John Korfmach writes:
> We may not be burning rainforests in the US these days, but--how much
> of our own rainforests (and tallgrass prairies, white-pine forests,
> baldcypress swamps, freshwater marshes, etc. etc.) have we eliminated
> in the past in order to support our society's 'footprint'? And how much
> more of this kind of activity elsewhere does our footprint continue to
> require? I frankly hope Wirt's right, that urbanization will lead to
> reduced population pressure and reduced environmental impact...but I
> don't see things moving that way at present.
Let me first apologize for being tardy in replying to John's comments, but
let me say again that I am more than modestly encouraged by the general trends
that the developed nations of the world, and most especially the United States,
are undergoing in minimizing their environmental footprints.
No one planned these minimizations. They are simply the results of
increasingly efficient free-market economies and the general mores associated
with
wealthy populations, but happily they are consistent with a concomitantly
increasingly more wealthy, healthy, well-educated and technological population.
For a
large number of reasons, these trends all seem to be on the side of the angels
in that they are both highly moral and ethical.
Two general trends for the developed world have become self-evident in the
last half-century:
o where economic and educational opportunities are freely afforded young
women, fecundity, and thus total population numbers, fall, often dramatically.
o wealthy populations are significantly more efficient at exploiting
their natural resources than are poor ones, and thus have a much reduced per
capita impact on the environment.
To understand these trends, please look first at this short paper by Thomas
Rowley, a social scientist formerly with the USDA:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/rdp/rdp298/rdp298b.pdf
As you can see in his maps, the Great Plains of the US is depopulating. The
reason is simple enough. The Plains have always tied their economic fortunes to
agriculture, but as farming has become increasingly more efficient, family
farms are increasingly faster disappearing from the region.
This self-evident depopulation trend led Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987 to
propose the idea of the "Buffalo Commons":
http://www.gprc.org/Buffalo_Commons.html
...a notion where broad swath several hundred miles wide, running from Texas
to Canada, would be returned to pre-European prairie. Paraphrasing their web
page, the Popper's research showed that hundreds of counties in the American
West still have less than a sparse 6 persons per square mile -- the density
standard Frederick Jackson Turner used to declare the American Frontier closed
in
1893. Many now have less than 2 persons per square mile.
The frontier never came close to disappearing, and in fact has expanded in
the Plains in recent years. The 1980 Census showed 388 frontier counties west
of
the Mississippi. The 1990 Census shows 397 counties in frontier status, and
the 2000 Census showed 402. Most of this frontier expansion is in the Great
Plains. Kansas actually has more land in frontier status than it did in 1890,
even though the total population of the United States has more than quadrupled
in
that century.
The population peak in the Great Plains occurred in the 1920's, but only
because of economic subsidies in the form of Railroad Land Grants and
agricultural
commodity programs. But it was also an era marked by extremely inefficient
and exploitative agricultral processes -- essentially the US's equivalent of a
slash-and-burn agriculture -- in which the thin soil was depleted within a
generation or so and resulted in the Dust Bowl, a process which by itself
helped
spur the US and the rest of the world into economic depression.
For the same basic economic reasons that the farmland of the Eastern Seaboard
has now reverted to successional forest, the continued depopulation of the
Great Plains is similarly inevitable. Because of this inevitablity, I have
always thought that the Poppers' "Buffalo Commons" idea has a great deal of
validity. Even more recently (August of last year), Josh Dolan et al. proposed
an
even more radical idea in the journal Nature: that of repopulating the Great
Plains with the Pleistocene megafauna (mammoth, lion, cheetah, camel, etc. or
their closest similars) that disappeared with the first arrival of humans into
North America 13,000 years ago:
http://rewilding.org/pdf/Pleistocene-Re-wildingNorthAmerica1.pdf
The population of the United States, along with the rest of the world, will
begin to fall sometime during the last half of this century. The US's
population will halve and halve again and will once again be equal to that of
the US in
1900, but it will be a highly concentrated technological population this
time. It would be extraordinary legacy if it were possible for us to leave the
center of North America in a state somewhat similar to its pre-human occupation.
Wirt Atmar
