vendit, you give an example of spinning the facts. I assume for your honor, that it was done inadvertantly, taking from a paper or news service without much thought.
I only mention because it is a never-ending illness of some anti-progressivist people, to claim that only liberals (or 'only the government', and so on) does spin the news. Although I am also anti-progressivist, I oppose that habit. Everybody will use facts that seem to corroborate his own views. Not the views of his opponents.
Now to the facts. Although it may well be true that the number of trees has grown, it is not an important fact. Important for the state of any woods is the mass of the living trees (and other green mass). Have you got an idea what a tree weighs just before the lumberjack uses his saw ?
Surely it weighs much more than ten times more than its' offspring after a year - or even after ten years.
The survival rate of trees under natural conditions is of course less than one in ten. So we can only hope that tree planters have methods (and interest enough) to guarantee a sufficient survival rate in their plantations to at least meet the weak criterion concerning the number of trees - when the trees have grown.
I do not assume the position that the human race is not allowed to change it's environment. It has been done all the time, and many of those spots that are taken to be 'natural' today are only the result of prior human economic activity.
I also think that market forces are the most efficient means of control for economic decisions. Actually the self-regulation is unbeatably effective.
However, we should not pretend that market self-regulation is a safe system. Like everywhere, there are risks to be taken; and sometimes markets reach critical situations, that can lead to catastrophic events. In some cases damages done by catastrophes are irreparable. Irreparable means not totally irreparable, but irreparable on the timescale accessible to us. If e.g. by bad agricultural management some valuable soil has left its' place to become part of a riverbank or ocean, it will not come back.
Although it is possible, and even most probable, that nature will reproduce that soil in the original place, this process can take a few thousand years. A better management is sometimes a matter of years only, so there is some kind of economical reason to choose good care from the beginning.
The assumption, that producers have an automatic economical reason to ensure sustainability on their ground is not true in all cases. It is true under the additional condition that it is much more difficult, i.e. expensive, to get new land, than to ensure sustainability. This was more or less true in the more traditional uses of land that we know from Europe and Northern America. However, whether this is true under different conditions, like tropic rainforests, or places with much cheaper or much more expensive labor, or places with much lower land prices, is not known a priori.
There may be situations in which an imminent danger of permanent loss doesn't immediately enter the economical calculation of the producer. In this case, it simply is not taken care of by the market system. Of course, if plantation owners had the choice of either paying a reasonable insurance rate against loss of fertility by mismanagement, and if this rate could be decreased by reasonable evidence of non-loss management, this would mean an instrument to make the risks enter the calculation. However, that is not reality, and would require additional governmental interference, that we oppose. So, as far I see, in general it will stay true that market regulation means taking risks.
Regards MNI. |
