As a global population landmark stirred the usual fears about feeding humankind last week, US President Bill Clinton moved to limit planetary bounty for the sake of nature. So goes environmental politics.
It is altogether doubtful that Clinton's proposal to tuck away 40 million more acres into the US hoard of idle land will cause anyone to starve. But aims conflict here. On one hand, environmentalists worry that population growth stretches what they call the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. On the other hand they cheer every time a politician, in the name of preservation, locks away more planetary surface to ensure no one can do anything with it.
The only consistent feature in this scheme is the subordination of human welfare to curtailment of economic activity. For a proliferating species, this is backwards.
The landmark
Last week, a birth somewhere pushed the world's population to 6 million. There was a time in human history when that many appetites would have created problems. There was a time when nature's carrying capacity was indeed static.
Not now. Nature's potential to sustain human life is by no means fixed. Human ingenuity has leveraged the bounty. Nature's yield depends on the clever application of land, labor, and capital-the factors of production in classical economics. Where there are no gross limits on the factors of production-on economic activity, in other words-there is diminished need to fret about each new increment of population. An economically vibrant planet can handle the load.
What should alarm anyone worried about nature's ability to sustain life is absolutist preservationism, the popular impulse to-in environmentalist parlance-protect as much land as possible from economic activity. It was to this uncompromising ethic that Clinton appealed when he instructed the US Forest Service to propose lock-up of the roadless areas under its jurisdiction.
"I have determined that it is in the best interest of our nation and of future generations to provide strong and lasting protection for these forests," Clinton declared. He directed the service to propose regulations providing "appropriate long-term protection for most or all" of the land in its roadless inventory-most in parcels of 5,000 acres or more-and "to determine whether such protection is warranted for any smaller 'roadless' areas not yet inventoried." So the Forest Service in a few months will propose a ban on road-building on most of the acreage, effectively prohibiting economic development, including exploration for and production of oil and natural gas.
Clinton obviously hopes to win back environmentalist favor, lately in decline, for his legacy and for the political prospects of his vice-president. It's not his first such resort to preservationist salve. In September 1996, while running for reelection, he dubbed 1.9 million acres in Utah the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In thus "protecting" the land from development, he also threw state school finance, dependent on proceeds from mineral development, into jeopardy for at least a while.
How much?
To be sure, preservation is a good thing. Not all land should be subject to economic development. There is value in unspoiled nature.
But how much preservation does one country need? How much economic development can it afford to do without for the sake of forests and grasslands that only long-distance back-packers might ever see? At some point, don't all those inaccessible woods just become a giant tinderbox? What, indeed, is the preservation capacity of the US?
Someone in government should be asking questions like these. Preservation for its own sake helps only politicians shining their environmentalist credentials. Sustainable preservationism would accommodate human welfare and the reliance upon economic activity that comes with it. In a growing world, it would be nice to hear more politicians say so.
