Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Environmental gains are many

By R. HAROLD BROWN
Professor Emeritus
University of Georgia

"This is my long-run forecast in brief,” said free-market economist Julian Simon in “The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Bjorn Lomborg:

“The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today’s Western living standards.

“I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.”

At no time is Simon’s perceptiveness more appropriate than during Earth Day celebrations.

Georgians’ turn toward environmental stewardship occurred long before the first Earth Day in 1970. It was on an earlier “Earth Day” that Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge proclaimed the state’s first Soil Conservation Week in 1949. The proclamation was reported in 734 newspapers, sermonized by 383 clergymen and celebrated in 93 civic club programs. Georgia Sen. Zell Miller eulogized Talmadge as “the tallest tree in the forest;” he certainly stood tall that day.

For too long, the hand-wringing about too many cars, too many people, future pollution of air and water, losing trees and rivers drying up has smothered news about steady progress. [After] this Earth Day, we have an opportunity to count blessings and successes and anticipate brighter tomorrows, not predict looming disasters in Georgia’s environment. We can celebrate our history of restoration, not degradation, reflected in numerous examples across the state.

Why not celebrate automobiles that are more comfortable and convenient, safer and 90 percent less polluting than 50 years ago? Why complain about people flocking to our neighborhoods to share the good life? Don’t deny them their modern four-bedroom house on an acre or so, if that’s what they aspire to. What’s wrong with living in the country as close to amenities of the city as possible? Sprawl is not an environmental sin; it is progress. We’ve seen vertical concentration of people downtown, and most of us don’t want it.

Why complain about the “unsustainable” lifestyle of suburbanites? Sustainability is the pessimist’s word for lack of confidence in the future imagination and ingenuity of humans. History is replete with the discredited words of pessimists predicting our inability to cope. In 1914, the U.S. Bureau of Mines estimated we had enough petroleum to last just 10 more years.

The most energy-sustainable system I can imagine is the small cotton farm where I was born: We bought no electricity, natural gas, petroleum or coal, and grew most of our own food. Ours was just one among more than a quarter-million Georgia farms like that in the 1920s or 1930s.

Today’s Georgia is as dependent on fossil energy as we were independent of it, but we have gained in sustainability, thanks to the human vision. Fossil energy, technology, food production efficiency and a thousand other advancements help sustain us. Less than 3 percent of our people produce food for all the rest of us.

More important are the advances in education, leisure time, economic opportunities and hope that enrich the human spirit. No sustainable ecological balance is respected when that spirit is restrained. The “sustainable” small farms of my childhood disappeared for good reasons: They didn’t offer the opportunities, progress and comfort we have today.

Today, our land is much better cared for than it was early in the 20th century. “The Red Old Hills of Georgia” are now covered with green. One hundred and thirty four (84 percent) counties had more than half of their land in forest in 1997; in 1935, only 90 (56 percent) did. And not all trees are in forests; many of our urban and suburban neighborhoods look like forests from the air.

Bare soil leads to erosion. In 1934, 37 percent of the metro Atlanta region was in row crops, bare for much of the year; in 1990 the Georgia Department of Natural Resources estimated only 5 percent was exposed soil. In mid-century, Georgia had 600,000 acres of roads and roadsides (larger than the peanut crop), most of them unpaved and eroding in every rain.

Today, the Georgia Statistical Abstract (2000-2001) lists the 1992 erosion rate for urban areas as zero and 5.5 tons per acre for cultivated land. Best management practices in agriculture are improving on that, too.

Erosion sediment no longer taints our streams like it used to. Morgan Falls Lake, constructed in 1905 near Roswell, completely filled with sediment by 1934. In contrast, West Point Lake, constructed in 1974 below Atlanta, is silting at just 0.02 percent per year, a rate that would take 5,000 years to fill it.

Streams in Georgia, some of which were grossly polluted in the 1960s, are now relatively clean. In the Chattahoochee River near Fairburn, fecal coliform bacteria, which indicate human and animal waste, are 99 percent less since the 1960s, oxygen levels are up 80 percent, and fish have returned.

Even mercury levels, despite the current controversy, should be weighed against past trends: The total mercury that falls into Georgia streams each year from power-plant emissions is about equal to what one chemical plant dumped into the Savannah River every 10 days in the 1960s. Mercury levels in largemouth bass have dropped by 50 percent since the 1960s, a clear sign of improvement.

We have cleaned our air, too. While the population tripled and vehicles quadrupled in metro Atlanta, four of the six worst air pollutants have decreased by more than 50 percent and none have increased. The incidence of respiratory ailments in the most urbanized Georgia counties is below the state average.

Let’s [celebrate] the hundreds of leading Georgia citizens who worked hard to make our environment more healthy and sustainable. They don’t deserve the continued charges that they have failed.

[University of Georgia Professor Emeritus R. Harold Brown is an Adjunct Scholar with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation and author of “The Greening of Georgia: The Improvement of the Environment in the Twentieth Century.” The Georgia Public Policy Foundation is an independent think tank that proposes practical, market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians.]

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