Category: Environmental History

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Saving America’s Forests?

It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]

George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.

Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate,  with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck,  to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]

But Wait!

Continue reading “Saving America’s Forests?”

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Julian Simon, Vindicated Again

Population growth is a good thing, Julian Simon told us.

Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.

Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr. Pangloss,” compared him to a “fast change artist at a county fair,” and said he persuaded people with “sleight of hand.” [1] Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and a leading alarmist wrote (along with his wife, Anne), that Simon was “the leader of a space-age age cargo cult” of economists and a “fringe character.” [2] They also called his qualifications those of a “specialist in mail-order marketing.”[3]

Today Simon’s views are beginning to be appreciated. Continue reading “Julian Simon, Vindicated Again”

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Climate Change and the “Madness of Crowds”

Madness of crowds: witches' sabbath

Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so.

I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.

I will look at two disastrous periods that have some resemblance to today’s craze: witchcraft fears in the Middle Ages and the eugenics movement of the 1930s. I am not alone in making these comparisons to climate change alarm , as you will see. [1]

But first, bear with me as I report on some of the efforts to ignore or squelch criticism of the prevailing apocalyptic approach. These efforts are inappropriate,  even unethical. Then I will discuss the two previous outsized eras. Continue reading “Climate Change and the “Madness of Crowds””

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Ethanol: Another ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ Coalition

Ethanol summit meeting in Sao Paolo in 2019

I recently became acquainted with an arcane language containing symbols like RFS, RINs, eRINs, RVOs, WTE, RNG, even HBIIP.  It is spoken by groups with their own esoteric names, such as RFA and ABFA and WTEA.

There is a reason for this obscurity: This is the language of lobbying for the multi-billion-dollar  “renewable fuel industry (RFI).” These speakers don’t want you to know much about them except when they make public announcements like: “lower-cost, lower-carbon ethanol fuel blends are better for the environment and the family budget.”

I’m going to share some of the 50 years of history of this renewable fuels  lobbying. My purpose is to explain two ideas that help me understand political history. One is the economist’s notion of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. Another is the “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition identified many years ago by economist Bruce Yandle. [1]

While I am singling out one big (and burgeoning) industry, that is because I have been examining it for my environmental blog, and I have more details there (including definitions of most of the terms identified above). But there  are plenty of other similar stories (start with sugar and cotton) .

Continue reading “Ethanol: Another ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ Coalition”

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Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?

Cotton field

Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?

We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.

What could southerners do? Continue reading “Was Southern Soil Exhaustion a Cause of the Civil War?”