But the alternative, however attractively humble it might sound, is really untenable. People, alone among creatures on earth, have both the rationality and the moral capacity to exercise stewardship, to be accountable for their choices, to take responsibility for caring not only for themselves but also for other creatures. To reject human stewardship is to embrace, by default, no stewardship.
The only proper alternative to selfish anthropocentrism is not biocentrism but theocentrism: Two groups of interrelated conditions are necessary for responsible stewardship. In one group are conditions related to the freedom that allows people to use and exchange the fruits of their labor for mutual benefit Matt. These conditions—knowledge, righteousness, and dominion—provide an arena for the working out of the image of God in the human person.
In another group are conditions related to responsibility, especially to the existence of a legal framework that holds people accountable for harm they may cause to others Rom. These two sets of conditions provide the safeguards necessitated by human sinfulness. Both sets are essential to responsible stewardship; neither may be permitted to crowd out the other, and each must be understood in light of both the image of God and the sinfulness of man. Freedom, the expression of the image of God, may be abused by sin and, therefore, needs restrictions 1 Pet. This means that it, too, needs restrictions Acts 4: Such restrictions are reflected not only in specific limits on governmental powers Deut.
All of these principles are reflected in the Constitution of the United States. Also crucial to the Christian understanding of government is the fact that God has ordained government to do justice by punishing those who do wrong and praising those who do right Rom. These principles indicate that a biblically sound environmental stewardship is fully compatible with private-property rights and a free economy, as long as people are held accountable for their actions.
Stewardship can best be accomplished, we believe, by a carefully limited government in which collective action takes place at the most local level possible so as to minimize the breadth of harm done in case of government failure and through a rigorous commitment to virtuous human action in the marketplace and in government. These principles, when applied, promote both economic growth and environmental quality. On the one hand, there is a direct and positive correlation between the degree of political and economic freedom and both the level of economic attainment and the rapidity of economic growth in countries around the world.
We shall return to this correlation shortly; first, however, it behooves us to know something of the changes in our material condition over the last few centuries. The Marvels of Human Achievement Until about years ago, everywhere in the world, the death rate was normally so close to the birth rate that population grew at only about 0. Eighteenth-century French farming—the best in Europe—produced only about pounds of wheat per acre; modern American farmers produce 2, pounds per acre, about 6.
This means that modern farmers also manage to farm from 37 to times as many acres, thanks largely to mechanized equipment and advanced farming techniques. As the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, it became very difficult to sustain life when productivity in wheat fell below 2. But for most of the years from to , productivity in France which, as was fairly typical of Western Europe, suffered a serious decline in productivity at the start of that period was well below that. Such facts help to explain why earlier generations spent a major part of each day working to earn enough income just to pay for food excluding its preparation, packaging, transport, and serving , while we spend far less today under 6 percent of total consumer expenditures in the United States in the s went to food.
These developments—along with the advent of glass window panes to admit light and heat but exclude cold and pests and screens to admit fresh air and exclude disease-bearing insects ; treatment of drinking water and sewage; mechanical refrigeration to prevent food spoilage and consequent waste and disease ; adoption of safer methods of work, travel, and recreation; and the advent of sanitary medical practices, to say nothing of antibiotics and modern surgical techniques—also help to explain why people live about three times as long now.
While "man is destined to die once" Heb. Economic development is a good to be sought not as an end in itself but as a means toward genuine human benefit. For instance, consider a few of the things absolutely no one—not even royalty—could enjoy before the last two centuries of economic advance:. No matter how rich people might have been a millennium—or even years—ago, if they contracted a bacterial disease, they could not have been treated with antibiotics. This development was prompted by the work of the French Christian and scientist, Louis Pasteur, only in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Also, there were no more effective anesthetics than alcohol and cloves. So when limbs gone gangrenous from infections that today could be cured or, more likely, easily prevented, had to be amputated, patients gritted their teeth and hoped they would pass out from the pain of the crude saw. The germ theory of disease did not become current until the late eighteenth century, and the use of antiseptics did not begin until half a century later, with the work of the British Christian and chemist, Joseph Lister.
Someone with a fever was likely to be bled to death by a doctor trying to cure it. Education was the province of the rich. Before the Reformation, few countries had widespread education, and even afterward, schooling was available principally to the rich.
What do Mormons Believe About Caring for the Environment?
Two major exceptions were Germany and Scotland. In Germany, Martin Luther insisted that widespread schooling was important so that people could read the Scripture—which he had translated into the vernacular—for themselves. But even there, few were schooled for more than five or six years, and only a tiny percentage attended college, let alone graduated. Today, by contrast, in the United States, 81 percent of people twenty-five years old and over are high school graduates, and 23 percent are college graduates, and the growth in availability of education is worldwide.
The most effective measures of material welfare are mortality rates and life expectancy, because they take into account every conceivable variable that can add to or detract from a long and healthy life. A thousand years ago, human life expectancy everywhere was well under thirty years—perhaps even as low as twenty-four; today, worldwide, it is over sixty-five years, and in high-income economies, it is over seventy-six years. The under-five mortality rate has plummeted from about 40 percent everywhere as late as the nineteenth century to under 7 percent worldwide today and under 1 percent in high-income countries.
And improved life expectancy comes not just from declining child mortality but from declining mortality rates at every stage of life. Materially, the world is a far, far better place today than it was not only one millennium ago, but even one century ago. Every raw material—mineral, plant, and vegetable—that plays a significant role in the human economy is more affordable which economists recognize as meaning more abundant , in terms of labor costs, today than at any time in the past. Every manufactured product is more affordable than it has ever been. This rosy picture, however, must not generate uncritical applause for economic development, per se.
Development can be positive or negative. While the fact that life expectancy keeps rising suggests that the net effect of development on human life has been positive, this does not imply that every instance of development is unmixedly beneficial, either to people or to creation. A biblical worldview and an institutional framework for prudent decision making, which we shall set forth below, are essential to ensuring that positive, rather than negative, development takes place. We support appropriate development not for its own sake but, for example, because it uplifts the human person through work and the fruits of that labor, empowering us to serve the poor better, to uphold human dignity more, and to promote values environmental, aesthetic, etc.
The Christian tradition clearly affirms that the accumulation of material wealth should not be the central aim of life; yet people are to use wisely the gifts of creation to yield ample food, clothing, health, and other benefits. It is obvious that the great advance in wealth over the past century has taken place only in a small proportion of countries, namely, the liberal democracies and free economies of the West. Enough is now known about the administration of national economies to conclude safely that free-market systems minimize the waste of resources, and allow humans to be free and to flourish.
All other systems that humans have tried lead to endless and unnecessary poverty, hunger, and oppression. For this reason, the religious communities of the Protestant tradition must take very seriously the claim that free markets and liberal democracy are essential to human welfare and therefore have a moral priority on our thinking about how society ought to be ordered. But an ideological difficulty at present is that Western Protestant churches take too much of the present affluence for granted, misunderstand its origins, and overstate the value of the environmental amenities that have been given up to attain it.
Today, this is leading many to embrace policy platforms that are explicitly against economic growth, and that give undue privilege to the preservation of the environmental status quo. This agenda threatens to deny those outside the West the very benefits that we ourselves have attained, and, ironically, it may burden the developing world with even worse environmental problems down the road. How Economic and Environmental Trends Relate We noted earlier that there is a direct and positive correlation between freedom and economic development and between economic development and environmental improvement.
Necessarily, then, there is also a positive correlation between freedom and environmental quality. Economists find that free economies outperform planned and controlled economies not only in the production and distribution of wealth but also in environmental protection.
Stewardship of creation vs. environmentalism
Freer economies use fewer resources and emit less pollution while producing more goods per man-hour than less free economies. Economic demographer Mikhail Bernstam explains:. Trends in pollution basically derive from trends in resource use and, more broadly, trends in production practices under different economic systems. In market economies, competition encourages minimization of production costs and thus reduces the use of resources per unit of output.
Over time, resource use per capita and the total amounts of resource inputs also decline and this, in turn, reduces pollution…. By contrast, regulated state monopolies in socialist economies maximize the use of resources and other production costs. This is because under a regulated monopoly setting, prices are cost-based, and profits are proportional to costs. Accordingly, the higher costs justify higher prices and higher profits. This high and ever-growing use of resources per unit of output explains the high extent of environmental disruption in socialist countries.
It is not only competition in free economies that encourages better stewardship of natural resources, it is also the incentive people have to protect property in which they have a financial stake. On the one hand, people naturally want their own homes and workplaces, and, by extension, their neighborhoods, to be clean and healthful, so they seek to minimize pollution.
Moreover, a dynamic economy works to reduce pollution by finding the most efficient means of doing so. This contrasts with a command-and-control approach, in which regulators are likely to mandate particular technologies and methods for pollution control with little regard for overall social efficiency. What we can infer from all these considerations—and what we find confirmed in empirical studies of the real world—is that free economies improve human health, raise living standards and life expectancy, and positively affect environmental conditions, doing all these things better than less free economies do.
Further, the wealthier that economies become, the better they foster environmental protection. But soon, increasing wealth enables citizens to invest more resources on environmental protection, and emission rates fall. The result has been termed the "environmental transition," which mirrors the more widely known "demographic transition. It occurs because initial increases in wealth rapidly force death rates downward in every age group, especially for infants and children, but fertility habits change only very slowly.
Consequently, for a generation or two, couples continue having as many children as their forebears did, both because they expect one or two out of four children to die before maturity and also because in a primitive agricultural economy they rely upon having many young children to boost production. Then, when they become accustomed to the higher survival rates, and when the cost of raising children rises and the delay before those children become net producers rather than consumers grows, couples begin having fewer children.
The result is a short-term high population growth rate preceded and followed by a long-term low or zero population growth rate. Similarly, the environmental transition is a way of depicting the tendency for some pollution emissions to rise in early economic growth and then decline. Environmental economist Indur Goklany notes,. The level of affluence at which a pollutant level peaks or environmental transition occurs varies. Other environmental quality indicators e. For these indicators the environmental transition is at, or close to, zero.
In effect, the environmental transition has already occurred in most countries with respect to these environmental amenities because most people and governments are convinced of the public health benefits stemming from investments for safe water and sanitation. In fact, the vast majority of the three million to five million deaths each year due to poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water occur in the developing world. Other indicators apparently continue to increase, regardless of gross domestic product gdp per capita.
Carbon dioxide and no x emissions and perhaps dissolved oxygen levels in rivers are in this third category. On the surface, these indicators seem not to improve at higher levels of affluence, but their behavior is quite consistent with the notion of an environmental transition. The transition is delayed in these cases because decision makers have only recently realized the importance of these indicators, or the social and economic consequences of controlling them are inordinately high relative to the known benefits, or both.
All the evidence indicates that, ultimately, richer is cleaner, and affluence and knowledge are the best antidotes to pollution. Understanding the environmental transition, we should not be surprised to find that air, water, and solid waste pollution emissions and concentrations have been falling across the board in advanced economies around the world for the last thirty to forty years. Thus, for example, in the United States, national ambient airborne particulate emissions fell by about 80 percent from to , and total suspended particulates fell by about 84 percent from to ; sulfur dioxide so 2 emissions fell by about 34 percent from to , and so 2 concentrations fell by about 80 percent from to ; carbon monoxide emissions fell by about 24 percent from to ; nitrogen oxide emissions peaked around and have declined slightly since then, while concentrations have fallen by about a third since ; volatile organic compounds emissions peaked in the late s and by had fallen by about 30 percent; ozone concentrations fell by about 30 percent from the early s to ; lead emissions probably the most hazardous air pollutant fell over 98 percent from to , and concentrations also fell by about 98 percent.
But there is no reason to think this must continue to be the case. As developing countries become wealthier—which they will do if their economic growth is not stifled by excessive government planning and by unreasonable environmental policies that suppress energy use and agricultural and industrial productivity—they have the opportunity to develop in a similar way. The environmental transition, as a concept, simply generalizes a common-sense insight: People tend to prioritize their spending in terms of their most urgent needs.
Generally speaking, the most urgent material needs of the poor are for basic water, food, clothing, and shelter; in a second tier come basic health care, education, transportation, and communication; and in successive tiers come other, less urgent needs. People worried about putting food on the table today understandably consider that to be more urgent than reducing smog next year or minimizing global warming one hundred years from now.
But when people are confident that their most urgent needs will be met, they begin allocating more of their resources to needs deemed by them less urgent—including increasingly rigorous environmental protection. The rapid decline in pollution in advanced economies over the last thirty to fifty years—a decline that is continuing today—is not matched in very poor countries in early stages of economic development.
But there is reason to be confident that the environmental transition not only will occur in the latter countries as surely as it has in the former, but also that it can and will occur more rapidly, with lower pollution peaks and more rapid improvements following them. That is, pollution abatement will become affordable in developing countries at much lower levels of economic development than it did in countries that progressed earlier.
This is one reason trade and open dialogue between peoples are so important; they allow for the diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies and methods. The result, as illustrated in Figure 1, is a series of pollution transitions. Just as some countries went through the demographic transition long ago and others more recently, while some are in the midst of it now and others have yet to begin it, so some countries are long past the peak in the pollution transition, while others are at or just approaching it, and still others are just beginning the uptrend in pollution.
While we celebrate the decline in pollution as economies advance, however, we must not be distracted from the need to accelerate that decline in presently developing countries. Some three to five million children under the age of five die each year from diseases contracted from impure drinking water.
Perhaps another three to five million die from diseases related to the widespread use of dried dung and wood for cooking and heating in the hovels of the poor, causing toxic indoor air pollution.
Urban smog, largely defeated in the advanced countries of the West, remains a serious problem in many poorer cities of the world. We know how to solve these problems, as we have already done so ourselves. What the poor lack is sufficient income to afford the solutions; that is part of why economic growth in developing countries and trade between nations which can speed the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies, management techniques, and regulatory regimes in developing countries are so critically important—and why it is so tragic that many environmentalists embrace policies inimical to these ends.
Such policies not only delay the achievement of the affluence that makes environmental protection affordable but also condemn millions of people to more years in poverty. Thinking, for instance, that reducing carbon dioxide co 2 emissions will prevent destructive global warming, some Western environmentalists are lobbying for severe restrictions on energy use, and are opposing the introduction of modern sources of energy into less developed nations.
Similarly, opposition to "unsustainable" agricultural practices used in the developing world—practices that serve as a take-off point for substantially more productive and environmentally sound agricultural methods down the road—threatens to condemn large numbers in the developing world to perpetual poverty and hunger. One clear implication of all of this is that an important assumption among many in the environmental movement is simply false. The assumption is that as people grow in numbers, wealth, and technology, the environment is always negatively affected.
According to this formula, every increase in population, affluence, or technology must result in increased damage to the environment—and even more so when two or all three of these factors increase together. The damage to the environment affirmed in this vision is twofold: The trouble with the assumption—even though it seems intuitively sensible and certainly is a widespread belief—is that it ignores the stewardship role of the human person, and, consequently, is falsified by hard empirical data.
That pollution declines when economies grow wealthier has already been seen. The fact is illustrated well by the situation in the United States. While population grew by 19 percent from to , the index of air pollution fell by 53 percent. During the same time, affluence tripled, and technology also increased dramatically, with more and more computerization and automation not only in industry and commerce but even in private homes. That we are not running out of resources is also clear. Since rising prices reflect increasing scarcity and falling prices reflect decreasing scarcity, we can learn long-term resource supply trends from long-term price trends.
And the long-term, inflation-adjusted price trend of every significant resource we extract from the earth—mineral, vegetable, and animal—is downward. Even more significant, the price of resources divided by wages is even more sharply downward, because while resource prices have been falling, wages have been rising. Together, these things mean that all resources are far more affordable, because they are far more abundant today than at any time in the past.
Why have people so often been mistaken about the impact of growing human population and growing economies?
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Fundamentally, it is because they have not understood the full potential of the human person. They have considered people basically as consumers and polluters. But that biblical understanding of human nature leads Christians to expect precisely what we have seen: Some Human and Environmental Concerns for Present and Future Despite the reassuring picture painted by all these general observations, many people continue to fear that we face serious threats to human well-being and to the environment as a whole.
How realistic are these fears, and, to the extent that there are real dangers, what can we do about them? Population Growth "The population crisis," writes cultural historian and evolutionary theorist Riane Eisler,. For behind soil erosion, desertification, air and water pollution, and all the other ecological, social, and political stresses of our time lies the pressure of more and more people on finite land and other resources, of increasing numbers of factories, cars, trucks, and other sources of pollution required to provide all these people with goods, and the worsening tensions that their needs and aspirations fuel.
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It threatens the earth with resource depletion and pollution. As we have seen, however, empirical observation, as well as biblical understanding of the implications of the image of God in the human person, suggests the opposite conclusion. Nonetheless, many people still fear population growth because they believe it leads to overpopulation. When asked what they mean by overpopulation, they usually speak of crowding and poverty. Yet the assumption that high population density begets those things is mistaken.
Some of the most desirable places to live in the world are also among the most densely populated. Manhattan, for instance, with its density of over 55, people per square mile, also has very high rents—a sure sign that plenty of people really want to live there, despite its high density. Or maybe, instead, they want to live there precisely because of its high density. The teeming population of Manhattan brings together a magnificent mix of human talent that makes life there fascinating, challenging, and rewarding for its millions. With all their problems, they clearly attract more people than they drive away.
Some people think high population density lies at the root of poverty in developing nations such as China and those in sub-Saharan Africa. Taiwan, however, produces about five times as much wealth per capita as China. Despite the common belief that it is overpopulated, it actually suffers instead from such low population density just over half that of the world as a whole and lower than the average densities of the high-, middle-, and low-income economies of the world that it cannot afford to build the infrastructure needed to support a strong economy.
In reality, overpopulation is an empty word. As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt puts it, "the concept cannot be described consistently and unambiguously by demographic indicators. What are the criteria by which to judge a country "overpopulated"? Population density is one possibility that comes to mind. By the same token, the United States would be more "overpopulated" than the continent of Africa, West Germany would be every bit as "overpopulated" as India, Italy would be more "overpopulated" than Pakistan, and virtually the most "overpopulated" spot on the globe would be the kingdom of Monaco.
Rates of population growth offer scarcely more reliable guidance for the concept of "overpopulation. Would anyone seriously suggest that frontier America suffered from "overpopulation"? What holds for density and rates of growth obtains for other demographic variables as well: The reason is that "overpopulation" is a problem that has been misidentified and misdefined.
The images evoked by the term overpopulation—hungry families; squalid, overcrowded living conditions; early death—are real enough in the modern world, but these are properly described as problems of poverty. Despite all this, some people still fear population growth. Their fears, however, lack both biblical and empirical bases. First, the Bible presents human multiplication as a blessing, not a curse Gen. Second, although some people continue to believe projections made thirty and forty years ago of the world population topping twenty, thirty, or even forty billion in the next century or so, demographic trends indicate that the reality will be quite otherwise.
Those projections were made based on the highest population growth rate the world has ever seen—about 2. But by the year , the worldwide population growth rate had dropped to about 1. The trfs in countries with above-replacement rates are beginning to fall. For all Asia, trfs have dropped by over one-half from 5. But even that might be overstating likely future population. That would mean that world population would top out at 7.
There is no good reason to believe that overpopulation will become a serious problem for the world. On the contrary, the more likely problem is that an aging world population will put greater stress on younger workers to provide for older, disabled persons. Only genuine barriers to human flourishing create the problems associated with "overpopulation"; attacking problems such as poverty head-on is a far better way of improving human welfare and upholding human dignity than simply deeming certain lives unworthy of living and so, in the name of fighting "overpopulation," embracing abortion, euthanasia, and other actions that undermine the sanctity and dignity of human life.
Global Warming Global warming is the biggest of all environmental dangers at present, maintain many environmentalists. Ironically, the great fear thirty years ago was of global cooling, for scientists recognized then that the earth is nearing a downward turn in its millennia-long cycle of rising and falling temperatures, correlated with cycles in solar energy output.
Now people fear that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, called a "greenhouse gas" because it traps solar heat in the atmosphere rather than allowing it to radiate back into space, will cause global average temperatures to rise. The rising temperatures, they fear, will melt polar ice caps, raise sea levels, cause deserts to expand, and generate more and stronger hurricanes and other storms. Are there good reasons for these fears? While atmospheric carbon dioxide co 2 is certainly on the rise, and global average temperature has almost certainly risen slightly in the last years or so, it is by no means certain that the rising temperature stems from the rising co 2.
The most important contrary indicator is that the sequence is the reverse of what the theory would predict. Almost all of the approximately 0. If the rising co 2 was responsible for the rising average temperature, the reverse should have been the case. In addition, roughly two-thirds of the overall increase is attributable to natural, not manmade, causes primarily changes in solar energy output. Highly speculative computer climate models drove the great fears of global warming that arose in the s and endured through the s. Early versions of those models predicted that a doubling of atmospheric co 2 would cause global average temperature to increase by 5 o C or more nearly 10 o F.
As the models have been refined through the years, however, their warming predictions have moderated considerably. In , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ipcc predicted, on the basis of the computer models, global average temperature increase of 3. Even that latest prediction is likely to turn out much too high, for it still is based on models that, had they been applied to the past century, would have predicted twice as much warming as actually occurred.
All measurement systems agree that was the warmest year on record. These discrepancies were reported in a study prepared by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and published in January After correcting the surface data for a variety of contaminating factors, a team of researchers produced new estimates of surface temperatures that yielded apparent decadal trends that were 0.
The differences, however, are still highly significant, since the corrected surface data trends are still percent to percent higher than the satellite-recorded lower troposphere trends. But the data—to the extent that both sets are to be trusted—now show the opposite to be true. The significance of this is that the computer models clearly remain far from accurate enough in their depiction of atmospheric temperatures, which suggests that policy makers should be very slow to base their decisions on model predictions. Not only is the actual global warming that is to be expected far from what the ipcc and other climate modelers originally predicted, but it is also questionable whether global warming is likely to bring many harmful effects.
There are several reasons for this. Most important, increasingly refined models now indicate—and empirical observation has confirmed—that the majority of the warming will occur in the winter, at night, and in polar latitudes. Instead, nighttime warming during the winter, to the extent that it affects populated areas at all, should result in a slight decrease in energy consumption for heating and, therefore, some reduction in future emissions and a slight lengthening of the growing season in spring and autumn.
Further, whatever rise in global average temperature occurs will likely result not in expanding but in contracting deserts, and not in contracting but in expanding polar ice caps. More water evaporates in warmer temperatures. But air circulates over all of it. But the enhanced precipitation at the poles is likely to enlarge polar ice caps, offsetting a long-term natural rise in sea level. As environmental scientist S. Fred Singer points out in reviewing a variety of studies of sea level trends,. Global sea level sl has undergone a rising trend for at least a century; its cause is believed to be unrelated to climate change [1].
We observe, however, that fluctuations anomalies from a linear sl rise show a pronounced anti-correlation with global average temperature—and even more so with tropical average sea surface temperature. These findings suggest that—under current conditions—evaporation from the ocean with subsequent deposition on the ice caps, principally in the Antarctic, is more important in determining sea-level changes than the melting of glaciers and thermal expansion of ocean water.
It also suggests that any future moderate warming, from whatever cause, will slow down the ongoing sea-level rise, rather than speed it up. Support for this conclusion comes from theoretical studies of precipitation increases [2] and from results of General Circulation Models gcms [3,4]. Further support comes from the albeit limited record of annual ice accumulation in polar ice sheets [5]. While only mild harm is to be anticipated from the small temperature increases that are most likely to come, some benefit is to be expected—indeed, has already occurred—because of enhanced atmospheric co 2.
Carbon dioxide is crucial to plant growth, and recent studies show that a doubling of atmospheric co 2 results in an average 35 percent increase in plant growth efficiency.
Some people have asserted that global warming poses a serious threat to human health through increased incidence of tropical diseases and heat-related ailments. However, not only must such anticipated effects be carefully justified and quantified in themselves, but they must also be studied in balance with anticipated benefits. For example, the reduction in hunger and malnutrition attributable to rising agricultural yields from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, however difficult to quantify, must certainly be considered.
Thomas Gale Moore concluded his careful evaluation of various studies of anticipated health effects of global warming by writing, "… a warmer climate should improve health and extend life, at least for Americans and probably for Europeans, the Japanese, and people living in high latitudes. High death rates in the tropics appear to be more a function of poverty than of climate. Thus global warming is likely to prove positive for human health. Despite all this, some people still want to greatly curtail fossil fuel use to reduce co 2 emissions.
They are promoting a number of measures to do so, such as the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to force reductions in energy consumption. But since every form of economic production requires energy, reducing energy use entails reducing economic production. Some will reply that the losses in production can be offset by improved energy efficiency. To some extent they might be, but it is very unlikely that the reductions in emissions could be achieved through government-mandated efficiency measures alone; almost certainly, some actual loss of production would result.
Because individuals seek to reduce their cost of living and businesses seek to maximize their profits in a free and competitive economy, they have a natural incentive to minimize waste, that is, to eliminate inefficient behavior and adopt the most economically efficient technologies they can though these are not always the most technically efficient. The apparent need for government to mandate further emission reductions therefore suggests that these reductions must cause a net loss in production and, ultimately, diminish human welfare.
Another economic forecasting firm, Charles River Associates, projects lower costs—about 2. Whether higher or lower, these economic costs translate into very human costs. But the United States is a rich country, far better able to cope with the costs of Kyoto than the vast majority of the world. The lost economic growth in any developing countries that are forced to comply with Kyoto emission restrictions spells added decades of suffering and premature deaths for their people, for whom the affordability of basic water and sewage sanitation, health care, and safe transportation will be long postponed.
Thus, says Frederic Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a letter accompanying a petition against the treaty signed by over seventeen thousand scientists, This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful. The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.
Even assuming that the popular global warming scenario were true, what benefit would come from all the costs—not just in the United States but all over the world—of complying with the Kyoto accords? Proponents of the accords estimate that without the Kyoto limits, hydrocarbon emissions will increase at about 0.
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The Kyoto Protocol calls for reduction of emissions to 7 percent below levels during the years to and no increase thereafter, with effective carbon dioxide concentration in of ppm. How much warming would be prevented by then? Such a price is too much to pay for so small and doubtful a benefit. It is tempting to say that we must not politicize this or any other environmental issue, and we do not intend to do so; our focus is on sound science rooted in a value structure that emphasizes honesty and openness to debate and evidence. But the issue has already been heavily politicized.
Starting in the early s, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol frequently spoke of a "scientific consensus" about global warming and derided the motives of scientists and others who questioned that conclusion. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, went so far as to say that belief in global warming and support for the Kyoto Protocol should be "a litmus test for the faith community.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Richard Lindzen, one of the leading researchers in greenhouse effect and climate change science, pointed out in the early s that "the existence of large cadres of professional planners looking for work, the existence of advocacy groups looking for profitable causes, the existence of agendas in search of saleable rationales, and the ability of many industries to profit from regulation, coupled with an effective neutralization of opposition" have undermined the quality of debate over both science and public policy, and that.
That becomes especially true when the benefits of additional knowledge are rejected and when it is forgotten that improved technology and increased societal wealth are what allow society to deal with environmental threats most effectively. The control of societal instability [brought on by the politicization of science in the global warming debate] may very well be the real challenge facing us.
Contrary to earlier claims, it turned out that there was no consensus in favor of the popular global warming scenario. Even in the early s, when the National Research Council appointed a panel dominated by environmental advocates—a panel that included Stephen Schneider, who is an ardent proponent of the catastrophic hypothesis—the panel concluded that there was no scientific basis for any costly action.
First, like a warning shot across the bow, came the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, released February 27, Signed by forty-seven atmospheric scientists, many of whom specialized in global climate studies, it warned that plans to promote a carbon emissions reduction treaty to fight global warming at the upcoming Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June were "based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action," adding, "We do not agree.
Although it did not specifically name global warming, the Heidelberg Appeal warned against "the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development. Three years later came the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, developed at the International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy held in Leipzig, Germany, in November , and revised and updated after a second symposium there in November Signed by eighty leading scientists in the field of global climate research and twenty-five meteorologists, the document declared "the scientific basis of the Global Climate Treaty to be flawed and its goal to be unrealistic," saying it was "based solely on unproven scientific theories, imperfect climate models—and the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from an increase in greenhouse gases.
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- Stewardship of creation vs. environmentalism - LIFE LIFE .
- The Blunder Wonders (1);
In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both satellite and balloon-borne radiosondes show no current warming whatsoever—in direct contradiction to computer model results. For this reason, we consider the drastic emission control policies deriving from the Kyoto conference—lacking credible support from the underlying science—to be ill-advised and premature.
But those early signs of consensus against the popular vision were dwarfed by the release in of a Global Warming Petition developed by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and accompanied by a thoroughly documented review monograph on global warming science. The petition urged the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol "and any other similar proposals," saying boldly, "The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth. The consensus of scientists on global warming has turned out to be quite the opposite of what the apocalyptic vision proponents claimed. This entails the importance of stewardship of life itself. However, in the spirit of 1 Thessalonians 5: When the claims are tested, they are found to be highly dubious. In that volume, V. Heywood, former director of the scientific team that produced the Flora Europea, the definitive taxonomic compilation of European plants, and S.
Stuart, executive officer of the Species Survival Commission at the iucn, wrote, "iucn, together with the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, has amassed large volumes of data from specialists around the world relating to species decline [worldwide], and it would seem sensible to compare these more empirical data with the global extinction estimates.
In fact, these and other data indicate that the number of recorded extinctions for both plants and animals is very small. Known extinction rates [worldwide] are very low. Reasonably good data exist only for mammals and birds, and the current rate of extinction is about one species per year If other taxa were to exhibit the same liability to extinction as mammals and birds as some authors suggest, although others would dispute this , then, if the total number of species in the world is, say, 30 million, the annual rate of extinction would be some 2, species per year.
This is a very significant and disturbing number, but it is much less than most estimates given over the last decade. Note, however, that this hypothesis of 2, extinctions per year is not based on empirical evidence; it is instead derived from a theoretical model of extinctions as a percentage of total species and a high guess of total species. A more likely estimate of total species might be five to ten million, which, inserted into the model, would yield about to extinctions per year.
If those numbers still sound alarming, keep in mind, first, that they represent only about 0. Even at that rate, it would take over five hundred years to eliminate 4 percent of all species on earth. What is more, as already noted, the same book contains repeated admissions that the model predictions of high extinction rates were repeatedly falsified by field investigation. That is not surprising to those familiar with the serious weaknesses in the species-area curve and island biogeography theories from which the hypothetical extinction rates are derived.
Subjected to careful critique, they turn out to vastly overestimate real extinction rates. In part, this is because they fail to describe ecosystems as they really are, and they unrealistically attribute to large, connected regions e. In short, the lack of sound data to support claims of species extinction rates continues. A World Conservation Union report in found extinctions since to include animal species, insect species, and vascular plants—about 2.
Environmental stewardship
Of the first group of species listed in under the Endangered Species Act, today [] 44 are stable or improving, 20 are in decline, and only seven, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and dusky seaside sparrow, are gone. This adds up to seven species lost over 20 years from the very group considered most sharply imperiled…. Under [conservation biologist E. Yet in the period only seven actual U. And the United States is the most carefully studied biosphere in the world, making U.
If plants and insects are included in the calculation, 34 organisms fell extinct in the United States during the s, according to a study by the Department of the Interior. This is clearly worrisome, but at an average of 3. The significance even of these small numbers is open to debate because, while most people think of a species as genetically defined, the Endangered Species Act esa defines species very differently.
This popular perception certainly lies behind the fear that "species" extinction forever removes elements from the global gene pool. But in reality, it may only mean that a given population segment of that genetically defined species is endangered; it is entirely possible that plenty of other specimens may thrive in other locations. Many citizens who support expensive policies to prevent species extinctions might reconsider if they knew that rather than preventing real extinctions, they were only preventing the removal of a geographically defined segment of an otherwise thriving species.
None of this means that there are not particular species that are, in fact, endangered and that can benefit from careful conservation efforts. But as field ecologist Rowan B. Martin points out, when monetary values are more fully aligned with other human values, the institutional arrangement allows for the maximization of both values:.
Western scientists, activists, and agencies favor the creation of reserves in developing nations to preserve biological diversity. However, this strategy is often an unworkable form of "eco-imperialism. An alternative strategy, which has had considerable success, is empowering local people to control the wildlife resources in their area.
In many parts of Southern Africa, where full rights of access and control over wildlife have been granted to landholders of both private and communal land , biodiversity is better conserved in the areas surrounding national parks than in the parks themselves.
Additionally, the areas surrounding the parks are economically more productive than the state-protected areas. In Southern Africa and other parts of the world, conservation of biological resources would be a profitable activity and not a cost if the correct institutional arrangements were developed, including a stronger reliance on private property and communal tenure systems. Environmental Market Virtues 70 We have already argued that economic growth itself is an important step toward environmental protection.
It makes good stewardship affordable and technically possible. Nonetheless, economic growth by itself is not enough. Environmental stewardship refers to responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices. Aldo Leopold — championed environmental stewardship based on a land ethic "dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.
Resilience-Based Ecosystem Stewardship emphasizes resilience as a basic feature of the changing world as well as ecosystems that provide a suite of ecosystem services rather than a single resource , and stewardship that recognizes resource managers as an integral part of the systems they manage. One author suggests that there are 3 types of environmental stewards: Doers go out and help the cause by taking action. For example, the doers in an oil spill would be the volunteers that go along the beach and help clean up the oil from the beaches.
A donor is the person that financially helps the cause. They can do anything from donating their money, to hosting public events to raise funds. They are typically governmental agencies. Lastly there are practitioners. They work on a day-to-day basis to steer governmental agencies, scientists, stakeholder groups, or any other group toward a stewardship outcome. Together these 3 groups make up environmental stewards and with the help keep the ecosystem running healthily.
Without these groups it would be hard to get any sort of sustainability in our increasingly industrially based world. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This Section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. January Learn how and when to remove this template message. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, New York.
Kofinas, and Carl Folke eds.