Market Environmentalism

Marginal Revolution blogger Alex Tabarrock, vacationing in Vermont, is excited to learn that Vermont's forestation rate over the past century or so went from 20% in 1870 to 85% today and is partly correct in noting that great strides in agricultural productivity are the cause of this environmental revival, particularly to petroleum for the lack of need for horses to get around and more food from less land, but with respect to Vermont and New Hampshire, the primary cause is actually the rise of synthetic materials in the shift away from wool as a primary clothing raw material.

The towns and cities of NH are littered with the vacant (or not) relics of the era of big wool and the mills needed to process it for market. When the mills moved south, the need for local wool died off, and when polyester, lycra, polartec and other synthetics came to dominate the market, there was little remaining need for states where there were more sheep than people.

In the Trenches

I have been engaged lately in the meme-wars, down and dirty in the trenches over at Wikipedia, documenting facts about gun control and gun rights, neo-luddism, etc. and hitting much resistance from an entrenched group of the opposition who are using the wiki as one more venue in the Fabians long term campaign of editing consensus reality by changing the definitions of the terms of debate. They seem to particularly be hostile to my detailing the neo-luddite movements players and their connections to the Club of Rome, which seems these days to be pimping the Peak Oil Myth now that it seems the US is still resisting the Greenhouse Effect Myth, both in support of their long term plan of socialist tranformation of the US economy.

While researching this, I ran across the blog of my friend Anders Sandberg, who quoted that oft maligned deep thought of Donald Rumsfeld about the difference between known unknowns and uknown uknowns as he pointed to this chart of what is known and uknown about the ecological risks of genetically engineered plants, which clearly lays out a research plan for making those uknowns known....

Adherents to The Precautionary Principle, of course would try to point to this as an excuse to never do anything, while we Proactionary Principle proponents look at the glass as half full...