Earth Day, Then and Now

The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why.

Ronald Bailey from the May 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Perversely, many environmental activists still fault markets for not properly valuing "natural capital" or "ecosystem services" and they continue to call for placing more resources in public hands. In effect, they want more open-access commons. But if no one has to pay for the use of a resource, then they consider it to be free. The way to take environmental goods into account is exactly the way we take all other goods into account--we put them into the market where people have to pay for what they use.

Synthetic Arguments

At Earth Day 1970, many Americans feared that synthetic chemicals, especially pesticides, were killing them. No culprit was more singled out than DDT, a pesticide that had been first used in 1946. The World Health Organization originally hailed it as a miracle that had drastically reduced deaths from malaria; its inventor, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller, was honored with a Nobel Prize in 1948.

By 1970, however, DDT had emerged as the symbol of all that was wrong with the modern world. DDT had been implicated in the decimation of several bird species due to egg-shell thinning. It was also alleged to cause several human cancers, including breast cancer. DDT was banned in the U.S. by the EPA in 1972; other countries soon followed suit.

Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons "may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945." In his "Eco-Catastrophe!" scenario, Ehrlich put a finer point on these fears by envisioning a 1973 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study which would find "that Americans born since 1946...now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out."

Keying off of Rachel Carson's claims about the dangers of synthetic chemicals in Silent Spring (1962), Look claimed that many scientists believed that residual DDT would lead to an increase in liver and other cancers. Cornell University ecologist Lamont Cole warned an Earth Day audience at Kearney State College in Nebraska that, "We are releasing into the environment more than 500,000 different chemicals." "There is one good thing about the blighting of our environment, that is, that Americans don't have to worry about cannibals anymore," said social critic Herbert Muller in The New York Times. "We've all become inedible, there's too much DDT in us."

Contrary to the conventional wisdom at Earth Day 1970, there's a broad consensus that exposure to synthetic chemicals, even pesticides, does not seem to be a problem. In 1996, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, in a comprehensive report called Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet, concluded that levels of both synthetic and natural carcinogens are "so low that they are unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk." The National Cancer Institute reports that "increasing exposure to general environmental hazards seems unlikely to have had a major impact on the overall trends in cancer rates." "Pollution appears to account for less than 1 percent of cancer," concludes University of California biologist and cancer researcher Bruce Ames.

To be sure, the total number of cancer cases in the population did go up from 1973 to 1990, but cancer death rates declined owing to better medical treatments. Cancer incidence went up for some very prosaic reasons: We smoke too much tobacco, we eat too much fat, and we sunbathe excessively. We also live longer and cancer is primarily a disease of old age. In the U.S. since the early 1990s, both the incidence of cancer and deaths from cancer have been declining, not rising. Some analysts, such as Gregg Easterbrook, have recently hinted that this decline in cancer rates is the result of reductions in the amount of toxins released into the environment. Actually, a good bit of the improvement in cancer rates can be attributed to the decline in the number of smokers in the U.S.

Never mind. Cancer is scary enough (and ubiquitous enough--about one-third of Americans will get some sort of cancer during their lifetimes) that it still serves as a good tool for frightening people about alleged environmental contamination. Just this past January, Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown ominously noted, "Every human being harbors in his or her body about 500 synthetic chemicals that were nonexistent before 1920." So what? Considering that American lifespans have increased by 20 years, from an average of 56 years in 1920 to 71 years in 1970 to 76 years today, one might be tempted to argue that those synthetic chemicals are prolonging our lives. Certainly, they're not causing damage. Just last year, the National Research Council issued yet another report that found no evidence that synthetic chemicals are causing higher rates of cancer, birth defects, and other problems alleged by Brown.

Meanwhile, banning DDT allowed a resurgence of malaria-carrying mosquitos worldwide. The Malaria International Foundation estimates that there are between 600 to 900 million cases of malaria a year and that about 2.7 million people die of it annually. Spraying DDT had cut malaria deaths from 4 million annually in the early 1940s to 1 million in the 1960s.

Nonrenewable Anxiety

Beyond anxiety over population, pollution, and pesticides, even more speculative concerns were on display at the first Earth Day. Many of these fears--especially the supposed depletion of nonrenewable resources, ostensibly disappearing biodiversity, and apparent global climate change due to human activity--have come to figure far more prominently in our current environmental debates.

The depletion of nonrenewable resources wouldn't take center stage until the publication of the infamous Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome in 1972. The limits-to-growth thesis got a huge boost when oil prices spiked during the Arab oil embargo. But on Earth Day 1970, there were already intimations that this would become a major theme of subsequent celebrations.

"We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones," warned Sierra Club director Martin Litton in Time's February 2, 1970, special "environmental report." Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate...that there won't be any more crude oil. You'll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill 'er up, buddy,' and he'll say, `I am very sorry, there isn't any.'" Later that year, Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Of course this didn't happen. The prices of all metals and minerals have dropped by more than 50 percent since 1970, according to the World Resources Institute. As we all know, lower prices mean that things are becoming more abundant, not less. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that at present rates of mining, reserves of copper will last 54 years; zinc, 56 years; silver, 26 years; tin, 55 years; gold, 30 years; and lead, 47 years. What about oil? The survey estimates that global reserves could be as much as 2.1 trillion barrels of crude oil--enough to supply the world for the next 90 years. These reserve figures are constantly moving targets--as they get drawn down, miners and drillers find new sources of supply or develop more efficient technologies for exploiting the resources.