Why We Had A Poverty Summit In Johannesburg, Not An Eco-Summit
August 22, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development was originally supposed to replay the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. However, the summit planners couldn’t find any lofty eco-goal that would have energized the world. Environmental gains in the past three decades have been so great that few people are still angry about the environment.
The affluent countries already have high and rising levels of air and water quality, a low rate of species extinction, ample energy sources, increasing acreages of wildlife preserves, declining cancer rates, and more food produced from less farmland.
Satellites tell us tropical forest losses are not 0.5 percent annually but closer to 0.3 percent (still unfortunate, but less unfortunate).
The Third World wants better environmental stewardship too—but notes that that begins to happen once people’s incomes rise above $4000 per year. That’s when people stop cutting trees to grow more low-yield crops and killing wild animals for bushmeat. (Instead, they guide more tourists to take the animals’ pictures.)
The United Nations is also turning away from its recent flirtation with the First World’s disaffected “eco-children.” Having never known privation, the eco-kids have been recommending privation for everyone, to rekindle some sense of purpose in their own aimlessly comfortable lives. However, the poor countries understand privation all too well.
All this good news meant Johannesburg was reborn as a conference on making poor people better off, rather than a repeat of an activist anti-technology circus.
Eco-activists have increasingly worked themselves out of their jobs. As you wander about the countryside, there’s little about the environment to make people angry, and anger was the best recruiting agent for the environmental movement.
(Global warming doesn’t make very many people angry because we’ve had no demonstrated global warming trend since 1940, let alone any clear link between a warming trend and human activities. The Third World couldn’t care less about it.)
The United States has more trees than it’s had in 100 years. Landfills are neatly burying our trash to make tennis courts and baseball fields—with plastic liners to prevent toxic leakage. New car exhausts are 90 percent cleaner than old cars’.
Our rivers are so clean that riverside communities are being almost buried in fragile mayflies. (Mayfly larvae live buried in the river bottoms; their susceptibility to water
pollution makes them an excellent bellwether of river health.
A new UN report says the global rate of species extinction is only half as high as it was a century ago, when the world’s human population was radically smaller. The Earth lost about 20 known species of mammals, birds and fish in the last third of the 20th century, compared to about 40 known extinctions in the last third of the 19th century.
Thanks to the decline of the use of firewood and coal and the rise of natural gas and electricity, England has more woodlands than in 200 years and London’s air is cleaner than it’s been in 300 years.
What about the upward population spiral? Brazil’s births per woman have dropped to match China’s low rate, without any of China’s forced abortions. A richer, more urban world will have a peak world human population of less than 9 billion, up moderately, but not terrifyingly, from today’s 6 billion.
The environmental movement still enthusiastically recommends organic farming despite growing evidence that pesticides are not a threat to humans. A recent massive $8 million study of breast cancer on New York’s Long Island found no link between cancer and pesticides. Worse, a Danish government committee recently estimated that organic farming would produce only 53 percent as much human nourishment per acre as that country’s current high-yield agriculture.
In fact, the UN species extinction report indicates that the worst possible scenario for wildlife species would be the spread of low-yield farming. It worries that human uses—mainly farming—will spread over 48 percent of the Third World’s land, up from 22 percent today.
Record numbers of humpback whales were recently counted off Australia’s east coast. The humpbacks once numbered 15,000, were cut to about 500 by whaling, and have now recovered to 4,500–5,000. However, a whale researcher warned: “global warming may be affecting their habitat.”
Will the eco-activists ever find any good news? Can they afford to—even in a world that’s getting cleaner, using its land and water more efficiently, and re-stabilizing its human population?
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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