COLUMN: Quiet down, earth alarmists

From Mark Fiore's: "The Right Stuff," Fall '99 From Mark Fiore's: "The Right Stuff," Fall '99Environmental activists would have Penn students believe the world is coming to an end any day now. Thousands of college students from across the country apparently bought into that nonsense last month, flocking to campus for ECOnference 2000. The three-day environmental hoopla allowed the holier-than-thou activists to open fire on corporations wrongly accused of recklessly polluting the environment. "The world should not be this way," cried one of the activists to a roaring round of cheers. Indeed, for the most part, it is not this way. While environmentalists like to spew forth rhetoric damning corporations for their activities, they overlook evidence that the environment is better off today than at any point in at least the last half century -- largely due to the very corporations being condemned. At the same time, environmentalists ignore both the creative and commercial value of corporations. Nowhere in the claims that environmentalists advance will the following facts be found. · Major metropolitan areas comprise only 2 percent of the nation's land, according to the United States Chamber of Commerce. What's more, about 95 percent of the nation's land remains undeveloped, and development is occurring at an annual rate of an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent. · There is three times as much forested land in the U.S. today as there was in 1920. · The way environmentalists depict it, however, money-hungry capitalistic powerhouses are sucking up America's land so fast that the nation will soon become one big slab of concrete. One activist, Kevin Danaher, shared such views in a book he wrote and discussed on campus last year -- amusingly titled Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama. Some more statistics: · Between 1970 and 1995, total emissions of the six most common air pollutants decreased by 29 percent, despite a national population increase of 28 percent. · In roughly the same period, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, carbon monoxide auto emissions declined by two-thirds while vehicle miles traveled increased by more than 100 percent. And the water quality in more than 95 percent of the nation's rivers, lakes and streams has improved or remained stable since 1972. Environmentalists, of course, don't want the public to know such facts. After all, what would they then have to protest about? Sweatshops? Instead, activists hold pep rallies like October's ECOnference. And they plan protests like the "Dirty Jobs Boycott" introduced at October's festivities. Under the boycott, a half million students are expected to sign a pledge stating they won't work for certain companies deemed harmful to the environment -- companies like Ford Motor Co. Once again, the activists don't know what they're talking about. While some corporations still have room for improvement, many are making concerted efforts to minimize their effect on the environment. Ford, for example, has a comprehensive environmental policy in place. In line with that policy, the auto maker employs 250 researchers working on dozens of projects to determine and reduce Ford's environmental impact. That's only one of dozens of examples of improvement at Ford. Yet activists still insist on a boycott. Perhaps more damaging than a mere boycott is the threat environmental activists pose to creativity and commercialism. Protection of the environment must be balanced against economic innovation and progress. As environmentalists seek to limit the creative output of corporations, the very real fear exists that needed commodities will not be developed because of potential harms to the environment. Imagine if environmentalists were around at the turn of the century when Henry Ford was inventing his car -- Americans today would probably still be riding around in Flintstones cars.