Doom and gloom and ... Say what?
In 1968 I read the The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich. Dr. Erlich and many, many others predicted that in twenty years the oceans would be dead, the Amazon Basin would be destroyed, and the United States would be a wasteland. For nearly 40 years I have been bombarded with this doom and gloom, but I learned a long time ago that statistics used to sell this alarmist propaganda and thus further certain political movements must be questioned.
For example, we were told in the '60s that the Amazonian rain forest was losing 100,000 acres a day to timbering, burning, mining, and agriculture. If extrapolated out 40 years, that equals nearly 1.5 billion acres. Since the entire rain forest encompasses only 1 billion acres, you can see that this statistic was bogus. Trouble is, visit any school website today and children are being taught the same thing, except that the figures now used are the loss of 1.5 acres every second, with total rain forest destruction occurring in 40 years. I'll leave it to you to determine what an even more outrageous lie this is.
Teach children truth
I have lived my life as a conservationist but I also respect the truth. You misled tree huggers and anti-human eco-terrorists want statistics that are verifiable, from an impressive variety of reputable (read apolitical and without an agenda) sources? Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, neatly compiled statistics that reflect what is really happening in America today:
"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 forest land.
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 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.
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."