ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604230042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT A. MARANTO
EARTH DAY: a day for those of us in awe of wolves, snail darters, and spotted owls. For people who'd prefer Death Valley to the fleshpots of Las Vegas, the Everglades to Miami Beach, the Pine Barrens to Atlantic City.
The trouble is, we environmentalists tend to be a sour lot, pessimistic, moralistic and bossy, like a bunch of Church Ladies in Birkenstocks. We may have a day, but we'll be damned if we'll enjoy it.
So this Earth Day, like all the others before it, will feature hectoring of the first order. We will cry over the endangered species, depleted ozone, and all the other sins of humankind. Inflated (and often just plain wrong) statistics will be used to show that in every day and in every way the world is becoming a dirtier place.
The only problem is, at least for those of us with some knowledge of science and history, the pessimism just isn't justified.
In most respects, our environment in America is far better than it was 30 or 40 years back. The same is true in Europe. Increasingly, as the world grows wealthier under global capitalism, the same will likely happen in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Take forests. After Americans depleted their forests in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the woods have made a great comeback, for five main reasons.
* Wood was replaced as a fuel source by oil and natural gas, which burn much cleaner.
* More efficient agricultural techniques and refrigeration meant that we could raise far more food on far less land, leaving the surplus to go back to the wilds.
* Wood was replaced in construction by synthetic materials.
* As wood grew scarcer its price rose, leading many landowners to grow trees as a cash crop.
* Wealthy Americans started private reserves and increasingly pressured the government to protect the forests.
Overall, we now have 29 percent more forest than in 1950. Forest cover has increased in every part of the country except for the West.
But what about animals? When I was a grade-school conservationist back in the 1960s, it seemed entirely likely that in my lifetime wolves, cougars and bald eagles would go extinct in the lower 48 states. Even less-exotic creatures were hard to find. As a kid I'd rarely see deer or hawks in the suburbs or the nearby Maryland countryside, despite lots of time spent trying.
Today, almost everything has changed for the better. Now that federal bounties have been removed, wolves have tripled their numbers in Minnesota and are moving into neighboring states. Out West, Canadian wolves have migrated into Montana and Wyoming and are moving south fast. It now seems likely that in my lifetime wolves will again be a common part of the West - for the first time since the 1920s.
Now that they are no longer hunted, cougars are making a comeback. They are now so common in parts of California that they are decimating local deer herds and occasionally eating household pets. They have gone from endangered species to abundant nuisance.
Since DDT was outlawed, bald eagle numbers are increasing in the Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. Once rare, they are now fairly common.
Other birds of prey are also increasing, in part because they are protected by law, but also in part because they no longer compete with humans. In the old days of free-range chickens, farmers shot hawks that might prey on their flocks. Now that chickens are raised in factories, farmers leave the hawks alone, and they are thriving.
Deer are now so common as to be a serious traffic hazard throughout the East. There are now more than 15 million whitetail deer in America, more than when the Pilgrims landed.
The world is getting cleaner and greener, in part because new technologies (such as cleaner fuels and more efficient agriculture) allow us to live on the Earth while disturbing it less.
Another reason is that capitalism has made much of the world (the United States, Europe, Japan, etc.) rich. Rich people are less focused on their daily survival, so they care more about such ``amenities'' as a clean environment. (I spent 10 years in the Sierra Club and never met a poor person.) Rich folks also have more money to contribute to the cause. Americans give billions annually to save the environment, a bit more than, say, Russians.
So why are most environmentalists such pronounced pessimists? In part it's because we have little knowledge of history, so we just assume that the past was better than the present. In part it's because we have little perspective. Most of us were born in the suburbs, an edge ecosystem between city and country, and each recalls some lovely forest or field felled by development. What we didn't see were millions of acres of farmland returned to forest, as agriculture grew more efficient.
Maybe our alarmism made sense in the 1960s, when we needed to alert the public to the need for some environmental regulation. But now that we have an Environmental Protection Agency and a whole host of environmental laws, alarmism serves only to depress ourselves and alienate others.
So celebrate Earth Day. Take a walk in the woods. Give a few bucks to the Nature Conservancy and have a Big Mac. (Like lots of corporations, McDonald's now recycles.)
The truth is, for a 1996 American environmentalist, life is good.
Robert A. Maranto, an assistant professor of government and law at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., is the author of ``Politics and Bureaucracy in the Modern Presidency: Appointees and Careerists in the Reagan Administration.''
- Knight-Ridder Tribune
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