Mr. Rehmke is director of educational programs at the Free Enterprise Institute in Houston.

In Facts, Not Fear: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment, Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw cover a wide spectrum of environmental issues and contrast the research of leading scientists and economists with assertions found in textbooks and environmental books for children.

This task is especially challenging because the parents who are the target audience hold their own environmental beliefs. Since reporting on environmental issues is often tilted, it is difficult to provide a balanced overview without sounding tilted the other way. People—and particularly parents—are naturally wary of books that seem extreme.

So as I read Facts, Not Fear, I tried to read not only for my own information about environmental issues and textbook teachings, but also with friends and relatives in mind who have children in school. Did an argument seem oversimplified? A conclusion overstated? Was an environmentalist’s position presented fairly? My conclusion is that Facts, Not Fear does a good job of mainstreaming its message. It succeeds in explaining environmental issues in straightforward and uncomplicated language. Sections on population, natural resources, rain forests, and wildlife all begin with quotations from school textbooks and then calmly compare gloomy textbook perspectives on these topics with the research of leading scholars. Facts, Not Fear demonstrates convincingly that school textbooks are misinforming young people about environmental issues.

The authors maintain an even and careful tone while pointing out the disparity between what textbooks try to teach children, and what scientific and economic research suggests should be taught. In the beginning of the book, the established experts that have reviewed each of the chapters on environmental topics are listed along with their academic affiliations. Leading economists reviewed sections on population, natural resources, and water, and a variety of scientists reviewed sections on forests, wildlife, greenhouse warming, the ozone layer, acid rain, and pesticides. Detailed notes and references for each chapter make it easy for skeptical readers to check out key sources themselves.

The chapter on natural resources makes clear that much misinformation is a consequence of textbook authors not understanding economics. You may face mineral shortages in your lifetime writes the author of one textbook. At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminum will be used up within your lifetime, says another. Well, yes, lots of things might happen in a student’s lifetime. An asteroid might hit the earth, aliens might invade, or the moon might fall out of the sky. But future resource shortages are far more likely to be the consequence of government price controls than any future inability to locate, extract, and deliver resources to consumers.

These fears of a coming resource shortage come from comparing proven world resource reserves with annual world consumption rates. This is misleading. As Sanera and Shaw explain, proven reserves are the reserves of a mineral that companies currently know about, and thus they depend on how much effort and technology companies have so far invested in looking. This, in turn, depends on the expected price of a resource. If prices begin to rise or if new technologies allow companies to search less expensively for reserves, then more reserves are likely to be discovered—and proven reserves increase.

In addition, it is useful to realize that today’s natural resources are yesterday’s rocks and rubble. Until entrepreneurs and engineers discovered how to make use of the stuff of the world, peat, bogs, coal deposits, oil, natural gas, and all manner of ores were of little use to mankind. Oil, the authors point out, was a liability to farmers, lowering the value of their land and harming crops and pasture until the technology was developed in 1859 to distill it. Entrepreneurs and inventors search to make today’s sand and rubble into tomorrow’s valuable natural resources. Textbook statements that we are running low on key minerals are wrong or at least misleading, and the implication that resource shortages might cripple the economic future of our children is indefensible.

Sanera and Shaw detail the fascinating U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) figures of ultimate reserves—the amount of recoverable resources estimated to be in the top-half mile of the Earth’s crust and the total amounts of particular minerals thought to be in the entire Earth’s crust. These are big numbers and show how absurd textbook predictions of shortages are. Consider the aluminum that many textbook authors say may run out. Instead of the 23 years that textbooks come up with by dividing known reserves by annual consumption, the USGS estimates, by dividing ultimate recoverable resources by annual consumption, that aluminum will last for the next 68 thousand years!

Future technologies will increase even this number by searching deeper in the Earth’s crust for minerals. How much total aluminum is there in the Earth’s crust? According to the USGS, enough for 38.5 billion years! Perhaps pessimists will still complain, But what will we do then? But for most people a few thousand years is enough of a cushion, and is a far cry from the 23-year deadline textbooks give children for aluminum (and 45 years for copper, 21 years for zinc, and so on).

In chapter after chapter, Sanera and Shaw steadily cut through textbook misstatements and misinformation. In addition to replacing fears with facts about the environment, the authors suggest at the end of each chapter exercises and activities that parents might use to engage their children in thinking about this more realistic and upbeat view of the future.

Perhaps the first few chapters will be hardest for skeptical readers. The authors begin the book with their critique of the way environmental ideas are taught in schools and lay out the basics of free-market environmentalism. Perspectives and conclusions are presented without having room to include the full analysis presented later in the book (readers are many times referred to later chapters). The alternative would have been to just launch into the chapters on specific environmental issues. Perhaps in recommending Facts, Not Fear to someone skeptical of market-oriented ideas it would be best to point them first to chapters on particular environmental issues.

This is a book worth buying for ourselves, and worth buying to share with friends and relatives who have children in school. I know of no better step-by-step economic and scientific critique of the standard doom and gloom environmental world view. In countering environmental beliefs found in textbooks and taught to children, Sanera and Shaw address a disturbing consequence of the environmental movement—the filling of young minds with a deep and pervasive pessimism about their own future.

Greek art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and politics clearly mark the beginning of Western civilization. But the Greek contribution to the Western world runs far deeper than its intellectual and artistic accomplishments, its stunning architecture, and its masterful works of philosophy and literature. Greek customs and institutions provided protection to private property unique in the ancient world, and by instilling a strong sense of equality before the law, laid the foundations for Western democracy and the rule of law.

I had long assumed the main Greek contributions to Western civilization were the great philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. But taking an art history course on ancient Greece stimulated my curiosity about its economics and politics, and since then I have worked my way through a number of thoughtful books on the Greek world. I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but I have noticed that many classical experts don’t show much appreciation for markets or the role of property rights in economic and cultural progress. Yet here the contributions were also enormous.

Central to the rapid progress of Greek civilization was its very lack of a political center. No great king ruled the Greeks. Instead, dozens and later hundreds of independent poleis, or city-states, developed in concert but with full political independence. They flourished, both in Greece and in its colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from 800 to 300 B.C.

Each city-state became a testing ground for small innovations in laws, economic policies, and political organization. Greeks shared a common heritage, but institutions, customs, and circumstances in each polis varied significantly, with totalitarian Sparta and democratic Athens as extremes. City-states whose laws and customs encouraged innovation and wealth creation passed on news of these practices through trade, and exported their laws and institutions by establishing colonies (which competed with the colonies of other Greek cities). Travel and intermingling at the Olympic Games and other athletic and religious festivals cross-pollinated the Greek world, communicating political ideas, economic policies, and business practices between citizens of independent Greek cities.

Cities with relatively high taxes and duties or other barriers to commerce discouraged agricultural and commercial progress and therefore tended to stagnate or decline. The city of Corinth, for example, became the early commercial leader of the Greek world by developing its harbor and port facilities to take advantage of its prime location. By the early fifth century B.C., however, Athens had supplanted Corinth as the commercial center of the Greek world. When its policies made it less competitive with Athens, Corinth, which had no political power over other Greek cities, was unable to hold onto its commercial power.

Wars among the early Greeks (before the Persian and Peloponnesian wars) were mostly border disputes between cities, and well-armed farmers mobilized for brief pitched battles. Early Greek cities supported no standing armies, battle strategies were minimal, and casualties in these conflicts were usually light. The citizen infantries or hoplites were the key defensive forces for both city and countryside.

The freedom of Greek citizens was based on their membership in a society of equals, unlike hierarchical oriental despotisms where all served their superiors and a king. Freedom meant not that the Greek citizen necessarily enjoyed self-government, but that however his polity was governed it respected his rights. State affairs were public affairs, not the private concern of a despot.^[1] Of course, not all Greeks were Greek citizens; women and slaves had no political rights and neither, in the beginning, did immigrants and other classes of noncitizens who lived and worked in Greek cities. Still, this was wider representation in civic affairs than existed in other ancient civilizations.

It has often been said, writes F. A. Hayek, that the ancients did not know liberty in the sense of individual liberty. This is true of many places and periods even in ancient Greece, but certainly not of Athens at the time of its greatness . . . ; it may be true of the degenerate democracy of Plato’s time, but surely not of those Athenians to whom Pericles said that ‘the freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life [where], far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes.’^[2] According to Hayek, the Athenian view that citizens should have freedom to live as they pleased influenced the development much later of the rule of law in England.

Protecting Family Property

The powers of the early polis were limited by the same Greek tradition that served to protect private property: a deep respect—even worship—of the family. Unlike most states founded with the conquest of one people over another, the Greek polis had its origin in pacts, probably for defensive reasons, between neighboring clans and tribes. Each clan or tribe had its own traditions of worship, and each family had a sacred enclosure protecting its sacred hearth and flame. Families governed their own affairs. Even the marking of property boundaries was a religious ceremony. Thus the men of the early ages . . . arrived . . . by virtue of their belief, at the conception of the right of property; this right from which all civilization springs, since by it man improves the soil, and becomes improved himself.^[3]

Though this religion made it difficult to transfer property between families, it provided powerful barriers to the expansion of government. Every transfer of property needed to be authorized by religion. If a man could not, or could only with difficulty, dispose of land, for a still stronger reason he could not be deprived of it against his will. The appropriation of land for public utility was unknown among the ancients. Confiscation was resorted to only in case of condemnation to exile.^[4] Fustel de Coulanges also notes that this strict protection of property rights lasted until the later democratic age of Greek cities.

This higher-law foundation of Greek civilization precluded for centuries active law making by tyrants or aristocracies. Solon, Lycurgus, Minos, Numa, might have reduced the laws of their cities to writing, but they could not have made them. If we understand by legislator a man who creates a code by the power of his genius, and who imposes it upon other men, this legislator never existed among the ancients. Nor did ancient law originate with the votes of the people. The idea that a certain number of votes might make a law did not appear in the cities until very late, and only after two revolutions had transformed them. Up to that time laws had appeared to man as something ancient, immutable, and venerable.^[5] Aristotle echoes this tradition in the Politics when he says that it is more proper that the law should govern than any of the citizens and that those appointed to power should be but guardians and servants of the law. Aristotle condemns governments where everything is determined by majority vote and not by law for in such cases the people govern and not the law.^[6]

Sophocles’ play Antigone turns on the existence of this higher law, which even the king cannot or should not ignore. Antigone, disobeying the direct orders of Creon, the king, buries her brother according to the sacred rituals, and tells the king, Nor did I think your orders were so strong that you, a mortal man, could over-run the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws. Not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live, and no one knows their origin in time. So not through fear of any man’s proud spirit would I be likely to neglect these laws. . . .

Expanding Commerce

The Greeks traded with and drew heavily from civilizations around them, adapting an alphabet from Phoenician traders, for example, and early sculptural styles and skills from Egyptian craftsmen. So far as we know, F. A. Hayek wrote, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person’s right to dispose over a recognised private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relations among different communities. Such a network worked independently of the views and desires of local chiefs, for the movements of naval traders could hardly be centrally directed in those days.^[7]

But the Greeks were far more dynamic than their ancient neighbors. The Greeks benefited both from a sense of the good life that emphasized the pursuit of individual excellence (arete) and from an entrepreneurial vigor given free rein by political and economic decentralization. Over time and in response to increasing population and changing views, the governments of Greek cities shifted from their ancient clan-based traditions. A series of revolutions swept through the cities, each expanding the protections of Greek law and limiting the power of aristocratic families.

Solon, a successful merchant and accomplished poet, revised Athenian laws in 594 B.C. to grant fuller property rights to a wider range of Greeks. Solon refused to confiscate and redistribute land, but his reforms canceled or reduced debts for small farmers and allowed them to own property—freeing them of their historical clientship to aristocratic families. In addition, Solon encouraged local industry by offering citizenship to craftsmen willing to immigrate to Athens, and encouraged the production and export of olive oil (in part by banning the export of any agricultural products except olive oil). Solon’s reforms applied the same law to all citizens and eliminated the privileges of the aristocratic Eupatrids, the network of aristocratic families who had long held political power in Athens.

Across the Greek world, the aristocrats by birth lost their control of public affairs, and were replaced by a new class of citizens who by virtue of independent wealth took over civic responsibilities, including defense. Greek cities prospered during this period. Fustel de Coulanges points out that the aristocracy of wealth gave a higher status to labor: This new government gave the most political importance to the most laborious, the most active, or the most skillful man; it was, therefore, favorable to industry and commerce. It was also favorable to intellectual progress; for the acquisition of this wealth, which was gained or lost, ordinarily, according to each one’s merit, made instruction the first need, and intelligence the most powerful spring of human affairs.^[8]

The Importance of the Farm

Indeed, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in his recent book The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, the disciplined life and hard labor on the thousands of small, independent farms developed Greek character, generated Greek wealth, and defended Greek city-states. Our image of the success of ancient Greece, he argues, is too much shaped by the surviving writings of authors who were members of a later urban elite.

Family-owned and -operated farms provided both the wealth and the hoplite defense for early ancient Greek cities. Their achievement, argues Hanson, was the precursor in the West of private ownership, free economic activity, constitutional government, social notions of equality, decisive battle, and civilian control over every facet of the military—practices that affect every one of us right now.^[9]

These independent farmers carved their farms out of the wilderness around cities and developed apart from the estates long operated by the great aristocratic families. The independent farmers slowly and steadily expanded their holdings through decades of experimentation with crops and improvement of farmlands. Rugged hills and the thin-soiled uneven lands between were gradually brought into cultivation. Crops included cereals, fruit trees, olives, and vines, as well as livestock. Secure property rights were essential for encouraging the long-term investments made by farming families. The year-round cycle of planting, pruning, and harvests both distributed the workload through the year and allowed time for Greek citizen-farmers to participate in the affairs of the polis.

The Influence of Homer and Hesiod

The Greeks had no Bible to organize their worship and educate their young. The books that were central to Greek life and education were the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, and Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony. The works of Homer and Hesiod appear at the very beginning of widespread Greek literacy, around 750 B.C. These books, learned in childhood and often memorized, deeply influenced the character and culture of all Greeks. Central to Works and Days is the idea of private farms owned by individual farmers and a steady disdain for the large estates of the bribe-swallowing barons. At all times in the poem, notes Hanson, private ownership and thus the theoretical ability of the farm to expand or contract are assumed.^[10]

In Works and Days Hesiod exhorts the farmer to labor for profit, yet at the same time to see his farm as more than a mere livelihood. Crucial to that dual idea is work: Hesiod is obsessed with hard labor, distinguishing his farmers from peasants, who hope for little more than general subsistence.^[11] Competition between farmers motivates them to work hard and improve their farms: In a phrase almost reminiscent of Adam Smith, Hesiod sings that the power of competition can ‘stir up even the lazy to work, for a man wants work once he sees his neighbor, a rich man, eager to plough, to plant and to put his house in good order.’^[12] Hard work leads to profit and the accumulation of surplus, Hesiod says: If there is desire for wealth in your heart, then do the following: Work with work on top of work.^[13]

The independence of Greek farmers seems to have carried over into the growing manufacturing sectors of Greek cities, for example, the pottery industry in Athens. Athenian potters and painters grew wealthy from their successful workshops, and Athenian pottery was highly prized and often copied around the Greek world.

The success of Western civilization owes much to the unique world-view and institutions passed on to the ancient world and later to the modern world by the Greeks. The sanctity of private property and contract shared by most Greek city-states and by Rome influenced later writers and philosophers who influenced America’s founding fathers. Today, when the accomplishments of Western civilization and the institution of private property are under sustained attack in our colleges and universities, the study of ancient Greece and of the classics is in steep decline. What interest there is concentrates on the status of women in ancient Greece or turns to the ancient world for support of various left-wing ideological causes.

Looking on the bright side, however, since most of us were little exposed to ancient Greece in high school or college, we are less likely to be disposed against it. So as adults we have the whole stunning landscape of the ancient world to discover on our own. We can each chart our own course through this stretch of centuries where people first turned the powers of reason upon the natural world, and first turned to the power of the marketplace to launch the Western world on its unique course.

Recommended readings beyond those cited above are: John Boardman, et al., eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford University Press, 1991); William I. Davisson and James E. Harper, European Economic History: The Ancient World (Irvington Publishers, 1972); Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature (Dover Publications, 1982); and Lord Acton’s essay The History of Freedom in Antiquity, in Essays in the History of Liberty (LibertyClassics, 1985).

1.   H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 9.

2.   F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 164.

3.   Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [originally published in 1864]), p. 59.

4.   Fustel de Coulanges, p. 63.

5.   Fustel de Coulanges, p. 180.

6.   Cited in Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 165.

7.   F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 29.

8.   Fustel de Coulanges, p. 316.

9.   Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 9.

10.   Hanson, p. 98.

11.   Hanson, p. 98.

12.   Hanson, p. 99.

13.   Cited in Hanson, p. 100.

Time began its January 2, 1989, “Planet of the Year” issue with a two-page photo of a burning Brazilian forest, and declared: “Man is recklessly wiping out life on earth.” A February 23, 1989, Rolling Stone article, “The Scorched Earth,” shows cattle in the state of Rondonia in western Brazil nibbling at still-smoldering shrubs.

Government-sponsored television advertisements, says Rolling Stone, encourage impoverished Brazilians “to seek their fortune in the farming, ranching, mining, lumber and hydroelectric projects under way in Rondonia.” The article explains that the 900-mile Highway BR-364, financed by the World Bank, cheaply transports settlers to Rondonia from urban areas.

Nearby, in the western state of Acre, residents depend on the Brazilian government for 85 percent of their income. But these subsidies are only the latest in a long series of uneconomic policies subsidizing rain-forest development.

The Brazilian military has insisted that building roads and settling the Amazon basin is necessary for national security. “The Amazon is ours,” declared Brazilian President José Sarney, in an April 6th speech announcing a new internationally financed program he said would “permit the rational siting of economic activities” in the Amazon basin.

The speech was reported to be strongly nationalistic, and many Brazilian officials see pressure to limit Amazon development as part of a “campaign for the internationalization of the Amazon.” General Leonidas Pires Goncalves, Brazil’s Army Minister, recently complained of “that tiresome grinding on and on” about forest destruction. Meanwhile, Fernando Cesar Mesquita, head of the new Brazilian environmental agency, be lieves “There is a true danger of foreign occupation of the Amazon.”

Citing “national security” to justify uneconomic programs is a popular ploy for special interest groups around the world and is certainly not unique to Brazil.

Subsidizing Rain Forest Destruction in South America

The cattle-ranching and road-building projects that first drew Brazilians into the Amazon were heavily subsidized with funds from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. By 1983, the Brazilian government had spent $2.5 billion to subsidize deforestation for large- scale cattle ranching that, according to the World Resources Institute, “would not he economically viable in the absence of the subsidies.”

After decades of subsidizing cattle ranching in the Amazon, the Brazilian government apparently decided it needed to subsidize farming communities to balance the concentrated wealth of cattle ranchers. The Polonoroesta plan, a project in northern Brazil funded by the International Monetary Fund, foreign lenders, and the government, was to develop 100,000 square miles of tropical forest for small farmers. Seventeen percent of the land has been deforested so far.

Yet the program, in addition to being environmentally destructive, has apparently led to an even greater concentration of land in the hands of ranchers. After a section of forest is burned, nutrients left in the ashes support only a couple years of crops. With the nutrients exhausted, the soil will support only grasses—making the land suitable for raising cattle.

Local cattle ranchers then purchase the land cheaply, and settlers move on to raze new acreage. The burning program continues to redistribute income from taxpayers (both domestic and foreign) in order to provide subsidized labor and !and for cattle interests.

In “How Brazil Subsidises the Destruction of the Amazon,” The Economist (March 18, 1989) cites a new World Bank study outlining a variety of misguided policies: “Brazil’s laws and tax system have made deforestation and ranching in the Amazon artificially profitable.” High inflation encourages people to invest in land, since money savings are wiped out. Agriculture is exempted from taxation, so legitimate farmers are bought out by those looking for tax havens, and farmers then move deeper into the forests to clear new land.

Land taxes on unimproved land are reduced 90 percent when cleared for crops or pasture, thus punishing private preservationists. Tax credits subsidize money-losing development schemes, generally benefiting rich cattle ranchers at the expense of poorer Brazilian taxpayers. Finally, government regulations give “squatters’ rights” to those who wander onto private land and begin using it “more effectively,” i.e., clearing the forests and planting crops. However, this last policy seems to work both ways: The New York Times recently reported that the squatters’ rights policy has allowed rubber-tappers in some areas to delay landowners’ plans to clear forests.

The Brazilian government, however, isn’t alone in subsidizing forest destruction. A program operated in the U.S. by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) transforms forests in the Southwest into grazing land for leasing—at below-market rates—to cattle ranchers.

“Engines of the Public Good”

Known as “chaining,” this U.S. Forest Service practice destroys pinon and juniper forests on Federal lands in the American Southwest. Giant tractors, pulling either end of a 600-foot, 60,000-pound anchor chain, rumble across the land ripping out shrubs and trees—“cleansing” the land for grasses and, later, cattle grazing. Economist Terry Anderson notes: “Between 1960 and 1972, the BLM chained nearly 300,000 acres in Nevada and Utah, and the Forest Service, more than 80,000 acres. More than 3,000,000 acres, including land in Arizona and New Mexico, have fallen to this destructive and expensive practice."^[1]

Brazilian burning reduces the diversity of species as tropical forests are cleared and replanted with single crops. The BLM’s chaining program does much the same thing. Forest Service reports, notes Ronald M. Lanner, show that chained areas contain “about 50 species of fish, 66 reptiles and amphibians, 75 mammals, and 140 birds in and around the pinon-juniper woodlands.” The “twenty-two common shrub species, fourteen grasses, and seventeen forbs [herbs other than grasses]” are replaced by the Forest Service with a single species of Asian crested wheat-grass.^[2]

Calling chaining a “plant control program,” the Forest Service claims it is “rehabilitating” grasslands. The Forest Service, unable to lease scattered pinon-juniper woodlands for logging, has labeled them as “uncommercial forests.” Much like burning in the Amazon, chaining is a process of converting uncommercial forests into commercial rangelands. Then, again as in the Amazon, these converted rangelands subsidize local cattle operations.

Lanner explores the Forest Service logic that leads to chaining: “active, on-the-ground management passed from frustrated timber-oriented foresters to range managers whose professional objective is the production of red meat. Trees are more of a hindrance than a resource to range managers, and chaining is an attractive method of removing them.” The Forest Service and the BLM so vigorously and imaginatively defend the benefits of their “plant control program” that Lanner refers to the chain-pulling D-8 class tractors as “veritable Engines of the Public Good."^[3]

From the jungles of Brazil to the southwestern U.S., special interest groups fuel forest destruction. Both projects would be unprofitable without governments’ shifting development costs to taxpayers.

Subsidizing Rain Forest Destruction in North America

The same is true in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, one of the world’s last temperate zone rain forests. The Forest Service subsidizes logging operations in the Tongass rain forest, which lose 98 cents for every taxpayer dollar spent. Logging jobs bolster the local economy, but cost U.S. taxpayers an average of $36,000 for each job created. The benefits are concentrated, creating Forest Service and logging company jobs (and profits) in the area, while the costs are spread out among U.S. taxpayers.

In the Tongass National Forest, and in other U.S. forests, government-built roads subsidize logging, just as Brazilian government roads subsidize logging and burning in the Amazon. The U.S. Forest Service has built 342,000 miles of roads in the national forests.

According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis: “These roads, primarily designed to facilitate logging, extend into the ecologically fragile backcountry of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, where they are causing massive soil erosion, damaging trout and salmon fisheries and causing other environmental harm. Because the costs of these logging activities far exceed any commercial benefit from the timber acquired, this environmental destruction would never have occurred in the absence of government subsidies.”^[4]

Road building does create jobs, though, and increases Forest Service budgets. The programs are driven by the logic of special interests—the benefits are concentrated, while the costs are spread out.

Tongass logging, Southwest chaining, and Amazon burning are all uneconomical projects that probably never would have been started without subsidies. Either the land would have been left alone, or other less destructive practices would have been developed.

Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, for example, have apparently learned how to cultivate the rain forest in profitable and environmentally sound ways. The Economist (February 11, 1989) cites a Peruvian study showing “the value of the products of a natural forest exploited sustainably for its fruit, rubber and timber, exceeded threefold the value of beef that the land would produce as pasture.”

Saving the Wilderness by Freeing the Cities

Many environmentalists, possibly influenced by Malthusian arguments, believe that overpopulation and economic growth alone force settlers into the Amazon rain forests, and into other tropical rain forests around the world. But if Brazil had an open economy, with sound money, free markets, and free trade, the opposite would likely happen: people would be drawn from the countryside into the cities, to take new jobs and share better living standards.

Cities can absorb an astonishing number of people, and when unshackled can transform low-cost labor into rapidly increasing prosperity. Singapore and Hong Kong are two recent examples of thriving cities creating wealth for their once-impoverished workers.

The mass migration of rural workers to urban areas has continued since the Industrial Revolution. People take advantage of the better jobs in and around thriving cities, leaving behind the agrarian life in isolated villages. Most Latin American economies, however, are neither free of inflation nor thriving.

Hampered by protectionism, taxes, regulations, and money-losing state-owned companies, Latin American cities have not been able to create the new jobs and prosperity needed to employ and enrich swelling urban populations. Brazilian politicians, instead of deregulating theireconomies, have dreamt up schemes to relieve urban pressure by shuttling the poor out to exploit the “hidden riches” of the Amazon.

Protection Through Ownership

Though eliminating government subsidies would make the current destruction of the Amazon rain forest (and Alaskans Tongass rain forest) unprofitable, private commercial development of the rain forests might someday be profitable.

If people want to stop future commercial rain-forest development (rather than just stopping subsidies for current unprofitable development), they should be willing to translate that desire into action. The Nature Conservancy did just that in Costa Rica recently with a $5.6 million debt swap that will finance nine local conservation projects, protecting some of Costa Rica’s rain forest from development. Another debt/nature swap in Bolivia encourages ecologically sound development (rather than just setting aside virgin forests, which does little to enhance the local economy).

If Americans want more of Latin America’s 1.6 billion forest acres set aside, they should consider buying the land, or purchasing long-term leases. In the same way, if Brazilians want to protect one of the world’s last temperate zone rain forests from destructive logging, or protect pinon-juniper forests in the Southwest, they too should have the right to purchase or lease the land.

Unfortunately, as it now stands, the Brazilian government is no more likely to let Americans purchase and protect land in the Amazon’s tropical rain forest, than is the U.S. government to let Brazilians purchase and protect land in Alaska’s temperate rain forest.

1. Terry Anderson, “The Market Alternative for Land and Wildlife,” in Doug Bandow, editor, Protecting the Environment A Free Market Strategy (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1986), p. 41.
2. Ronald M, Lanner, “Chained to the Bottom.” in John Baden and Richard L. Stroup, editors, Bureaucracy vs. Environment The Environmental Costs of Bureaucratic Governance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 163.
3. Ibid., pp. 159,154.
4. John Baden, “Destroying the Environment: Government Mismanagement of our Natural Resources,” National Center for Policy Analysis, Policy Report g124, October 1986.

If we have any duties to the poor of the world and to the poor here in America, surely they include prying open the doors of opportunity, and restoring the free and open economy we inherited from our parents, and which should be the birthright of our children.