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| People Day 2005 |
| 2005-04-23 |
| A nice summary of American environmental progress, with statistics, from the founder of Earth Day. Registration required, so I give it uncut. When I helped organize the first Earth Day on my college campus in 1970, I never dreamed we would be celebrating number 35 yesterday, or that we would come so far in cleaning up our environment. The improvements have been remarkable. Since 1976, airborne sulfur dioxide has been reduced 72 percent... carbon monoxide 76 percent... automobile tailpipe emissions 95 percent... lead 98 percent -- and microscopic soot particles are about half what they were 20 years ago. About 80 percent of U.S. community water systems had no violations of health-based Environmental Protection Agency standards in 1993. Last year, 95 percent had no violations. For the past five years, our wetlands have increased 26,000 acres a year -- reversing years of decline. We've gone from 500 nesting pairs of bald eagles in 1965 to 7,500 today. Progress since the "good old days" is even more dramatic. In 1905, average U.S. life expectancy was 47 years; today it's 78. Few homes had electricity; instead, coal and wood fires created clouds of pollution, and the average home generated 5,000 pounds of wood or coal ash yearly. More than 3 million horses worked in American cities -- producing 11 million tons of manure and 9 million gallons of urine annually. Most got left on streets or dumped into rivers. During summers, manure dust was a primary cause of tuberculosis. In New York City alone, crews had to remove 15,000 horse carcasses from streets every year. The arrival of automobiles changed all that. It also meant we no longer needed vast forage and pasture land for horses, modern farming began increasing production per acre, and we've added a million acres of new U.S. forestland annually since 1910. All is not rosy, of course. For instance, Alaskan stellar sea lions continue declining, though exact causes are unclear. But overall -- in sharp contrast to gloomy reports from some activist groups and news media -- environmental progress has been steady, not only in the U.S. but Europe, Canada and Australia. So celebrate. Be thankful. Try to separate our true remaining ecological problems from those that are analyzed incorrectly, exaggerated or simply concocted to promote activist agendas. Most important, our remaining problems are relatively minor. Truly serious health and environmental problems are in the poorest countries. That's where we should focus our attention. That's why we should have an annual People Day, when we can resolve to address real, immediate, life-or-death problems that threaten poor nations -- rather than fixate on minor, distant, fashionable and theoretical problems. The world's impoverished countries have little to celebrate. Two billion of their people still lack electricity. In India, 4 in 10 families -- 150 million households -- have no electric power. In sub-Saharan Africa, it's 9 in 10 families. They are forced to burn wood, animal dung and agricultural waste in unventilated homes -- and live with constant pollution that causes as many as 3 million children to die yearly from respiratory diseases. And still radical greens use Earth Day to justify demands that the Third World not build hydroelectric projects or coal, gas or nuclear power plants. Nearly a third of humanity also lacks safe drinking water. Families get water from distant wells, rivers and lakes that often teem with bacteria and pollutants. As Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg notes, for the cost of carrying out the Kyoto climate change treaty for just one year, we could permanently provide sanitation and clean, safe drinking water to everyone on the planet. Mosquitoes and flies spread malaria, sleeping sickness and other diseases to more than a half billion people annually. Tens of millions are too sick to work, cultivate fields or care for their families for weeks or months on end. Up to 4 million die yearly. These should be easy diseases to control or even eliminate. But extreme environmentalists, and even WHO and USAID, refuse to support or promote pesticides. They say the chemicals might harm fish or be detected in mother's breast milk. "African mothers would be overjoyed if that were their biggest worry," says Uganda's Fiona Kobusingye. She may not know modern instruments can detect 1 part per billion -- a single second in 32 years. But she knows she lost her son, two sisters and two nephews to malaria. She knows Americans can afford to worry about detectable DDT in breast milk and pesticide residues on grapes, precisely because we used those chemicals to eradicate malaria, typhus and yellow fever in our country. "We have to become white, before we can become green," Kenya's James Shikwati observes. Poor nations must first enjoy modern technology, health and prosperity, before they can focus on concerns important to the world's lucky elites. Obviously, eco-imperialistic Western standards, ideologies and priorities are not the only cause of this monumental human tragedy. War, endemic corruption and horrid political, legal and economic systems are also to blame. We cannot easily fix these latter problems. But we can do something about our own misguided policies. We can rein in the environmental Horsemen of the Third World Apocalypse. So celebrate our progress. But resolve to help poor nations reach our technological, economic, health and environmental status, so more of their children can live past infancy and enjoy some of the blessings we view as our birthright. Earth Day was originally about our planet and its people. Let's restore that common-sense approach. Paul K. Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and author of "Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death." (www.Eco-Imperialism.com). |
| Posted by: trailing wife |