“Our responsibility to the coming millions,” the president said, referring to Americans in the next century, “is like that of parents to their children….In wasting our resources we are wronging our descendants.”
We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves for being smarter than Teddy Roosevelt. We’re in no better position to predict the 21st century than he was the 20th. We don’t know what inventions will transform the next hundred years. We don’t know what our descendants may need or want. We’d like to plan for generations to come, but any master plan we draw up may well suffer the same eventual rejection and reversal as TR’s.
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No doubt global civilization will change, but only a tyrant beyond the wildest dreams of Joseph Stalin could “reinvent” it, and probably not for the better. Roosevelt had a “broad, compelling, and coherent vision.” So did the people who committed urban renewal half a century ago. How many times do we have to make the same mistake?
As it happens, these areas are surprisingly small and surprisingly rich. The world’s known living species include 300,000 vascular plants, 9,881 birds, 7,828 reptiles, 4,809 mammals, and 4,780 amphibians. Two-thirds of them live on just 1.4 percent of the world’s land, an area roughly the size of Alaska plus Texas. (So far there’s no hot-spot analysis for freshwater or marine organisms or for invertebrates.) Many hot spots are islands, including the Philippines and Madagascar. Most are tropical or Mediterranean in climate, including Central America, southern Florida, and western California. Each of the 25 hot spots has its own chapter with specialist authors.
In his book Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto, engineer-lawyer Peter Huber makes a similar but more radical case–that mining fossil fuels and building materials is good for the environment because it consumes less land than the alternatives. “What we mine from the depths of the Earth now substitutes directly for what we would otherwise have to reap, harvest, gather, scrape, and flood from a vast area on the surface. …The more energy rich the fuel extracted the less disruption there will be. Generally speaking, the greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. Coal is the least good hard fuel by that standard, oil is significantly better, and nuclear is millions of times better still. Strip mining is more environmentally disruptive than shaft mining, even if shafts are more dangerous for the miners. It is better to drill for oil in a desert, or over permafrost, than in a Louisiana bayou. There is a lot less life in those places to disturb.”
But there’s nothing golden about the status quo. When regulators are presented with a new drug, they can go wrong in two different ways. They can approve it and later find that it’s unsafe, in which case people may die from taking it. Or they can not approve it and later find that it’s safe–in which case people may die from not having been able to take it.
But nature is way too ambiguous to be anybody’s mentor. For starters, is there really no waste in nature? It all depends on how you look at it. From one point of view, the frog’s reproductive strategy is stupendously wasteful: tadpoles are produced by the millions and die by the hundreds of thousands every spring. Nature wastes tadpoles like crazy. From another point of view, the frog’s reproductive strategy isn’t wasteful at all: the organic matter that made up the dead tadpoles is consumed by bacteria. So nature doesn’t waste organic matter. The only way we can say, “There is no waste in nature,” is to arbitrarily choose the second point of view–which is reading into “nature” what we’re predisposed to find. (“Waste” is ambiguous too. When he wanted to build dams to generate electricity, TR might well have thought of himself as emulating nature by not wasting the energy of flowing water. He wasn’t thinking about wasting fish.)
