Human Population and the Earth's Forests

Harry Pollard

[Reprinted from a Land-Theory, discussion, 15 December, 2008]

This is a Georgist answer to a pretty good 'over-population' enthusiast. This one concentrating of an earth bereft of resources. Our huge population is using everything up.

As you know, I don't subscribe to Malthus' theory, which was pretty potty, though seductive, (We can't do anything about anything. It's those proles breeding like rabbits that are the problem.)

This one started off with our 'disappearing forests'.

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I was writing about the US when I pointed out that until I stopped checking a decade or two ago, in every year since the mid-20's the Forestry wood count had risen. You mention Africa and South America as troubled spots for trees.

We must remember that in the 19th century Africa was a great plain on which millions of cattle thrived. Then rinderpest (I seem to recollect brought in by Italian cattle in the late 19th century) killed off practically all the cattle and Africa reverted to the jungle that now we consider 'African'. (The growth also led to the tsetse epidemic but then it never rains but it pours.)

So, do you measure the 'net loss' in Africa from before there was jungle, or since there was jungle?

Elsewhere in the world, it is usually a governmental problem.

Brazil is a typical example. The government gave tax breaks to corporations that cleared areas of the rain forest for cattle. So gentlemen farmers like Xerox and VW went to work. You probably know that rainforests exist above ground. Root structure is weak. The farmers went to work with bulldozers connected by a chain.

The machines would move across the forest with the chain between them pulling down the trees. The felled trees were then burned creating space for cattle. Some 20 or 30 years ago when I was writing about the rainforest, I noted that a single hardwood tree could sell for $10,000. Corporations apparently are ignorant of anything outside their immediate responsibilities. It has been estimated that some $250 million worth of hardwood was consumed by the fires.

The rainforest doesn’t contain hardwood forests. Rather the hardwood trees grow singly perhaps several hundred yards apart, so perhaps they weren't too obvious to the gentlemen farmers. Anyway, they were all burned in the rush to get government tax breaks.

The unused (but owned) land in the non-rainforest part of Brazil is estimated to be larger than the combined size of Britain, France, and Germany. My favorite example was an 84,000 acre "cattle ranch" that supported 200 cattle.

Such nonsense is multiplied across the world. We grow subsidized rice in the hot San Joaquin Valley with much of the water disappearing by evaporations - in the same area we practically give away the water to landholders so they use through the air sprinklers on hot summer days. Growing corn for fuel sounds like something from Monty Python but its government policy. Perhaps we should avert our eyes from the breadbasket of Southern Africa - Zimbabwe.

Perhaps we shouldn't look away from the Africans being killed, mutilated and raped by the millions.

I don't think that we are constricted by lack of global resources. I do think that stupidity will do for us all the nasty things you expect will be in store for us. Probably our only hope is to allow the free market efficiently to handle any problems for us. We would have to attack the major problem (absence of price mechanism control of land) but that's easy enough.

So don't worry overmuch about an excess of population. Worry about an excess of (mostly) government stupidity.