Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Read Free Page A

unsustainable situation. In many of the tropical developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the forests are shrinking as hundreds of millions of people cut a patch of forest to plant crops and graze animals just to grow enough food for their family. They don’t have enough wealth to reforest land that is cut for fuel or timber, so the inevitable result is continued deforestation.
    But outside of this context of extreme poverty, if people stopped using wood, there would be no incentive for private or public landowners to reforest their land. It would make more sense to get rid of the trees and plant corn, cotton, or soybeans, which are perfectly good crops that can pay the taxes and provide income for the landowners. It is really fortunate the demand for wood is high in North America, as it results in continually reforested landscapes.
    It is regrettable that the public has been led to believe deforestation is caused by using wood to build our homes, package our goods, and provide paper for printing, packaging, and sanitation. The forest industries that provide wood for these purposes are, almost without exception, engaged in the practice of reforestation, the opposite of deforestation. In fact, more than 90 per cent of deforestation is caused by the conversion of forests to agriculture. The balance largely results from the unsustainable gathering of fuel wood and illegal logging that is followed by conversion to farming.
    Clearly we can’t solve this problem by banning agriculture or the use of wood for cooking and heating. Further on in the book we will analyze this issue more thoroughly, in particular, the role of intensive agriculture and forest management in conserving natural forests and biodiversity.
    China, with its growing middle class, has established a larger area of new forest in the past 15 years than any other country. India, which is also growing wealthier, has doubled the forested area it had just 20 years ago. Why? Because the emerging middle class wants wood and paper and can afford it, so people have planted trees to provide it, thus increasing forest cover. No doubt government reforestation and conservation programs have also played a strong role in China’s and India’s increasing forest area, but these are contingent on there being enough wealth to support them. This is a win-win scenario for people and the environment, yet activists refuse to recognize this linkage between forest use and forest cover. This is just one example of how the environmental movement has lost its way, and of how it promotes policies that seem reasonable at first glance but are actually detrimental in the long run. Sustainability is all about the long run.
    The main purpose of this book is to establish a new approach to environmentalism and to define sustainability as the key to achieving environmental goals. This requires embracing humans as a positive element in evolution rather than viewing us as some kind of mistake. The celebrated Canadian author Farley Mowat has described humans as a “fatally flawed species.” This kind of pessimism may be politically correct today, but it is terribly self-defeating. Short of mass suicide there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate response. I believe we should celebrate our existence and constantly put our minds toward making the world a better place for people and all the other species we share it with.
    A lot of environmentalists are stuck in the 1970s and continue to promote a strain of leftish romanticism about idyllic rural village life powered by windmills and solar panels. They idealize poverty, seeing it as a noble way of life, and oppose all large developments. James Cameron, the multimillionaire producer of the most lucrative movie in history, Avatar , paints his face and joins the disaffected to protest a hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. Who needs lights and newfangled electric gadgets anyway? So what if hydroelectricity is by far the most important source of