Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment.

Recently, Stanley Fish, a prominent left-wing academician who believes that political correctness is good for you, and Dinesh D'Souza, a prominent right-wing analyst who believes academia has become a thought-police state, began doing little two-man shows, appearing jointly at college campuses to denounce each other with polite magniloquence. It might seem odd to schedule joint appearances with someone whose positions you claim to detest, but at least Fish and D'Souza are mutually civil, which is more than can be said for many other literary antagonists.

In Scarcity or Abundance?, the antagonists Norman Myers and Julian Simon join this vogue, this volume being the transcript of a joint appearance the two made at Columbia University in 1992. Myers, an English environmentalist and a leading doom-sayer, believes environmental affairs to be so unswervingly bleak that, among other things, "global warming will mean no more winters at all in Britain" because colder weather in the United Kingdom has already "been forever eliminated by human agency." Simon, an American economist and a leading cornucopian, believes the environment and a range of other issues are peachy keen, and his "central premise" is that "almost every economic and social change or trend points in a positive direction."

In this book Myers and Simon do a better job of being civil than of forming fully persuasive arguments for their positions. Scarcity or Abundance? does not do justice to either's work, and contains such eminently dispensable filler as transcripts of audience questions, one of which begins, "I've listened very carefully to both of you and in your arguments I think you make very different assumptions..."

Myers and Simon both have important things to say, but both often succumb to the temptation of trying to make their views all-encompassing by dismissing every point on the other side. Myers first gained the public eye with his 1979 book The Sinking Ark, which posits that species extinction is running rampant. He has since taken orthodox doomsayer positions on nearly every ecological issue, becoming something of a darling of the establishment left foundation set, in part because of his Oxford affiliation and his fashionable British accent.

Myers is correct in thinking that species extinction numbers are among the most damaging ecological impacts caused by people--perhaps the worst, given that, unlike pollution or ozone depletion, extinction is irreversible. The numbers he uses are, however, hard to swallow. Myers says that right now human action causes the loss of "at least 30,000 species every year," a numbing 82 extinctions per day. Since there are surely many species yet to enter any taxonomic catalogue, some extinctions may well have gone by unnoticed. But if there are really 30,000 extinctions per year, about 1.5 million species would have vanished in the postwar era. Instead only about 200 actual extinctions have been documented worldwide in this century. The United States has six percent of the world's land area, so based on the 1.5 million figure, one could roughly estimate 90,000 U.S. extinctions in the postwar era. The highest documented actual figure for the U.S. for that period, however, is 14, with an inferential case that perhaps 100 additional little-known species fell extinct.

That is amply high to demonstrate that species extinctions are a serious issue requiring new conservation initiatives. Yet even adjusting for unknown species, the observed extinction figure is astronomically lower than Myers' estimate. In these and other important areas, Myers exaggerates the case for gloom.

Simon is best known as a defender of human population growth, having argued in The Ultimate Resource and other works that more people not only represent no lasting problem for the planet, but that an ever-expanding human population is a blessing because the more people there are alive, the more minds are available to solve the world's problems. As Myers is right to call attention to species extinction and other problems that industrialists would rather not talk about, Simon calls attention to a fact that for some reason gives the left the willies: namely, that bringing life into the world is a good thing.

But like Myers, Simon often goes overboard in the interests of not facing the flaws in his own arguments. For instance, he offhandedly dismisses the prospect of global warming as a nonissue, as it jeopardizes his contention that "almost every" trend is positive. Global warming is unlikely to be the immediate hyper-threat that Myers and others suggest. But from the standpoint of simple atmospheric chemistry, it's hard to believe all the carbon dioxide people are putting into the air won't eventually do something.

And is an expanding human population happy news? Though in principle the Earth may someday sustain a vastly greater human population than at present, with material security for all and a high standard of ecological cleanliness, that's someday, not today. Anyone who has walked through the slums of Jakarta, Karachi, Kinshasa, Manila, and numerous other places where the current ecological and social systems cannot support those already alive will find it hard to believe that each new cry of birth in these places is a cause for celebration. Simon is right that thoughts are what human existence is all about, and the more people, the more thoughts. But for the moment the thoughts of hundreds of millions of new children to be born in impoverished nations will be confined to ignorance and deprivation. Many trends in environmental affairs are, as Simon asserts, positive. Human population growth isn't necessarily one of them. Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of the forthcoming book A Moment on the Earth.