In 1997, while completing a science fair presentation, 14-year-old Nathan Zohner devised a way to test for bad environmentalists. The first part of his presentation was on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide – this chemical is a major component of acid rain, can cause severe burns in its gaseous form, and is often lethal when accidentally inhaled. After explaining these risks, Nathan surveyed his listeners and asked how many of them would support a ban of this hazardous chemical. Of the 50 people he surveyed, 43 supported a ban, 6 were unsure, and only one realized that dihydrogen monoxide is H2O, or water.¹

Forty-three people wanted to ban water. Let’s forget for the moment that this works out to an amazing 86 per cent of the respondents. Right now let’s just focus on the fact that at least 43 people in the world thought that banning water was indeed a good idea. These 43 people are bad environmentalists.

Marks of a baddie

Some readers might object at this point and argue these people aren’t actually bad environmentalists – they were just tricked. But how were they tricked? Nathan never lied to them, and never even exaggerated the truth. He told them the chemical’s true hazards: water is a major component of acid rain, it can cause severe burns in its gaseous form, and drowning (accidentally inhaling water) is often lethal. Yes, it’s true they wouldn’t have banned water if they had known it was water, but the point is they were willing to ban a very useful chemical based on very limited information. That makes them bad environmentalists.

And they aren’t the only ones. Bad environmentalists abound, and some of them are very influential. Before Christians jump on the environmental bandwagon they should be sure the people they listen to are actually the good environmentalists. Telling the difference between the good and bad ones can often be very hard, but the “baddies” have at least a couple of flaws that observant Christians should be able to spot.

1. They make decisions based only on the dangers of use

Nathan Zohner’s 43 bad environmentalists were ready to ban a chemical after only hearing about its hazards. Would they have come to a different conclusion if they had also heard about dihydrogen monoxide’s many benefits? Just imagine if Nathan had told them that yes, it can be lethal when inhaled, but on the other hand, if man is deprived of it for as little as three days, he will die. Hmmm…this dihydrogen monoxide sounds like a pretty important chemical, doesn’t it? They wouldn’t need to have known it was actually water to come to a different conclusion; they just needed to know about its benefits.

But far too often environmentalists emphasize only the hazards. DDT is perhaps the most striking example. This chemical has been vilified for the last number of decades and yet since its commercial introduction in 1944 it has been credited with saving between one hundred million² and 500 million³ lives. Though it is useful as a general insecticide its most impressive results came when it was used to stop mosquito born diseases like malaria. In 1948, for example, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) had 2,800,000 reported cases of malaria. In 1962 large-scale DDT programs had reduced that to only 31 cases.⁴ Results like this garnered Dr. Paul Muller, the Swiss chemists who patented DDT as a contact insecticide, the Nobel Prize in medicine.

But the odds are, when you hear the word DDT, you don’t think of a beneficial chemical. You are more likely to recall the accusations leveled against the chemical in the 1960s. Environmentalists back then tried to get DDT banned, claiming it:

1) was harmful to bird populations, because it caused a thinning of their egg shells,
2) was persistent in the environment and didn’t break down quickly
3) was a cause of human disease since it built up in human fatty tissues.

There was some merit to these claims, particularly the first one, but there was a good deal of hype to these claims as well. Even as US bird populations were supposed to be suffering due to DDT spraying, the Auduborn Society was noting an upward trend in the numbers of most birds.⁵ The persistence of DDT in the environment was both a hazard as well as a benefit, as it meant the chemical didn’t need to be sprayed as often. It was true that DDT did build up in the fatty tissues of animals and humans, but only to very low levels that were not hazardous.⁶

The point here is not to argue that DDT is harmless. Its use does seem to have some impact on birds and here in the western world we can probably afford to use other methods that are safer to birds. But the move to ban this chemical is a worldwide movement. In 1963, the last year Ceylon had wide scale DDT spraying, malaria cases had dropped to 17. Then they stopped and by 1969, only 6 years later, the number of cases had risen back to 2,500,000. India used DDT to bring their cases of malaria down from an estimated 75 million in 1951 to only 50,000 cases in 1961. But then they reduced their use of DDT and by 1977 the number of malaria cases had risen to at least 30 million.⁷

Worldwide there are between 300 million and 500 million cases of malaria each year. There are 2.7 million deaths annually.⁸ Even if you accept all of the claims made about the hazards of DDT, even if you believe it does cause harm to birds, does persist in the environment, and may be a contributing factor in some cancers, DDT is still the cheapest and one of the most effective means of fighting malaria. If you factor in both the hazards and the benefits DDT seems to be a clear winner. But of course, if you just focus on the hazards even water should be banned.

2. They view the world as a closed system with limited resources

In 1980 two prominent environmentalists, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, made a remarkable bet. The bet itself was fairly straightforward - Simon bet Ehrlich that any 5 metals Ehrlich chose would in ten years time be cheaper than they were in 1980.⁹ The remarkable part was the motivation behind this bet. Simon and Ehrlich had two very different views of the world’s resources, and the bet was a way for them to wager on whose view was right.

Ehrlich thought the world’s resources were finite and limited, and as we used them, we were getting closer and closer to the point where we would run out of them. The predictions of doom you frequently hear in the newspapers are usually based on this worldview. As resources became more and more rare, they should become more and more expensive, so Ehrlich was sure the 5 metals would be more expensive in 10 years time. Simon, on the other hand, had a much more optimistic view of the situation. Rather than running out of resources, Simon was sure the opposite was true. He was so optimistic he let Ehrlich choose the metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) they would wager on. It didn’t matter what the specific resources were, he was confident they would be more plentiful, and therefore cheaper in 10 years.

Well, when 1990 rolled around Simon emerged the winner, and by a landslide. All five metals had dropped in price, chromium by 5 per cent and tin by an amazing 74 per cent.¹⁰ But even as Simon emerged the clear winner, it was less clear how he won. Ehrlich for example, conceded he lost the bet, but refused to concede that Simon’s view of the world had beaten his worldview. Simon’s optimistic worldview just didn’t seem to make sense. How can the world’s resources keep increasing even as we keep consuming nonrenewable resources?

The world’s resources can keep increasing, because man can create new resources. For example, in Alberta there are huge oil sands deposits that were absolutely useless to mankind until quite recently. Then someone figured out a way to separate out the oil and suddenly Alberta had vast new oil sources. Yes the oil was always there, but it wasn’t a resource until man’s ingenuity figured out a way to get at it.

Man can create resources in another way as well. One of the more interesting examples of this has to do with copper, which was an important component of phone lines. As the number of phone, faxes and computer modems increased, the number of phone lines increased as well. The cost of the copper in all these phone lines started becoming a concern for phone companies, so they began to investigate cheaper ways of transmitting the phone signals. Now, instead of copper, many phone systems use fiber optic lines made of glass. And glass is made of sand. Man’s ingenuity turned common sand into a resource that can be used to replace the more limited resource of copper. And these “sand” telephone lines can now be used to transmit hundreds of times more information than the old copper lines ever could.¹¹

So the ultimate resource on earth is man’s ingenuity, and it is limitless.

Conclusion

This article is not an attempt to proclaim that all is right in the world. We live in a fallen world and that evil extends into environmental matters as well. People pollute; it is in our nature to deface and abuse this planet.

But things are also not as bad as they are sometimes made out to be.

Sources:
1 National Review, Nov 10, 1997
2 Dr. Elizabeth Whelan’s Toxic Terror, pg. 71
3 National Post, Aug 19, 2000, “Let’s use DDT”
4 Dr. Elizabeth Whelan’s Toxic Terror, pg. 69
5 pg. 75
6 Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw’s Facts not Fear, pg. 202
7 Julian Simon’s Hoodwinking the Nation, pg. 88
8 The Edmonton Journal, Sept 12, 1999, “The DDT dilemma”
9 The Edmonton Journal, August 12, 2001, “Green but not gloomy”
10 National Post, September 3, 2001, “Running on empty?”
11 Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw’s Facts not Fear, pg. 83

Reformed Perspective - October 2001