Summit Ministries

By Michael Bauman

I've heard it long enough.

People keep repeating the old saw that our forests, our wildlife, and our rivers are under threat and under seige.

They are not.

The United States is not now, nor ever will be, reduced to protecting its last few patches of green from asphalt and concrete encroachment the way a miser greedily hoards his gold. As Thomas Sowell observed, our National Park Service lands alone are larger than all of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland combined. The U. S. Forest Service itself controls a land mass larger than all of France, easily the largest nation in Europe. The Fish and Wildlife Service owns more land than all of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Portugal together - and the total number of square miles set apart for these and similar public uses is actually increasing every year.

Neither Greenpeace nor the Sierra Club will ever tell you that by far the largest portion of U. S. land today is forest, and by "forest" I mean forest land excluding the nation-sized expanses mentioned above. By "forest" I mean woodlands outside of, and in addition to, national parks, state parks, city parks, national wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and recreation lands of all sorts. In fact, forest, grassland, and cropland together make up nearly 80% of all our nation's land. We have actually set aside twice as much land for wildlife use and wildlife protection than we employ for all urban purposes. We have almost half as many square miles of idle cropland every year in the U. S. as we have urban area. Our pasture land alone is nearly 40% larger than all our so-called urban sprawl. Almost all our one-quarter billion people live on only 2.1% of our land. In fact, our swamps, deserts, and tundra alone are nearly five times larger than all our cities and towns combined. According to E. Calvin Beisner, if all the earth's 5.3 billion inhabitants were magically transplanted onto American soil, our nation would still have a population density 7% less than Taiwan and 24% less than Bangladesh. If the entire population of earth were restricted to Texas alone, that state would have a population density only 30% that of Macau. Our forests and croplands are not under seige.

In short, America is green, and it is getting greener all the time.

But the environmental activists won't tell you that because they know that the widespread dissemination of such information would hit them where it hurts the most - in the pocketbook. People respond to incentives, and the environmentalists are no exception. The green lobby thrives on private contributions and on massive government subsidies, both of which would be severely restricted if the hard facts ever got a wide audience.

The green lobby will not tell you that global warming is the largest non-event threat since the swine flu. In the last 100 years, the earth's average surface temperature, where it can be measured, has increased only 1/2 a degree. The greenies won't tell you that this 1/2 degree increase occurred during the first 50 years of measurement, not the second. They won't tell you that most of this increase has taken place in the extreme North and the extreme South of our planet's habitable regions, rendering those forbidding zones slightly more hospitable. They won't tell you that our small rise in temperature occurs almost entirely at night, making the daily growing period slightly longer. In other words, the greenies won't tell you that, at its habitable margins, the earth is now a little more friendly to life and a little more green than it once was. If the green lobby told you that, you'd stop giving them mountains of cash, the green they seem most eager to preserve.

Nor will the green lobby tell you the truth about the alleged hole in the polar ozone layer, which isn't a hole at all, and which might have some immeasurably small effect on the number of cases of melanoma among penguins but has absolutely no effect upon human beings living anywhere human beings normally live.

The greenies won't tell you that acid rain has not produced acid lakes in the northeast, where scientists recently discovered that we have had acid lakes for hundreds of years, long before there were car factories in Detroit or steel mills in Pennsylvania, allegedly among the chief culprits in our supposed acidification. Acid lakes have causes; acid rain is not one of them.

What the greenies will try to tell you is that people like me, people who prefer human beings to snail darters and to spotted owls, are species bigots, that we prefer the human species to all others. They are right. Unlike the greenies, who worked to displace several thousand families in one northwestern state in order to preserve a dozen owls, I prefer to protect the lives and dwellings of people more than those of birds. Yes, and I'd much rather save unborn humans from abortion than baby seals from hunters. But the baby seals apparently have a lot more friends in the green lobby and in the courts than do their human counterparts.

Furthermore, if the self-appointed friends of nature had learned more from nature itself and spent less time trying to identify the issues and species that are most readily fundable, they would have discovered that nature itself is constantly bringing new species into existence while it is constantly banishing others to extinction. I, for one, am glad it does. I am not alarmed that dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers no longer stalk the earth. In other words, the green lobby often fights against nature, not for it.

But the charge of species prejudice cuts both ways. Greenies themselves do not treat all life forms as equal. Greenies discriminate against some species at the expense of others - and well they should. No member of the green lobby pushes to preserve the AIDS virus, rats, or killer bees against extinction. They decline to do so for the same reason I decline to endorse some of their pet projects: human beings have surpassing worth.

It just seems to me that the only living things assured of protection by the green lobby are those species that are either cute or whose protection seems most popular and therefore most lucrative. Apparently the definition of species prejudice is not the denial that all species are equal, but the belief that the value of various species differs from those they are perceived to have by the Sierra Club.

If the greenies want to save the whales and are willing to invest their time, their money, and their energy in the project, I am behind them. I hope they prosper. But if their efforts make it more difficult for me to protect human life, human freedom, and human property, I won't be behind them. I'll be in their face.

Copyright © 2000 Michael Bauman. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Previously published in Pilgrim Theology: Taking the Path of Theological Discovery (Zondervan, 1992).