Environmental pressure groups regularly publish “studies,” blindly reported by the media, meant to convince people that the environment is falling apart. We are also told that as a consequence our health and quality of life are declining.
In June the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exposed all of this as nonsense. With no fanfare, the EPA published its “Draft Report on the Environment 2003.” This is a book of facts that paints an optimistic and comforting picture of environmental improvement.
The most notable data relate to air pollution. All air pollutants are declining and four of the six pollutants regulated by the EPA are at levels, throughout the country, that are well below the maximum allowed. The exceptions are ground-level ozone and particulates, where most of the country was, until recently, meeting federal standards.
What changed are the standards, not the amount of pollution. Ozone, in particular, has declined continuously for the last 20 years. But new and much more stringent standards, which have moved many areas from being in compliance to being out of compliance, are being put in place. However, even using the new standards, ozone concentrations have decreased by more than 11 percent in the last 10 years. It is also notable that acid rain, a byproduct of particulates, has declined; reductions of as much as 30 percent have been reported in certain areas of the Northeast and Midwest.
Probably the best indication of air-quality improvement is captured in one significant trend. Between 1988 and 2001 “based on EPA’s Air Quality Index…the percentage of days…on which air quality exceeded a healthy standard dropped from almost 10 percent to 3 percent…”
The EPA report covers a range of other environmental indicators. For example, in the area of wetland preservation, there has been a dramatic improvement. Between 1954 and 1974 there was a loss of nearly 500,000 acres of wetlands annually. Between 1986 and 1997 that fell to 58,000 acres out of a total of nearly 106 million acres of wetlands nationwide. This constitutes a loss of one-twentieth of 1 percent of the total annually.
In the chapter on land protection, the EPA reports that the continental United States has more than 2 billion acres of land. Only 98 million acres, or 4.3 percent of the total, are considered developed. The other 96 percent is designated as farmland, grazing land, wilderness, etc. This is a very different picture from that portrayed by the Sierra Club and other pressure groups that constantly tell us that the country is over-populated and being swallowed up by “urban sprawl.”
Most encouraging is the EPA’s report on health. Over the last century, life expectancy at birth increased from age 51 to 79.4 years for women and from age 48 to 73.9 years for men. Rates of heart disease, cancer, and most other chronic diseases are down and decreasing. While it is noted that death rates from cancer have increased, the EPA points out that this is due to the good news that we are living longer. Diseases such as polio and tuberculosis, which once killed Americans at younger ages, have either been eradicated or rendered curable. As cancer researcher and National Medal of Science winner Dr. Bruce Aims has shown, when the data is adjusted for age, cancer death rates are also declining.
The EPA report should be required reading at every newspaper, television, and radio newsroom in the country. It is a sober and refreshing antidote to the “scare” reports offered by special-interest groups, whose purpose is to shock people into closing their minds and opening their checkbooks.