Making sure there are enough young trees to produce oxygen for mankind is a laudable goal, but, if people believe that America is suffering from a tree shortage, then the environmental movement has misled them.

In agreement with this view is Dr. Patrick Moore -- a cofounder and former director of Greenpeace. He once led many of this organization’s campaigns, but left it in disgust when he felt that the whole movement had grown deceitful about this issue and others.

“The forest cover in the United States today,” he observes, “is the same as it was in 1920.”

Because Moore makes such admissions, the environmental movement now deplores him as a traitor, dubbing him an “anti-environmentalist.” Timber companies finance some of his work, and environmentalists say this discredits him.

Yet the U.S. Forest Service confirms Moore’s findings. In 1993, it reported that there were 23 million trees in the United States, which was more than any time since 1900. And now, in 2002, one-third of the entire country is forest.

Furthermore, Moore points out that Greenpeace’s deforestation statistics are inaccurate, because “Whenever a tree is cut down, they [Greenpeace members] subtract it, but they never add the ones that grow back.”

This makes sense, as market economics give timber companies an incentive to make sure that the tree supply doesn’t dwindle. If they cut down all the trees in the entire world, for example, the complete absence of their product (trees) would drive them bankrupt.

If, however, they regularly plant more trees for the future, then there will always be a healthy supply of their merchandise, which means more long-term income. Greed motivates conservation.

That’s why timber companies are switching to “tree farming.” They use certain patches of land to grow only the sorts of trees that they need. They even wish to use genetic engineering to improve the quality of wood.

Furthermore, there are more trees precisely because of the pesticides environmental groups have crusaded against for decades. Because these pesticides -- both in chemical form and genetically-engineered -- killed off so many crop-eating pests, farmers were able to increase their yields, which means that less forest area had to be converted into agricultural land.

And what about the Third World? Here, deforestation is a greater dilemma. Leftists often blame capitalism for this, accusing multinational corporations of going into forests to cut down trees and strip-mine.

In actuality, this is because most Third World countries are socialist or fascist. People have little incentive to work when they know that that government will penalize them from doing so, thus explaining the Third World’s slow progress in industrializing.

As a result, widespread starvation ensues. To grow more food, the governments burn down many trees in order to develop more agricultural land. That is the source of most deforestation.

Incidentally, this would be far less necessary if the Third World governments gave their people more economic freedom, letting individuals profit from industrialization, rather than hampering industrial progress by trying to centrally control it themselves.

After they achieve wealth like America’s and Japan’s, Third World residents will finally have the luxury to worry about these tall plants rather than starvation.

Yet, even in the Third World, deforestation isn’t as problematic as we have been led to believe. According to a 5/30/2000 edition of the New York Post, 87.5 percent of the Amazon rainforest remains intact.

The Post also added that we should be worrying more about young, newly-planted trees than old-growth and rainforests, as it is the young trees that breathe in more CO2, while rainforests, thanks to the decay of dead old trees, take in more oxygen.

Why aren’t radical environmentalists, the mainstream media, and the government giving us these facts straight?

If people believe there’s an environmental crisis, they will donate more money to environmental groups and support increased funding for environmental government agencies. That leads to the long-term survival of the Sierra Club and the EPA and greater job security for those they employ.

"Finally, as Patrick Moore observed, 'The environmental movement, to a large extent, has been hijacked by political activists who are using environmental rhetoric to cloak agendas, like class warfare and anti-corporatism, that have almost nothing to do with ecology.' "

That applies here and to many other environmental issues as well.

Since the 1970s, April 22 of every year has been celebrated as Earth Day. Nowadays, environmental activists meet on this date to give speeches about how they disapprove of capitalism and industrialization.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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