BigHornRam
Well-known member
Couldn't have said it better myself. Now let's hear some whinning from the Hunt Talk Doom and Gloom Society!
Earth Day should be met with optimism - Sunday, April 23, 2006
SUMMARY: Environmental record is cause for pride and sense of empowerment, not doom and gloom.
Earth Day is depressing. Every year, we begin the spring with a downbeat assessment from environmentalists about how almost nothing is right with this planet. Buck up! We certainly have environmental challenges to tackle - including one really big one. But experience, especially over recent decades, offers ample reason for optimism.
Simply stated, our environment isn't as immediately imperiled as suggested by Earth Day doomsayers, and the record offers an impressive affirmation of mankind's ability to make things better.
Surely anyone much over voting age is aware that the air we breathe - locally and nationally - has gotten cleaner, not more polluted. We've made huge strides in reducing particulates, lead, sulfur and most other airborne pollutants. Anybody remember when acid rain was the topic of daily news coverage? To say that the air can be made cleaner and ought to be made cleaner doesn't - or shouldn't - negate the fact that it has been made cleaner.
Remember when the Clark Fork River ran red with mining wastes? When Silver Bow Creek was officially classified as an industrial sewer? When Ohio's Cuyahoga River burst into flames? When Lake Erie was headed the way of the Dead Sea? Huge investments in pollution control, sewage treatment and reclamation have paid tremendous dividends in terms of public health, fisheries and nearly everybody's quality of life. Increasingly, the challenge in cleaning up water pollution is deciding who's going to pay for it, not whether it can be done. Don't declare victory on this front until, say, the Berkeley Pit is swimable. But let's give ourselves credit for great progress.
How about endangered species? Let's see: We saved the bald eagle and restored gray wolves to Montana and several other northern states. Grizzly bears are ready to be removed from the list of threatened species in Yellowstone, and probably exist in sufficient numbers around the northern Continental Divide to do the same. And, say, when was the last time you saw a “Save the Whales” bumper sticker. Do they even make them anymore?
But to get a clearer sense of our ability to rescue species you have to take a longer view. A century ago, elk, deer, moose, bison and antelope were all nearing the brink of extinction. So were ducks, geese and swans. They're all back - big time. We brought them back. What we did for them we can do for most species. The challenge of saving endangered species isn't one of empowerment or know-how - it's simply a matter of priorities. It's something to work on, not complete cause for despair.
Scarcely a day goes by without some breathless young man or woman alerting us to the fact that the national forests are being mowed down to make lumber and paper. We wind up lamenting the lack of historical perspective much more than the logging. By any measure, the amount of logging in the national forests has dramatically declined. Forestry has become far more sophisticated in our lifetimes and now focuses more on holistic forest stewardship than timber production. What's more, timber harvested from public and private lands alike is being used with increasing efficiency. Easy to overlook, too, is that more of America is forested today than a century ago, and we're growing trees faster than we're cutting them down.
Energy? Oooh. That's always tough. But, hey, look what happens as world demand for oil climbs: The Oilman in Chief touted ethanol from switchgrass in his State of the Union address; utilities are lining up to build wind turbines; conservation has become a business strategy, not a utopian ideal. Worry least of all about energy. Because consumers and shareholders bear the direct cost of energy, the free market is perfectly suited to encourage people to gravitate toward sound sources of energy. For those of you who lament the lack of any perfect affordable energy source, keep in mind that the prosperity we get through using the most economical types of energy makes it possible to tackle the broad range of environmental challenges. Environmental progress is directly tied to prosperity (which is why environmentalists should be champions of international trade in the developing world, a subject for another day, perhaps).
Altogether, the list of environmental success stories would fill many pages. The list of environmental problems needing solving might be at least that long, but the tide of history suggests more time on task will continue producing good results across a broad, important range of issues.
There is one looming environmental challenge that dwarfs the others - global climate change. People continue to argue about the cause and extent of climate changes. They argue about the influence climate changes might be having on things like storm severity and drought patterns. Decide for yourself how concerned to be. The way we see it, if the many credible scientists warning about global warming are wrong, we can all have a good laugh someday. If they're right, it'll become increasingly apparent and before long, people here and around the world will decide maybe they should try to do what makes sense to mitigate the negative human influences on climate. We know it's immensely frustrating to some of you that the United States, much less the entire world, hasn't yet had the epiphany, but give it time. The track record suggests that environmental stewardship has much less to do with altruism than with self-interest. At the point enough people decide they're better off with a cooler planet, there'll be no stopping the bandwagon.
Of course, humans have no experience purposefully changing the global climate. Can we even do it? We honestly don't know. But decades of experience across a broad spectrum of environmental challenges argues for a can-do attitude.
Earth Day should be met with optimism - Sunday, April 23, 2006
SUMMARY: Environmental record is cause for pride and sense of empowerment, not doom and gloom.
Earth Day is depressing. Every year, we begin the spring with a downbeat assessment from environmentalists about how almost nothing is right with this planet. Buck up! We certainly have environmental challenges to tackle - including one really big one. But experience, especially over recent decades, offers ample reason for optimism.
Simply stated, our environment isn't as immediately imperiled as suggested by Earth Day doomsayers, and the record offers an impressive affirmation of mankind's ability to make things better.
Surely anyone much over voting age is aware that the air we breathe - locally and nationally - has gotten cleaner, not more polluted. We've made huge strides in reducing particulates, lead, sulfur and most other airborne pollutants. Anybody remember when acid rain was the topic of daily news coverage? To say that the air can be made cleaner and ought to be made cleaner doesn't - or shouldn't - negate the fact that it has been made cleaner.
Remember when the Clark Fork River ran red with mining wastes? When Silver Bow Creek was officially classified as an industrial sewer? When Ohio's Cuyahoga River burst into flames? When Lake Erie was headed the way of the Dead Sea? Huge investments in pollution control, sewage treatment and reclamation have paid tremendous dividends in terms of public health, fisheries and nearly everybody's quality of life. Increasingly, the challenge in cleaning up water pollution is deciding who's going to pay for it, not whether it can be done. Don't declare victory on this front until, say, the Berkeley Pit is swimable. But let's give ourselves credit for great progress.
How about endangered species? Let's see: We saved the bald eagle and restored gray wolves to Montana and several other northern states. Grizzly bears are ready to be removed from the list of threatened species in Yellowstone, and probably exist in sufficient numbers around the northern Continental Divide to do the same. And, say, when was the last time you saw a “Save the Whales” bumper sticker. Do they even make them anymore?
But to get a clearer sense of our ability to rescue species you have to take a longer view. A century ago, elk, deer, moose, bison and antelope were all nearing the brink of extinction. So were ducks, geese and swans. They're all back - big time. We brought them back. What we did for them we can do for most species. The challenge of saving endangered species isn't one of empowerment or know-how - it's simply a matter of priorities. It's something to work on, not complete cause for despair.
Scarcely a day goes by without some breathless young man or woman alerting us to the fact that the national forests are being mowed down to make lumber and paper. We wind up lamenting the lack of historical perspective much more than the logging. By any measure, the amount of logging in the national forests has dramatically declined. Forestry has become far more sophisticated in our lifetimes and now focuses more on holistic forest stewardship than timber production. What's more, timber harvested from public and private lands alike is being used with increasing efficiency. Easy to overlook, too, is that more of America is forested today than a century ago, and we're growing trees faster than we're cutting them down.
Energy? Oooh. That's always tough. But, hey, look what happens as world demand for oil climbs: The Oilman in Chief touted ethanol from switchgrass in his State of the Union address; utilities are lining up to build wind turbines; conservation has become a business strategy, not a utopian ideal. Worry least of all about energy. Because consumers and shareholders bear the direct cost of energy, the free market is perfectly suited to encourage people to gravitate toward sound sources of energy. For those of you who lament the lack of any perfect affordable energy source, keep in mind that the prosperity we get through using the most economical types of energy makes it possible to tackle the broad range of environmental challenges. Environmental progress is directly tied to prosperity (which is why environmentalists should be champions of international trade in the developing world, a subject for another day, perhaps).
Altogether, the list of environmental success stories would fill many pages. The list of environmental problems needing solving might be at least that long, but the tide of history suggests more time on task will continue producing good results across a broad, important range of issues.
There is one looming environmental challenge that dwarfs the others - global climate change. People continue to argue about the cause and extent of climate changes. They argue about the influence climate changes might be having on things like storm severity and drought patterns. Decide for yourself how concerned to be. The way we see it, if the many credible scientists warning about global warming are wrong, we can all have a good laugh someday. If they're right, it'll become increasingly apparent and before long, people here and around the world will decide maybe they should try to do what makes sense to mitigate the negative human influences on climate. We know it's immensely frustrating to some of you that the United States, much less the entire world, hasn't yet had the epiphany, but give it time. The track record suggests that environmental stewardship has much less to do with altruism than with self-interest. At the point enough people decide they're better off with a cooler planet, there'll be no stopping the bandwagon.
Of course, humans have no experience purposefully changing the global climate. Can we even do it? We honestly don't know. But decades of experience across a broad spectrum of environmental challenges argues for a can-do attitude.
