The bad news is that a new United Nations
report says the world's coming to an end.
But, first, some good news: America's
doing great!
Seriously, forests are breaking out
all over America. New England has more forests since
the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent
forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850,
Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it's 76 percent
forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered
by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936
a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was
without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state
is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added
more than 10 million acres of forestland.
As
Harvard president Lawrence Summers says, nobody's
ever washed a rented car. |
There are many reasons for America's
arboreal comeback. We no longer use wood as fuel, and
we no longer use as much land for farming. Indeed, the
amount of land dedicated to farming in the United States
has been steadily declining even as the agricultural
productivity has increased astronomically. There are
also fewer farmers. Only 2.4 percent of America's labor
force is dedicated to agriculture, which means that
fewer people live near where the food grows.
The literal greening of America has
added vast new habitats for animals, many of which were
once on the brink of extinction. Across the country,
the coyote has rebounded (obviously, this is a mixed
blessing, especially for roadrunners). The bald eagle
is thriving. In Maine there are more moose than any
time in memory. Indeed, throughout New England the populations
of critters of all kinds are exploding. In New Jersey,
Connecticut, and elsewhere, the black bear population
is rising sharply. The Great Plains host more buffalo
than at any time in more than a century.
And, of course, there's the mountain
lion. There are probably now more of them in the continental
United States than at any time since European settlement.
This is bad news for deer, which are also at historic
highs, because the kitties think "they're grrrreat!"
In Iowa, the big cat was officially wiped out in 1867,
but today the state is hysterical about cougar sightings.
One of the most annoying tics of the media is always
to credit the notion that human-animal encounters are
the result of mankind "intruding" on America's
dwindling wild places. This is obviously sometimes the
case. But it is also sometimes the case that America's
burgeoning wild places are intruding on us.
Anyway, there's more good news, of course.
According to Gregg Easterbrook, air pollution is lower
than it has been in a generation, drinking water is
safer, and our waterways are cleaner.
America's environmental revival is a
rich and complicated story with many specific exceptions,
caveats and, of course, setbacks. But the overarching
theme is pretty simple: The richer you get, the healthier
your environment gets. This is because rich societies
can afford to indulge their environmental interests
and movements. Poor countries cannot.
Unsurprisingly, rich countries tend
to have a better grasp of economics and the role of
markets, private stewardship and property rights, reasonable
regulations, and so forth. With the exception of some
oil-rich states, they're also almost always democratic
and hence have systems that can successfully assign
blame to, and demand restitution from, polluters. In
socialized economies, a "tragedy of the commons"
almost always arises. As Harvard president Lawrence
Summers says, nobody's ever washed a rented car.
So let's get back to the bad news, the
world is coming to an end. O.K., not quite. But the
coverage of the United Nations new "Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment" report was very close to
a doomsday scenario, complete with references to "running
out" of resources and the rest. And let's be fair,
unlike the situation in America and Europe, there are
some enormous environmental problems in the world. Even
if you're a global-warming skeptic, there's no disputing
that such problems as overfishing are real.
But fear not. There's some unexpected
good news. The United Nations seems to have some good
ideas (!) for how to solve these problems. Tim Worstall
of TechCentralStation was the first, and perhaps only,
commentator to notice that the U.N. report entertains
the possibility that market mechanisms property
rights, credits, trade are solutions to environmental
ills, not causes of it.
If the United Nations is actually serious
fingers crossed! this would constitute
enormous progress and a sign that the global environmental
community has finally conquered what I call the cultural
contradictions of environmentalism. Broadly speaking,
environmentalists want to end poverty, hunger, and disease,
but they also want to keep indigenous cultures unchanged.
But you can't have both simultaneously. It is the natural
state of indigenous cultures, after all, to be constantly
vulnerable to disease and hunger, and no man fighting
to keep his children alive cares about "biodiversity."
For decades, environmentalists pointed
to various calamities and boasted that they were identifying
the problems, which is the first step for providing
a solution. But they were wrong; environmental distress
is a symptom of political and economic corruption. There's
reason to hope the United Nations has finally recognized
the real problem, and that's great news.
(c) 2005 Tribune Media
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