Greeniacs in Jo-burg: The U.N.'s latest 'earth summit'

National Review, Sept 16, 2002 by Jerry Taylor

'A great tragedy is fast unfolding," intones Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and one of the most respected figures in American environmentalism. "More than 20 years ago the alarm was sounded regarding threats to the global environment, but the environmental deterioration that stirred the international community then continues essentially unabated today." Population growth, affluence, and technology, Speth warns, are pushing us toward "a swift and appalling deterioration of the natural world. Only a response that in historical terms would be seen as revolutionary is likely to avert these changes."

As we prepare for the latest U.N. environmental carnival -- the "World Summit on Sustainable Development," to be held in Johannesburg over our Labor Day weekend -- despair is indeed warranted. No, not despair over the state of the planet. Despair over the state of the world's intellectual elite.

"Sustainable development" is widely defined as "that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It's essentially a call to maximize human welfare over time, although people seldom think of it this way. That's what economics is all about: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations could fairly be called the world's first blueprint for sustainable development. Sustainable development, that is to say, is in the eye of the beholder.

There are some, of course, who would urge us to avoid any deterioration of the natural resource base. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Is the world really a poorer place because past generations drew down stocks of oil, iron, and various other minerals and metals to make advanced satellites, modern industry, and -- through the wealth created thereby -- advanced medicines and hundreds of other life-enhancing technologies?

Other environmentalists allow that we must use some resources, but call for us to leave them above a minimum critical level and to pass down the wealth generated by resource use to future generations, who would otherwise be "robbed" of their rightful inheritance.

But consider: If the only way we could have preserved the American bison beyond a "minimum critical level" was by leaving the Great Plains largely untouched by agriculture, would the sacrifice of what was to become the world's most productive cropland been in either the economic or the social interest of future generations? Issued without due consideration of both costs and benefits, the admonition is anti-human.

Moreover, the claim that the proceeds of resource use must be preserved for future generations is redundant at best. Since all wealth is eventually inherited, there is simply no need for a special, state- supervised "account" to be established for the benefit of those to come.

Indeed, the radical improvements in standard of living, life expectancy, and resource availability attained by each succeeding generation since the Industrial Revolution show that we don't need the Greens to watch over our children. You can look it up: Agricultural production continues to outpace population growth. Global forests are on net expanding, not contracting. Resources of almost all kinds -- petroleum, natural gas, minerals, and foodstuffs -- are becoming more abundant no matter how one chooses to measure them. Air and water quality in the most advanced industrial nations is improving at a truly jaw-dropping pace, while improvements in even the poorest of the world's nations are demonstrably tied to levels of per capita income. The number of species living on the planet today is far greater than at any other period in the Earth's history. In a pinch, desalinization plants will ensure that we never run out of fresh water. And life expectancy continues to increase, proving at the most obvious level that the human environment is on a sustainable path.

The future, moreover, is even sunnier than the present. Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculates that, given trends in agricultural productivity, an area the size of the Amazon basin will likely be returned to nature by 2070. Innovations in timber harvesting suggest that 10 percent of the world's forests will produce all our commercial needs by 2050. Advances in fisheries management promise a boom in marine productivity and a corresponding recovery of commercially valuable fish stocks. Growth in per capita income will improve the quality of both our air and our water. Man's "footprint" on the planet is becoming both softer and smaller.

Yet the Green mentality seems impervious to such facts, no matter how high the data are piled. My late colleague Julian Simon demonstrated this quite nicely at a forum some years ago. He began by asking, "How many of you think that pollution is in general getting worse and that resources are on the brink of exhaustion?" Nearly every hand in the audience went up. Then he asked, "What sort of evidence would you need to change your opinion?" No hands. "Is there anything that could change your mind -- anything at all?" Again, nothing. "Well," he said, "let me apologize then. I'm not dressed for church."