Opinion: Earth Day 2010 -- Celebrating 40 Years of Being Wrong

(April 22) -- For the millions of people gearing up for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, there's a lot to celebrate. Forty years after experts in ecology, sociology, demographics and economics predicted the Earth would be uninhabitable in 40 years, we can happily point out that we are still here and we are doing better all the time.

It's worth reflecting on why those experts were so wrong as we look forward to the next 40 years on Planet Earth.

To help "celebrate" the first Earth Day in 1970, biologist Barry Commoner wrote, "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation." Ecologist Kenneth Watt said in a speech at Swarthmore College, "If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." And a New York Times editorial claimed, "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction."

After four decades, most measures of human welfare show that the world's population is better off today than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy is increasing, per capita income is rising, the air we breathe and water we drink are cleaner. And, of course, concerns over climate change have shifted to catastrophic warming.

Paul Ehrlich, the author of "The Population Bomb," published in 1968, was the prophet of population disaster. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation during the 1970s because the Earth's inhabitants would multiply at a faster rate than the world's ability to supply food.

By 2000, there were 6 billion people, not the 7 billion Ehrlich had predicted, as average fertility rates dropped from six children per woman in the 1960s to 2.8 today. At the same time, the "green revolution" helped avoid massive famines, and daily calorie consumption in poor countries increased from 1,932 to 2,650. Although many people still don't have enough to eat, mass death by starvation did not occur.

These kinds of miscalculations can be traced to faulty reasoning starting with the writings of Thomas Malthus, who argued some 200 years ago that human population growth would run into constraints imposed by fixed natural resources, especially land for food production.

But as Stanford economist Paul Romer notes: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply."

While regulation has played a role in cleaning up the environment and making our lives healthier, the main driver of this progress is a free and open economy.

When individuals are free to pursue their own interests and operate with a minimum of institutional constraints, new ideas and new "recipes" grow at a much faster rate than population. Predictions of catastrophe such as those that were so prevalent in 1970 can suffocate the very process that leads to improved environmental quality. And bureaucracies wielding new government regulations -- created to save us from ourselves – can often undermine progress.

The truth is there's much to celebrate on this Earth Day. Indeed, one reason to rejoice is that the doomsayers have been wrong over the past 40 years and will likely be wrong again.

Laura E. Huggins is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the co-author with Terry Anderson of "Greener Than Thou: Are You Really an Environmentalist?" and the editor of "Population Puzzle: Boom or Bust."


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