Last week we celebrated Earth Day and it was a fantastic success.
No American river caught fire. Brown clouds of smog did not engulf New York City. No children were poisoned by leaded gasoline. No major U.S. corporation casually dumped untreated wastes into a lake or river.
Instead, eagles and ospreys caught fish in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. A hybrid gasoline-electric car with four passengers drove through 55 miles of city traffic on one gallon of gasoline. The citizens of Oregon and Washington celebrated the fact that their Columbia River salmon have been spawning in record numbers. The nation’s water quality continued to improve slightly as another town separated its sanitary sewer from its storm drains and another factory completed its zero-effluent redesign.
The world’s birth rate dropped to the lowest numbers in global history, signaling the time within a few decades when total human numbers will also begin to decline slowly. This occurred, not because of forced abortions, but because so many of the world’s increasingly affluent young couples want to afford better education for their kids.
Food production in America and the rest of the world moved toward another record growing season, both in total tonnage and per capita food supplies – with hardly any more forest cleared for low-yield crops. American agricultural scientists bent over test tubes and test plots to ensure that the high-yield trend continues in the years ahead, for both the United States and the world.
Soil erosion per pound of food produced hit record lows in North America, South America, Australia and South Asia, thanks to higher yields and a high-tech farming system called conservation tillage.
The U.S. had more trees, and more acres in forests and wildlife parks than at any time in the last century.
Two major Presidential candidates openly debated their environmental policies to win votes in what will be a probably close election. One favored tougher enforcement of stricter environmental laws. The other favored more government collaboration with companies and landowners in voluntary efforts to improve environmental trends. Both made good points.
Earth Day 2004 still faced America with some tough, unresolved eco-issues.
One of the toughest is forest policy. One side wants to let trees grow and die naturally rather than letting them be harvested for timber. The other side warns that the nation has a huge buildup of dead and dying trees that threaten to engulf the forests in mega-fires, and stresses that trees are a renewable resource. Meanwhile, forest policy is immobilized and the buildup of fire fuel continues on millions of public forest acres.
Organic farming advocates say farm chemicals are dangerous to people and the environment. Conventional farmers say that organic farming would take twice as much land to produce today’s food supply. Forests and wild meadows would be sacrificed mostly because organic farmers refuse to use nitrogen fertilizer that is no threat to people-and protects the forests against plow-down. Neither side can win the debate.
Immigration continues to be hotly debated. Some want America isolated from the pressures of higher birth rates and poverty in other countries. Others say the border can’t be sealed without live ammunition, which they can’t sanction.
The earth continues to warm slowly and erratically. One side wants us to renounce the fossil fuels that provide 85 percent of our energy. The other side says seabed sediments and ice cores show the planet has had nine global warmings-and nine coolings-in the past 12,000 years, in a natural cycle tied to the sun’s variations. The public votes to give up the fossil fuels-but buys increasing numbers of SUVs and electric air conditioners.
The best news is that environmental concern is no longer an afterthought, for anyone.
