One of the stereotypical complaints about environmentalists is that they are all "gloom and doom." The fact that there is some truth to this frustrates me. I think that part of this derisive statement comes out of the fact that enviros actually do care about the planet more than a lot of folks, and so seeing the loss of its beauty and its wild creatures and its healing qualities pains us in a way that doesn’t other folks (insert your insult here).
Nonetheless, every once in a while, I feel compelled to defy the stereotype and point out some potential good news, culled from a variety of enviro sources.
Here’s a passage from a story about development along the "edges" of the forest, called Living on the Edge, from the excellent magazine Forest, by Patricia Marshall.
Randal O’Toole, an economist with the Thoreau Institute in Portland, Oregon, says that the concern over development is misplaced. O’Toole published the results of a study he did in Wallowa County in northeastern Oregon in the late 1980s, in which he described the county—which is breathtakingly beautiful, with soaring mountains and pristine lakes-—as a tragedy in the making. He predicted that the demise of the timber economy would be incentive to convert timber land to recreational or residential areas, and that people would be tempted to make the conversion for their own economic gain. The tragedy was that development itself would ruin the scenic beauty of the area, thus devaluing it. But as it turns out, though there has been some development in Wallowa County in the last decade and a half, O’Toole’s predictions did not come true. “There hasn’t been a major boom in Wallowa County,” O’Toole says. “People seem to want to be near population centers.”
O’Toole says that from an economic and resource standpoint, growth in areas near cities is not a problem. “One thing people don’t understand is that we have a huge abundance of land in this country. If every single family in this country bought an acre of land, it wouldn’t even double the amount of land we’ve dedicated to cities in this country,” he says. “Having people buy land for second homes and putting houses on them isn’t going to consume that much land.”
I’m not sure that’s the last word on the subject, but you know…it’s a perspective worth hearing.
Kit Stolz 