Saving the environment from the environmentalists

I always believe that,  to protect the environment, to help the poor.... all of these tasks require not only a good intention, a faith, but also fact-based reasoning.

Peter Huber’s book “Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto” is such a good example of scientific reasoning.

Today, all of homes, buildings and roads occupy less than three percent of the land in the lower 48 states. Thanks to efficient use of land, we have lots of trees in the US, so we actually consume more carbon dioxide than we produce. In developing countries however, the most devastating force in deforestation is actually the use of wood as energy for heating by poor people, not paper industry that usually obtains raw material from commercial forests which are not part of the wild jungle. The development of paper and pulp industry by making more efficient use of land and raising workers’ income level actually preserve forests, because locals don’t need to destroy forest for heating energy any more.  “Environmentalists” claims that by sending less post-cards you can save Amazon jungle; but the fact is that paper industry contributed very little to the deforestation of Amazon jungle.

As argued by Professor Huber, “the only way to save the wilderness is to reduce the human footprint on the land by living vertically instead of horizontally.” In the past, vast forests in New York and other states were felled by pioneers, the original “organic” farmers, to feed their families and their livestock. More than a quarter of the farmland was devoted to “turning solar energy into the renewable fuel powering their transportation system”. These buzzwords simply mean grasses and grains eaten by horses. So we used to be very “environmentalists”, but as we already see, those days were more disastrous to the environment.

In recent decades, however many of those fields have reverted to wilderness because they are no longer needed to grow food or fuel. Over the past quarter-century, Professor Huber estimates, the country has gained 70 million acres of wilderness, more than all the land occupied by cities, suburbs, roads and any other kind of development. So urbanization and economic development, opposite to what “environmentalists” have predicted, actually help preserve wilderness.

John Tierney, in his book review in New York times, highlights several of Professor Huber’s excellent points the bust the myths created by “environmentalists”

Where Soft Greens see ''urban sprawl'' destroying the countryside, Dr. Huber sees cities absorbing the farmers who once destroyed the wilderness. ''It's true that we lose a little green space at the edge of cities as suburbs grow,'' Dr. Huber said, ''but that loss is more than offset by all the wilderness gained from the farms abandoned farther away.'' You might think of New York City and its suburbs as the antidote to rural sprawl.

Where Soft Greens fret about the risks from factory farms and pesticides and genetically engineered plants, Dr. Huber exults in the land saved by new technologies. ''If you care about the open range, you should recoil from free-range chicken on the menu,'' Dr. Huber said. ''You should prefer chickens living in the agribusiness equivalent of Trump Tower. If you care about seeing more of the Vermont woods of Robert Frost, you should think twice about eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream.''

Ben & Jerry's prides itself on getting milk from small family farms in Vermont, and it opposes the use of a synthetic growth hormone to increase each cow's output. ''If farmers used that hormone, they wouldn't need so many cows,'' Dr. Huber said, ''so some of the farms could revert to forests. There would also be fewer cows emitting methane, which is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases.''

''You may want to stop someone from building new homes near you because the extra crowding reduces your quality of life,'' he said. ''But it's a fraud to confuse your self-interest with what is good for the planet. If you make it harder for people to move to cities and suburbs, they'll end up in places where cougars and eagles could be living.”

Mark Hetsgaard, in his review article also on New York Times, however disagrees with Professor Huber’s view that the answer to our environmental problems is to unleash the power of the market.