Hudson History: A Selection from Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (2019)

“Few places better illustrate the complex relationship between population and environment than the lower Hudson River Valley . . . . To the west rise the Catskill Mountains, blue at sunset and blanketed by trees. Interstate 87 makes a black ribbon between the water and the mountains. In years past I spent some time driving back and forth on that road, and down long miles of its length the forest stretched out so far and so dark and so empty that I imagined I was looking at the America of 150 years past, before there were millions of people like me around. How wonderful, I thought, that so close to Manhattan is a huge piece of real estate that we never trashed.

I was wrong. If I had traveled through the Hudson Valley in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, I would have passed through an utterly different landscape. I would have been surrounded by hardscrabble farms and pastures ringed by stone walls. It might have looked picturesque—guidebook writers of the day thought so. But I wouldn’t have seen many trees, because almost every scrap of land that wasn’t vertical had been clear-cut or burned.

The forest was stripped to make way for agriculture and to supply New York’s army of charcoal burners (who needed lumber to make charcoal), tanners (who extracted tannin from bark), and salt makers (who used wood fuel to boil down seawater). Loggers played a role too: Albany, the northernmost deepwater port on the Hudson, was the biggest timber town in the nation and possibly the world. When the first Europeans came to New York, the rolling uplands were almost entirely covered by open forest; by the end of the nineteenth century less than a quarter of the state was wooded, and most of what was left had been picked through, or was inaccessible, or was being kept by farmers as private fuel reserves. During the epoch that I, swooping along the tarmac in my minivan, was nostalgically picturing as a paradise, newspaper editorials were warning that deforestation would drive the valley toward ecological disaster.

Since then the collapse of small farming on the East Coast has allowed millions of acres to return to nature. When New York State surveyed itself in 1875, the six counties that make up the lower Hudson Valley—Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, and Ulster—contained 573,003 acres of timberland, covering about 21 percent of their total area. A hundred years later trees covered almost 1.8 million acres, more than three times as much.

Back in 1875 these six counties had a collective population of 345,679. The U.S. Census says the figure for 2012 was 1.06 million. In other words, the number of people living there tripled in the same period that the local ecosystem climbed out of its sickbed and threw away its crutches. This wasn’t just some odd thing that happened in New York. As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere. Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.

‘People pollute,’ as Hugh Moore said. But more people ≠ more pollution. Eco-critics claim with some justification that the Hudson Valley recuperated because farmers abandoned it in order to wipe out the native grasslands of the Great Plains. But they can’t explain away all the other good news. Seals and dolphins return to the Thames. White-tailed deer, almost extinct in 1900, plague New England gardens. Air quality in formerly polluted Japan improves remarkably. Wild turkeys have a greater range than they did when they were first seen by European colonists. If all this occurred during the population boom, why the belief, voiced by Vogt, Osborn, Leopold, and so many who followed them, that overpopulation will lead to an eco-catastrophe? . . .

None of this is to deny that environmental problems are real. Overfishing, deforestation, soil degradation, contaminated groundwater, declining populations of mammals and birds, and, most alarming, the possibility of very rapid climate change—all of these are important. But the contribution of population growth to them is indirect, and the relationship to economic growth is equivocal. Focusing on them as a root cause, as Vogt did, is a distraction. It was a waste of two decades, and doubly unfortunate because the fight over population sometimes shrouded the more important part of Vogt’s message, the part about limits. He denounced social scientists as fools, but he should have listened to them.”—Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World (2019)