The environmentalists are going to keep on winning
Dan Gardner
Times Colonist
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Seymour Garte, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh, tells a story about listening to a lecture a few years ago. The subject was air pollution in Europe. For Garte, a toxicologist, this was a bit outside his field, and as the lecturer showed one slide after another, he was surprised to see they all showed pollution declining.
"Every year, for every chemical, at every site, and for every method of measurement, the amount of pollution was decreasing," Garte writes in Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the State of the Planet. So he raised his hand. Wasn't there some sort of mistake here?
The lecturer "looked at me with the weary patience that an expert in any field feels when asked a stupid question by a non-expert. He explained that of course it is real, and 'everyone knows that air pollution levels are constantly decreasing everywhere.' "
From this experience came Garte's book, which catalogues basic facts about the state of the environment and public health. "Our air and water have been getting cleaner consistently," he says on the phone from Pittsburgh. "We have cut down the amount of toxic emissions and the number of toxic waste dumps is decreasing. Lifespan is increasing all over the world. Infant mortality is decreasing all over the world. Hunger is decreasing all over the world."
Forest cover is increasing in many countries. Endangered species are being saved. Acid rain is declining.
Many environmentalists worry that this kind of talk invites complacency, a reasonable concern given that right-wing think-tanks have published many books like Garte's to make the case that economic growth magically eliminates environmental problems and so there's no need to do anything but cut taxes and regulations.
But Garter takes the good news about the environment in a very different direction.
"The reason things are getting better is not that it happened by itself. It is the result of very hard work by environmentalists, by activists, by scientists who did the research. And it happened because of government regulations. These regulations have worked."
The key is a democratic government that responds to pressure from below. Simply put, democracy is good for the environment, a point Garte illustrates by comparing environmental trends in the West with those in the former Communist Bloc.
As in the West, industrialization made the air of Communist countries blacker and the water fouler. But unlike in the West, pollution only got worse and worse. "The absolute disaster that happened in Eastern Europe is what we would have had here in the West if we had not had our environmental movement."
This is a key reason why Garte believes the positive trends we have witnessed over the last several decades will continue. "We see a big increase in the amount of people living in democratic countries and democracy is good for public health."
Continued improvements can also be expected in the developed world, Garte argues, mainly because "the environmental wars that we had in the 1970s and early 1980s are over, and the environmentalists won."
"If you look at what's going on in business, of the top 100 companies in the country, 40 per cent put out sustainability reports last year.
"Being sustainable, being efficient and caring about how you use energy and materials saves money."
Of course it's easy to find examples of decidedly unenlightened behaviour.
But the basic concepts of environmentalism have spread so widely and shifted public attitudes so profoundly that even the toughest growth-above-all right-wingers have been forced to change with the times.
As Garte notes, Reagan-era Republicans sought to crush the Environmental Protection Agency and erase environmental regulations. By that standard, George W. Bush is practically a tree-hugger.
Increasingly, the dividing line on the environment is not between the left and the right, or between greens and industry.
The dividing line is between optimists and pessimists, and Garte knows which side he's on.
"There are solutions. We found solutions in the past and I know we can find them in the future."
dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008