On April 22, 1970, I, along with 20 million others that day, attended one of the first Earth Day celebrations (Read the history of Earth Day here, written by the founder, Senator Gaylord Nelson). The one I went to was held at Santa Monica City College (yes, Dustin Hoffman’s and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alma mater). In those days, most of us in the environmental movement worried about air pollution causing another ice age through global cooling.
I was a nineteen-year-old student attending SMCC, and my main concern was the over-harvesting of trees leading to the permanent loss of forests, especially the deforestation of the Amazon’s rain forest. Deforestation was my reason for entering into the field of forestry.
I transferred after a couple years to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. I majored in Forest Management. It turns out forests in the United States and other countries (primarily in the OECD) are doing just fine. The information is contained in public records such as:
Forest Resources of the United States, 2002: A Technical Document Supporting the USDA Forest Service 2005 Update of the RPA Assessment by W. Brad Smith, Patrick D. Miles, John S. Vissage, And Scott A. Pugh.
RPA Assessments report on the status and trends of the nation’s renewable resources on all forest and rangelands, as required by the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA) of 1974.
So what are the trends and status our nation’s renewable resources?
- About 33 percent of our nation’s 2.3 billion acres of land area is forest today as compared to about one-half in 1630. Some 300 million acres of forest land have been converted to other uses since 1630, predominantly agricultural uses in the East.
- Fifty-seven percent of all forest land is privately owned. Private forest land is dominant in the East. Public forest land is dominant in the West.
The graphic shows that for the last 130 years or so the forest area of the United States has remained nearly the same or grown. Only the Pacific Coast has diminished slightly.
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| Forest area of the United States, 1630-2002, “Forest Resources of the United States” |
Nullius in Verba 
Hi Norm – Happy Earth Day!
I remember when we were worried about ‘the next ice age’ too. How things have changed as the science has improved! The term ‘global warming’ is causing we environmentalists in the UK problems though. We just had the coldest winter in 18 years, so the tabloid press are all ‘global warming, my arse’ (apologies for Brit colloquialism). Of course there is the underlying warming trend behind everything else that is happening, but to get Joe Public on board it’s being debated whether we should just use the term ‘climate change’, or ‘climate chaos’, or something that lets people know ‘things are changing and it is our fault, guys’.
And while I’m debating about terms and names, even ‘Earth Day’ is slightly misleading. Whatever we do, the planet Earth will survive. It’s the human race who may not.
On that cheery note…
K
Hi K,
I’m not particular as to what it’s called. It’s the cause and the “what next” step that I’m not as sure of. There is a community of organizers and fund-raisers who make their living creating fear, “give now or the (insert endangered thing here) will be forever gone”; I don’t think creating fear is any way to make rational decisions. I believe we should make decisions based on science not on panic. We know that warm times and ice ages occurred before humans arrived on the earth; why? We know that CO2 increased during those warm times; why? And, according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics the “greenhouse effect” doesn’t exist. Toss in primitive computer models that aren’t much better than what Svante Arrhenius quantitatively described as the “greenhouse effect” in 1896.
You might like to check out Paul Sheehan’s opinion article at the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote an overview of the book Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer. His article is titled Beware the climate of conformity. Here’s the link: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/beware-the-climate-of-conformity-20090412-a3ya.html?page=-1 If you read Sheehan’s piece, you’ll see that Plimer says we are still in an ice age and are on the way out.
One last thought: In 2008, Nobel laureate economists who gathered for Copenhagen Consensus found that even large-scale carbon cuts would make a very poor investment – and prove an ineffective, very expensive way to rein in temperatures. Put me in the Bjorn Lomborg camp.