“Vanderbilt forest management set the stage for the U.S. Forest Service and the way it manages timber. Whether that was good remains in doubt.”
It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.” [1] Peak Trees? Peak Forestry? The same was being said for petroleum and other resources.
George Vanderbilt (grandson of “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue. Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on forest land, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage about 125,000 acres around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest.…
Ed. Note: Jane Shaw Stroup blogs at two websites: Jane Takes On History and Liberty and Ecology Blog. The post below can be accessed here.
Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.
Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.
Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr.…
Ed. Note: This interview with Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Jane Shaw Stroup appeared earlier this week at the Liberty and Ecology website of the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research. Comments are welcomed, including new questions to clarify the role of nuclear power in a free economy.
Q1. What role should nuclear power have in the years ahead?
A. “Let the market decide” is the straightforward classical-liberal, free-market answer. This means government neutrality in terms of not subsidizing or penalizing one energy technology versus another to determine what, when, where.
The decision to build new capacity, or the decision to operate-versus-retire, should be based on stand-alone economics, without government favor or penalty.
Q2. Under this standard, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix as far as new capacity?…