[extropy-chat] LUDDISM: Neat article on N.A. reforestation...

[Mike Lorrey]

There is a neat article here by our friend Peter Huber on how north
american reforestation has occured, why, and how the greens try to hide
the fact:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_latimes-how_nongreen_cities.htm

How Non-Green Cities Are Rebuilding the American Forests 
Wednesday, December 29, 1999

Anti-sprawl activists hide the resurgence of the continent's woodlands.


By PETER HUBER, MARK MILLS

For the United States as a whole, wealth and city overtook poverty and
country some time around 1920. Until then, the effects of immigration,
increasing life span and rising demand for food outweighed the effects
of rising agricultural productivity and declining fertility. As a
result, forests contracted. 

Around 1920, however, the balance shifted, and forests began to expand
once again.The upshot has been a truly remarkable, if little noted,
environmental reversal: the steadyreforestation of the North American
continent. 

When Europeans first arrived--after millenniums of deforestation by
fire, promoted by

American Indians--the area now represented by the lower 48 United
States had about 950 million acres of forest. That area shrank steadily
until about 1920, to a low of 600 million acres. It has been rising
ever since. Just how fast is hard to pin down; the continent is large,
most of the land is privately owned and definitional debates rage. Yet
all analyses show more, not less, forest land in the U.S. And all agree
that about 80 million more acres of cropland were harvested 60 years
ago than are harvested today. Most of this land is on its way to being
reforested too. At least 10 million acres have been reforested since
1987 alone. Thus, for the first time in history, a Western nation has
halted and is now rapidly reversing the decline of its woodlands.

Why do so many of us believe just the opposite? We've been spun.

Green activists and their political friends publicize only half of the
environmental ledger and play a shell game with definitions. They're
engaged in a great, green fraud. The anti-sprawl activists often count
as developed land about 90 million acres of farmsteads, field
windbreaks, barren land and marshland. This rural land has nothing to
do with any reasonable definition of urban sprawl or even of
development. Yet the activists need these 90 million acres because, if
they admitted that cities and their suburbs covered only a tiny 3% of
the continental U.S., who could take their fear of sprawl seriously?
That extra 90 million acres makes it seem as if the sprawling cities
cover 150 million acres, more than double the real number. This begins
to sound like quite a lot, though it is still only 8% of the 48
contiguous states.

"The city" itself is all the more kind to the environment because it
has so completely rejected the policies that the green establishment
holds dearest. It shuns renewables. The city isn't animal or vegetable;
it's mineral. Start with construction. The city certainly favors
nonrenewable resources here, and about that, at least, the green
establishment remains silent, as it should. The U.S. now harvests about
240 million tons of wood each year, almost all of it for construction.
The city, however, prefers to build with the three-dimensional
resources, steel and concrete. Those materials can hold up a
skyscraper; renewable wood can't.

The way we build things now, a comparatively tiny area of land
yields--from far beneath its surface--all the mineral resources that it
takes to build a city. You can't get any greener than that. The energy
picture looks much the same. There's no way the city could ever adopt
the green establishment's "renewable" path to energy. Live on a
good-size spread in the country and harvest it aggressively, and you
can plausibly imagine living off the renewable sources of energy the
greens so strongly favor. Live in the city, and you can't, not on your
own acres. You have no acres. Nevertheless, you have tremendous energy
efficiency when your energy comes from an oil well and refinery and
gets delivered by tanker. The supplies are highly concentrated to begin
with, and it takes relatively little energy to deliver them to a highly
concentrated point of use, like a city.

Cities have become environment-friendly by rejecting the greens' food
policies too--the policies that emphasize organic farming, free of
bioengineered seeds, man-made fertilizers and pesticides. When food is
grown or raised in the agricultural counterpart to the oil well--the
mammoth factory farm, outfitted with every high-tech innovation--it
takes relatively little land to produce it in the first place, and it
takes little additional energy to deliver it to the tightly packed
city. The city is green not only because its residents occupy little
land, but because its non-green sources of building materials, fuel and
food--and their delivery systems--can be frugal with land too.

By building the city up out of nonrenewable resources, by heating and
lighting it with nonrenewable fuels and by feeding it with non-organic
foods preserved with chemicals or plastic packaging, the city returns
acre upon acre of land in the country to wilderness, the greenest
accomplishment of all. Nature has enormous power to cleanse and
restore; freeing up 95 million acres to be reclaimed by watershed and
forest has surely done more to clean water and protect birds than the
curtailing of pesticides ever achieved.

- - - Peter Huber Is the Author of "Hard Green" From Basic Books and a
Fellow of the Manhattan Institute. Mark Mills Is a Senior Fellow of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. This Piece Is Adapted From an Article
in City Journal Magazine

©1999 The Los Angeles Times



Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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