Freedom's Environment
 
 Freedom for stewardship of the environment
 
The Greening of America
 The Wall Street Journal
June 27, 2003

     Nothing becomes Christie Whitman's tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency as her leaving it. We're referring to her release this week of the agency's first-ever Report on the Environment, which has the courage to admit success.
 
     The professional green lobby is in the pessimism business. Some catastrophe always looms; we're running out of oil, the ozone layer is vanishing, or something. The EPA report -- which used data from 30 agencies, states, Indian tribes and non-profits -- found that America is turning greener all the time.
 
     The air is cleaner, for example, with major pollutants declining 25% over 30 years despite more people, cars and a larger economy. Of 260 U.S. metropolitan areas, 212 have pollution levels that are trending down. The days across the country in which air quality violated a health standard fell to 3% in 2001 from 10% in 1988.
 
     The volume of toxic chemicals released in the environment has declined by nearly half in 15 years. The U.S. has addressed the threats at 846 of its 1,498 most toxic waste sites. The Eagle Mine near Vail, Colorado -- once a major area of groundwater contamination -- is today alive with brown trout. In the Great Lakes region, bald eagle nests increased to 366 in 2000 from 50 in 1961. Forests still cover one-third of America, with acreage increasing by two million from 1997-99. Just 4.3% of the nation's total land area is developed (no, that's not a typo).
 
     There are areas that need improvement. While 94% of the nation drinks water that meets all health standards (up from 79% in 1993), water quality is still poor in certain rivers and lakes. But the main lesson of the report is that Americans have never lived in a cleaner, healthier country.
 
     If cornered by the truth, the green lobby will even drop its veil of woe and admit this good news. But then it will attribute all progress to the power of government regulation and its attendant lawsuits. This is also a mistake. Those of us who believe in free markets understand that pollution is an "externality" that isn't factored into normal transaction costs; even Milton Friedman endorses effluent taxes.
 
     But the point the lefties miss is that only a prosperous country can afford to pay for those externalities. America only developed the political consensus to clean up the environment in the 1970s, after it had become a society of two-car garages. The key to future green progress is maintaining the free-market growth and innovation that can produce hydrogen cars or find a way to turn wind into cheap power. Our main beef with the greens -- other than that they make depressing dinner companions -- is that their household remedies are always the kind of regulation that will stifle this growth.

 

     President Bush has tried to balance growth with stewardship. The EPA has instituted a new trading program that should clean more water at lower cost. Congress is debating a Clear Skies program that would give business more flexibility to reduce pollution in cost-effective ways. The House has already passed something called Healthy Forests, which recognizes that human management can help stop damaging wildfires. The feds continue to pour money into habitat restoration for endangered species, water conservation, brownfields clean-up, reforestation, and much more.
 
     And yet the professional greens portray all of this as the end of natural days. The League of Conservation Voters gives the Bush Administration an "F" for its "assault" on the environment "on all fronts" -- a fact that merely betrays the League's own relentless partisanship. It sponsored a forum for Democratic Presidential candidates yesterday in which doom, gloom and disaster were also the major themes.
 
     The EPA report deserves wide distribution because it documents the environmental progress that Americans have been seeing with their own eyes, from sea to shining sea.
 

[Evil Environmentalists]
 
Forest Management
 
Nature vs. Politics
 By PATRICK MOORE
The Wall Street Journal
June 18, 2003

     Greenpeace has just issued a report claiming that it is better to let our forests burn to the ground than to adopt programs that will reduce catastrophic wildfire. As an ecologist, I can tell you that this approach ultimately leads to soil destruction, air and water pollution, and wildfires that can kill every living thing in our forests -- all in the name of "saving the forests."
 
     Having dedicated my life to the environment, I am always concerned when the forces of nature meet face-to-face with the forces of politics. This is especially true when the forces of nature are coming in loud and clear: Approximately 90 million acres of our nation's public forests are at risk of catastrophic wildfire right now. Every year we see millions of acres of forest burn when this could be prevented.
 
     At the Western Governors' Association summit this week in Missoula, Montana, the topic will be forest health. Earlier this month, the House passed a bill that would hopefully improve forest officials' ability to properly manage the forests. The Senate is scheduled to begin hearings on this bill next week.
 
     We live in an era when many activists believe we should leave our forests alone -- an ecologically dangerous policy that sets our forests up to be destroyed not just by fire, but by insects and disease. It is especially bewildering when you consider how simple it is, through the application of time-tested forest management practices, to maintain forests in a state that reduces the chance of such outcomes.
 
     The root of the problem is that when we protect our forests from wildfires, over time they become susceptible to disease and to catastrophic wildfires as fuel loads build up. The only way to prevent this is to actively remove dead trees and to thin the forest. The active management of these forests is necessary to protect human life and property, along with air, water and wildlife. This does not prevent us from also maintaining a world-class system of parks and wilderness areas where industrial activity is restricted or banned.
 
     Many activists have a mindset that is simply opposed to forestry. These groups favor policies that involve reducing the use of wood instead of encouraging its use as a renewable resource. We have been led to believe that when we use wood we are causing a bit of forest to be lost. This is not the case. When we buy wood we send a signal into the marketplace to plant more trees, and produce more wood. One of the main reasons there is still about the same area of forested land in the U.S. today as there was 100 years ago is because we use so much wood. Agriculture and urbanization cause forest loss, not forestry.

 

    The inferno that began in the Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos, N.M. in May 2000 is a classic case in point. The park officials who started this fire did so with good intentions. But they failed to take into account that more than 50 years of fire prevention had resulted in a fuel load build-up that nearly guaranteed what ensued: hundreds of homes destroyed and thousands of acres of forest lost.
 
     The only solution in these circumstances is removal of wood to reduce the fuel load. In some types of forests, it may be possible to manage fuel loads with prescribed fire. In other forest types, especially where there are homes and other property at risk, mechanical thinning and harvesting are the best options.
 
     It is unfortunate that some organizations characterize the need to implement active management of national forests as damaging to the environment. It is actually the only way to break the present environmentally destructive pattern of fuel build-up that often results in catastrophic outcomes. I hope that those responsible for our forests will bring about the very necessary changes in law and practice -- and return the forces of nature to a more desirable state.
 
     Dr. Moore is co-founder and former president of Greenpeace.