A new United Nations report tells us that human activity is basically slaughtering the wildlife out there, killing off the species upon which our own existence is reliant. We should stop doing that, and I assume that you’re with me, because we’d like a world for our grandchildren to live in so we probably should stop doing that. The thing is, to do so we should stop doing pretty much every thing it is that this report and environmentalists tell us to do.
There is a problem with their basic contention that we’re about to drive 1 million species to extinction. How many species are there anyway? Are we talking about some substantial portion, or some tiny percentage?
The answer is actually the latter. Once we start adding the number of beetles (as the biologist JBS Haldane pointed out, if God exists he seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles) to those of bacteria, viruses, and so on, we start powering off into the tens and hundreds of millions of individual species, as, actually, certain environmentalists proclaim.
Two stories from Australia illustrate the problem we have. Certain stygofauna only evolve in one specific place, exist only there, and do not spread. Therefore, any mine that digs up a few thousand acres will be driving a number of species extinct. Some insist that a planned mine must prove the impossible, that a uranium mine will not make extinct some bug or other, a bug we don’t know the existence of as yet, cannot test for, but we must prove we won’t eradicate it by digging a hole.
If this is our definition of species, and it is the wider one, then we’re not in fact damaging biodiversity at all.
But let us take their other arguments seriously by accepting their preface. We need to tread more lightly upon this Earth in order to preserve God’s other creatures. That’s fine with me, by the way, my reading of Genesis is that we are here to curate, not exploit to nonexistence, God’s creation.
That’s where this report really gets a bit sticky, for they appear to decry economic trade between nations:
“In the past 50 years, the human population has doubled, the global economy has grown nearly 4 fold and global trade has grown 10 fold, together driving up the demands for energy and materials.”
That, sadly, is to be ignorant of the subject under discussion (economics). Trade actually reduces resource use. We buy and import things which are cheaper for the same standard than we can produce ourselves.
Cheaper means using fewer resources. Resources are the inputs to a process. More inputs means more expense on the stuff we’re using to make something. That something is cheaper is, by definition, proof that it uses fewer resources to make. Thus, trade either gives us a higher standard of living for the same resource use (we’re using the same number of resources but getting more production) or we gain the same level of living for the use of fewer resources through trade.
To be against both resource use and also trade is to be either ignorant or stupid.
They also call for the world to change its view of economic growth as the goal. Which is fine, obviously enough, there are plenty of religions which insist that it is not riches in this life but the ones piled up for the next that matter. It’s just that human beings don’t really work that way and it’s the desires and behavior of human beings that will have to be changed on this point, not that of governments or bureaucracies. It isn’t our rulers telling us we must have economic growth, it’s us telling our rulers that we’d rather like to have some please.
But to tell us all that we must give up growth for biodiversity is again to be ignorant. The U.S. has more or less biodiversity than it had 100 years ago? The wolves coming back rather tells us the answer there, doesn’t it? The U.S. also has more forest cover than it did. One calculation has it that there’s more than at any time since the Mayflower bumped Plymouth Rock. It’s most certainly true that we have more than in the 1920s.
Few seem to know, or even care, that those New England forests we all go to gawp at in the fall are nearly all new. It was the opening of the Great Plains to farming, the railroads, and the iron plow that led to the abandonment of the hard-scrabble older farms of the eastern United States. The formerly near-clear-cut areas were abandoned and have, on their own and quite naturally, reforested over the past century and a bit.
That is, if we go farm those wonderfully fertile areas, we can grow our food on less land than if we’re trying to scrape a living out of the soil. We use fewer resources by trading food to Boston from Des Moines.
We’re also told that the greatest threat to biodiversity is changing land use. That therefore rules out organic farming then, doesn’t it? The one thing that industrial farming uses less of is land. We substitute fertilizer and herbicide for land, thus meaning that chemical farming leaves more land not nature to be biodiverse in. Actually, by at least one calculation, if we returned entirely to organic farming then we’d have no space left for any wildlife at all.
All of which, to me at least, is the joy of this and other similar reports. We can take seriously their warnings about nature and the biosphere, in which case we should want as much industrial production of food and energy as we can — that mine to feed a nuclear power plant might kill a few bugs but it’ll leave more space for nature than solar panels to produce the same power — so that we leave more room for the biodiversity we desire to save. Or we can say that we don’t need to worry about that room for not-human activity to thrive, in which case we have enough to allow ourselves the luxury of resource-intensive things such as organic farming and other inefficiencies such as local production.
But what cannot be true is both, that we must mind the world by intruding upon it less and also go back to inefficient methods of production. Yet this is what this report does. It insists upon efficient resource use by being inefficient. But then who thought that a report stemming from the U.N. was going to be either logically valid or empirically useful?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
