Even the most casual inspection of the evidence shows that the countries with the cleanest rivers, the clearest air, expanding forests, and the most protected wildernesses are the wealthiest countries with the greatest economic growth.
Huber treads perilous ground, however, when he argues that government can be used to advance conservative environmental goals, particularly the preservation of wilderness. "All in all, private conservation is, by a wide margin, the most important form of conservation we have," he acknowledges. That said, he hastens to argue that "at some point the vastness of White Mountains and Everglades, or river archipelagos and coral reefs and the sheer scope and scale of the most ambitious conservation objectives require a reach to match. That means the reach of local, state, and federal governments." Huber says government can play a necessary role expanding and protecting "the wilderness broadly defined--because the objective here is to see to it that in those places nothing much is done at all. Nothing is the one thing that big government is capable of doing quite well, and doing nothing is the paramount objective of conservation."
Government can, of course, buy land under the doctrine of eminent domain if taxpayers are willing to foot the bill. But the federal government already owns 28 percent of the land area of the United States, and Huber does not specify how much more he would like it to acquire. Furthermore, when Huber talks about "wilderness" he doesn't make clear distinctions between national parks, wilderness areas, national forests, etc. Ultimately he doesn't seem to want to "conserve" so much as "preserve" wilderness. He would limit human activity in his government wilderness areas to recreation only. By contrast, Huber's icon, ur-conservationist Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to conserve forests largely so that they could produce lumber in the future. In Huber's "conservative commune" such productive activities would be forbidden.
It's an open question whether government conservation of wilderness is better or worse than private efforts. Although Huber might dismiss the vast private well-managed forests in Northern Maine or the rapidly expanding forestlands in the South as not wilderness enough, they function well ecologically and are superb havens for a huge variety of wildlife. Meanwhile, the history of federal land management is rife with failures. It was, after all, the Army Corps of Engineers that channelized, dredged, dammed, and drained all those rivers and wetlands. It was the Bureau of Land Management that deployed "range improvement" programs that ripped up native vegetation on thousands of square miles of land and offered below-market leases that ultimately encouraged overgrazing on its ranges. And as Alston Chase has amply shown in his book Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park, federal managers of U.S. national parks, despite Huber's claim to the contrary, don't "do nothing" very well at all.
Huber acknowledges that political management has been problematic, but I suspect that because he is in a hurry to protect what he loves, he is willing to justify the use of government to promote the values he personally deems important. He apparently believes that without government efforts to preserve wilderness, we will drive willy-nilly into the "high-tech hell" of a future where nature will be stamped out beneath a technologically triumphant humanity. "In all likelihood... high-tech environmental hell is perfectly feasible, sustainable, and viable," Huber writes. "Humans multiply like grains of sand on the shore. The entire surface of the planet ends up like Manhattan, without Central Park. These thoughts are repellent, but that does not make them untrue. Our most likely future is a high-tech hell: comfortable, stable, sustainable, perfected in every way for the comfort of our species and no other."
Huber is so anxious to avoid the high-tech hell he predicts that he reaches for government power to stop it. Having donned his seer's hat, he then curiously castigates both neo-Malthusians and techno-optimists for making "big future" predictions, insisting that they are simply flip sides of the same determinist coin. It is true that neo-Malthusians such as Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich and Worldwatch Institute President Lester Brown make supposedly precise predictions about the coming catastrophic destruction of nature and human society. And on the basis of their models, neo-Malthusians claim that they know exactly what needs to be done and therefore should be given political power to avert the looming doom.
Of course, techno-optimists, including many of the Wired magazine crowd or so-called Extropians, also make forecasts about the future, but Huber's charge that they are as deterministic as the neo-Malthusians is too strong. Contrary to Huber's claims, most technological optimists don't generally prescribe ends. Like Huber himself, they prescribe means, and the means are essentially identical to Huber's: markets, property, and freedom.
As technology improves, we learn to do more with less, and we depend less on the living resources of nature. Already, increased agricultural productivity has enabled the expansion of temperate forests in the U.S. and Western Europe. And this could easily become a worldwide phenomenon, according to noted agricultural researcher Paul Waggoner. "If during the next sixty to seventy years the world farmer reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower, the ten billion will need only half of today's cropland while they eat today's American calories," concludes Waggoner in his article, "How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?" in the summer 1996 issue of Daedelus. Similar trends can be seen with regard to levels of air and water pollution: As productivity increases, pollution levels fall. So in fact the technological progress celebrated by techno-optimists is arguably more likely to permit the flowering of a green paradise than it is to result in a Huberian "high-tech hell."
Nevertheless, Huber is far more right than he is wrong. As he shows, Soft Green programs and policies do imperil both the natural world and the economic progress humanity needs. If all we had to worry about is whether or not the government should buy up more land, we would very well off indeed. By focusing on tangible environmental goals like protecting wilderness and abating noisome levels of pollution, Hard Green conservatives can legitimately appeal to the majority of Americans who share these goals and lead them away from the dangerous, self-defeating fantasies peddled by Soft Green alarmists. That would be good for the polity and good for the natural world. In the end, though, Huber should have more confidence than he apparently does in freedom and markets to provide the innovations, wealth, and incentives needed to protect what we value.
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