Ronald Bailey replies: Thanks to Mr. Nelson for his kind comments. I admit that I, too, initially believed the dire predictions of Ehrlich, Commoner, and other doomsters, but it took me nearly two decades to realize that they had been spectacularly and harmfully wrong.
In response to Ms. Gatwood: Far from overlooking food and population issues, I showed how Paul Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians were wrong. Hundreds of millions did not starve to death as they predicted. Global food production has certainly affected the natural environment, but modern, high-yield agriculture, by tripling farm productivity since the 1950s, has prevented the plowing down of as much as an additional 10 million square miles (the land area of North America) to produce food for today's population. I don't want to be perceived as claiming that humanity has solved all environmental problems, but I do want to assert that the only way to protect and even extend the area spared for nature is through technological progress and economic growth.
In response to Mr. Andrew: He does have a point with regard to the tragedy of the commons as applied to cleaning up dirty air and polluted rivers and lakes. But bear in mind that the preferred strategy of many environmentalists for cleaning up air and water was stopping economic growth and moving to a steady-state economy. Government regulation--local, state, and federal--has helped clean up both the air and the water in the United States. But why did environmental concerns top the public agenda in the late 20th century? Because only prosperous people are willing to devote wealth to improving environmental amenities.
One can either regulate or privatize environmental commons. Most countries have chosen to regulate and made considerable progress, as discussed in my article. But free market think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute are now doing some interesting preliminary work on figuring out how to enclose envi-ronmental commons such as airsheds, groundwater, and fisheries. If such proposals are adopted, we can expect industry to oppose them, for the same reason they opposed government regulations: They don't want to pay for something they once got for free.
Mr. Vavra thinks Wyoming is suffering from a miniature tragedy of the commons. One can have unlittered shorelines if no one visits a lake, but one can also have them if one pays to keep them clean or encourages visitors (by fines, say) to clean up after themselves. If there are too many hikers on one trail, the Forest Service or Park Service could charge hiking fees to ration use of the trail. As for Jackson Hole, a wag once wisely said that an environmentalist is someone who already has his cabin in the woods. Mr. Vavra would apparently prefer to enjoy solitude without paying for it, or even have other people pay for his solitude. Despite the hullabaloo over sprawl, more and more land is reverting to nature in the United States as farms and ranches are abandoned and Americans move to relatively compact suburbs.
Now to Mr. Butts. Publishers publish Worldwatch's books for the same reason they publish Stephen King or Deepak Chopra: not because they are true, but because they sell.
Mr. Butts makes many scientifically unsubstantiated assertions, relying chiefly on arguments from authority. Let's deal briefly with a few of them. First, if toxics were such a problem one might expect U.S. life expectancy to be decreasing; it continues to increase. Overall cancer incidence and cancer death rates in the United States have been going down since 1990, and both the Food and Drug Administration and the National Research Council have concluded that synthetic chemicals are involved in less than 2 percent of human cancers.
As for POPs, they were not created to pollute the environment but to solve problems. Organochloride pesticides like DDT were a great boon to agriculture as well as to human health by preventing insect-borne diseases. PCBs were superior stable coolants for electrical transformers. Richer societies like ours have decided that many POPs are sufficiently hazardous to wildlife that they can afford to forego the benefits of these synthetic chemicals. But pesticides like DDT still play a vital role in preventing diseases such as malaria in the poorer regions of the world. Is it moral to forbid poor mothers to use DDT to protect their children from malaria in order to save songbirds? Or is it even necessary, since many of those species are rebounding today?
Consumers buy organic foods because they either prefer them or have been misled by environmentalist propaganda. There is no scientific evidence that organic foods are more healthful than conventionally grown foods. Since organic farming is only two-thirds as productive as modern farming, a switch to organic methods would mean plowing down lots of wildlife habitat to provide food for people.
As for animal extinctions, let's look at the data. According to data compiled in 1994 by the World Conservation Union-IUCN, since 1600, 593 animal species (including 368 invertebrates) and 384 vascular plants have gone extinct. Seventy-five percent of these extinctions occurred on oceanic islands. With regard to the alleged disappearance of 50,000 species a year, would Mr. Butts please name 500 of them, or even 50? Those huge numbers are extrapolated from the species/area curve relationship in the increasingly challenged theory of island biogeography.
Despite Mr. Butts' claims, the number of hurricanes is not increasing, nor are they getting fiercer, according to the National Hurricane Center. Hurricane Mitch was a disaster in Honduras and Nicaragua largely because of poverty, poor infrastructure, and the denuding of steep hillsides by subsistence farmers. As for increased weather-related insurance claims, surely Mr. Butts is aware that Florida has had a population boom, as have many other coastal areas. This means there are more targets for storms to hit. Note than 1,000 Americans died annually in hurricanes between 1900 and 1908, while only 25 died annually between 1988 and 1996, despite huge population increases.
I really do care about what kind of planet future generations will inherit, and I believe Mr. Butts does too. But misdiagnosing problems and advocating bad, though well-meaning, policies will not achieve an environmentally healthy world.
Pay Attention Now
Jason Sholl's review ("Dangerous Distraction," May) of two popular books on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) illustrates five common pitfalls: the danger of "a little knowledge," quoting out of context, assuming that a disorder does not exist unless its cause is known, confusing treatment and diagnostic issues, and assuming that pathology must be qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different from health.
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