We interviewed Jeremy Rifkin at a science teacher’s convention back in the 1990s. Rifkin, a leading proponent of green lifestyles, is a spellbinding speaker. He claims to be an important consultant to many European countries. And indeed many have adopted some of his recommendations. One of the most important is his advice to ban genetically modified seeds. He explained the green agenda this way:

“We have to develop a green life style … Only six percent of the world’s population lives in this country yet we’re using a third of the resources of this planet as we are responsible for 28% of the global warming…. Every statistic I’ve seen says we are going to run out of fossil fuels. Deforestation has become uncontrollable, much worse than we predicted just five years ago … we are going to have to learn that the more we consume the less resources are available on the earth for other human beings and other creatures.”

Not all greens would agree 100% with Rifkin but I think it is fair to say that most do hold similar views. Let’s examine the green movement that is popular today, its virtues and its vices.

What I would call “light” green is valuable, even critical for life yesterday, today and tomorrow. One of my heroes, Buckminster Fuller, often promoted what he called a “world game.” The idea was that we should work hard, long, and creatively to find ways to bring 100% of the world’s people to a decent standard of living with the bare minimum of environmental damage. In other words all the world could be rich and it could be a sustainable rich. I agree.

Another current guru of green ideas, Amory Lovins, founder and president of the Rocky Mountain Institute, told us in an interview a few years ago that “I don’t use the term energy conservation because to about a third of Americans it means privation, discomfort, curtailment, doing without. What I’m talking about is doing more with less by using energy in a smarter way that saves money.” Again, I wholeheartedly agree.

“Conservation” of energy is questionable but conservation of wilderness and care for our air, water and land are admirable goals of “light” green proponents. I consider myself one. This kind of conservation, of course, means  honest and meticulous work to prevent pollution and to make our air, water and soil as healthful as we can. It also means protecting wilderness areas and doing all we can to prevent species extinctions.

If a green lifestyle means all of the above it merits our enthusiastic support.

On the other hand there is a “dark” green side that does not. In the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column a few years ago the writer claimed that “everyone agrees that if the rest of the world were to live as we do in America, it would be a disaster.” I don’t agree. And neither do a lot of other people who have more knowledge and expertise than I do. On the contrary, we hold with Bucky Fuller, Amory Lovins and Abraham Lincoln that it should be a goal of all right-thinking people as Lincoln once said “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

“All” to me means all U.S. citizens but also all world citizens. And having an “equal chance” means being rich enough to go to school, eat well, travel widely, be free from disease and violence and in general to have a lifestyle at least as rich as the one most Americans (most, not all of course) enjoy today.

To get there one of the most crucial tests is whether we can keep learning to do more with less (light green), or try instead to do less with more (dark green). There is a big difference.

Start with the most important need of human beings, food. For many centuries, for many millennia, famines and malnutrition have plagued humankind. People have starved to death or suffered crippling malnutrition all through human history. Many still do. But today few people in the industrialized world of Western Europe, Japan or North America suffer from malnutrition or starvation. How did we get so lucky?

The answer is not luck, nor is it as complicated as some make it out to be. We got there by virtue of the scientific and the industrial revolutions working in an environment of free-trade and a predominantly capitalist economic system. Free-trade means competition and win-win transactions. Both sides win in free-trade and world society as a whole gets richer, more prosperous, and less prone to famine, malnutrition, violence and disease.

In feudal times all over the world (and in primitive pre-civilization times) economic transactions were mostly zero-sum ones. If I gain more land, gold or serfs you have to lose land, gold or serfs. Society then had some high points and heroes, but on the whole it stagnated and 98% of the people had to make do with famines, malnutrition and disease. So much so that the average life expectancy was less than 35 years (even for the elite).

Translate that history into today’s “dark” green movement and it should give us pause. Activists like Paul Ehrlich, Michael Moore, Jeremy Rifkin or the New Yorker writer quoted above would have you believe that the world is still a zero-sum place. “The more we consume, the fewer resources are available on the earth for other human beings and other creatures.” If a few people get “obscenely wealthy,” the rest of us will be poor. Wealth and resources to “dark greens” are like a big pumpkin pie. If I get a bigger piece, you will have to be satisfied with a smaller one. And the more people there are, the smaller piece each can have.

A common corollary is the belief as stated by Rifkin and others that we are rich because we have stolen resources from poor countries or at the very least we use way more than our share. Some today claim the 2% at the top are rich because they have taken advantage of the 98% at the bottom. The answer usually proposed is some kind of socialist system to control population size and to share the wealth. Unfortunately this solution only too often results in sharing the poverty.

If we really did live in zero-sum world society today, the only moral thing to do would be to cut back drastically and dramatically on our Western life styles. At a minimum that would mean using many fewer resources, having fewer children or none, stop wasting so much wealth on gadgets and luxuries. It would also mean living in smaller houses, discouraging suburban life, buying food only from local farmers, restricting the import of food and goods from other countries, using public transportation more and private vehicles less. It would also mean we should travel less, restrict or abandon free-trade, discourage competition, put moratoriums on oil exploration, mining ventures, nuclear power construction and genetic crop use, increase government control and in general bring down our standards of living so that the rest of the world can have a few more resources. Maybe then they could eke out a decent living too.

Bringing down our standard of living is not politically popular so even the most fervent of dark greens rarely promote this part of their agenda. They also do not want to point out that the unfortunate and unplanned result of all of these cut backs mean fewer jobs, smaller profits, reduced incomes, lower GNP, more recession, slower progress in developing countries, reduced ability to provide pensions and health care, and in general a reduced standard of living for all.

I say hogwash. We do not live in a zero-sum world today. Or at least we don’t have to.

In 1850 the U.S. had a population of around 30 million people, over 80% of them small farmers, most of them dirt poor. Each farm could feed itself and maybe half a person more. Today the U.S. has a population over 300 million people with only 2% of them farmers. And yet the 300 million people today are much better fed, much healthier and much richer than the 30 million people were in 1850. The average life expectancy has grown from around 40 years to over 70 years. Each farm today can feed itself and a hundred persons more. Where did all that extra food and wealth come from? It certainly could not have been stolen from the poor countries of the world. They have never had any extra food or wealth. They still don’t.

The answer is that our plentiful supply of food and wealth came from the first principle of “light green” economics, doing more with less. We have expanded the soil acreage in this country by very little. We have the same amount of water and sun. But we have used those natural resources with much greater efficiency. We have done a lot more with a lot less.

In the case of farms and food production, the new abundance came from many things: using tractors instead of horses; electrifying farms; adding factory-made fertilizers to the soil; turning to larger more mechanized farms; finding better ways to irrigate; developing and using new genetically improved seeds; breeding new varieties of farm animals; inventing and using better insecticides and herbicides that kept weeds, insects, molds, mice and other pests from siphoning off as much food as they did for centuries past; vastly expanding cheaper and faster transportation so that our diets can be more varied and if one region has a drought, food can be imported from regions with a surplus; and vastly improving communication, including education, advertising, and most recently high-tech computerized equipment.

The “dark” green movement often opposes many of these do-more-with-less technologies. They raise strong objections to genetic engineering of plants, animals and microbes. They decry the use of chemical factory-made fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Some support Locavare, eating only foods produced in a few miles of the local farmer’s markets. Many demonize supermarkets, fast food outlets and importing lamb from New Zealand, blueberries from Chile, oranges from Florida or vegetables from California. Many oppose the damming of rivers and using the water for irrigation. They are often scornful of the “green” revolution that has brought such dramatic increases in food to poor countries. Some of the more radical even propose going back to horses instead of tractors. Most “dark greens” also actively (and effectively) promote anti-chemical and anti-plastic biases. They advise instead using only “organic” foods and “natural” products. (Can any food can be non-organic? Can any product can be unnatural?)

Organic foods may or may not be more flavorful and environmentally benign. The evidence is weak. Natural cosmetics, shopping bags, furniture, clothing and what have you may or may not be more energy efficient and environmentally benign. The evidence is weak. What is certain is that organic and natural are more expensive, doing less with more. And were this organic/natural view to become the dominant one in the modern agricultural and industrial world, quite a few billion people would starve to death and quite a few billion more would be condemned to malnutrition and zero-sum poverty for the foreseeable future.

One bizarre example. A few years ago the African country of Zambia was having one of its periodic droughts and millions of people were on the verge of starvation. The President of Zambia had received tons of grain from the U.S. that would have prevented mass starvation. He declined to use any of it because he thought that some of it may have come from genetically modified crops, a belief that dark greens had convinced him was bad. The result–millions of his citizens felt first hand the horror of dark green ideology.

Summing up, in so far as “green” means protecting the environment and doing more with less, what I would call “light green,” I think we are on solid progressive ground and I say go for it. It is the way we have progressed in the past and it points the way to future progress.

I’m going to let the late Marion Clawson have the last word. Dr. Clawson was the head of the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior and spent his life studying and administering our nation’s natural resources. He had retired from his work as a forestry researcher with the foundation Resources for the Future when he gave us an interview.

“Well certainly there is an enormous amount of popular interest in and stimulated by the media in the gloom and doom.  Go back to Malthus and you can go back even earlier than that, population is growing, how are we going to feed them, yet the fact is food supply has increased as fast as population has increased we have more often had surpluses than not, but I don’t think the answer lies in us cutting, well, I think we could cut back on waste, and I think there are more efficient ways of using resources, but the probability is that the rest of the world is going to move up.

“Today half the world is poor and half the world is rich, 300 years ago all the world was poor, 300 years from now all the world could be rich by today’s standards, and I think that is the answer.  We have always been interested in this answer at Resources for the Future and I called this cautious optimism.  Sure there are problems, there are always problems, this is what challenges you, but we think that we can solve the problems, we think that the picture as a whole is favorable and good, we think that contrary to many, life today is a lot richer and better than it was a generation ago.”

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. The best summary (and expansion) of this edition is my own new program, Resources, Populations and Climate Change. As the old Chrysler salesman, Lee Iacocca, used to say “if you can find a better program, buy it.”

Some readers took offense at my recent defense of BP and of oil companies in general. The most common criticism was that we should ignore the propaganda coming from the oil companies. Instead we have to expedite the changeover from a fossil fueled economy to a non-fossil fuel economy. Actually I agree with that. The only real dispute is how long it might take for the changeover. I claim a minimum of twenty to thirty years, probably more like forty or fifty. And in the meantime I pointed out we are desperately dependent on oil for the very survival of our civilization.

Some say the oil companies are promoting a long time scenario because they want to make money and discourage competition. That may be true. The environmental lobby and the present federal government are promoting a competitive view that we can and must changeover much faster. That may be true. Who do you believe? Both views have merit. Both are self-serving. The oil companies make more money the longer the “meantime” is. The environmental groups (and the present government) get more publicity, more members (or more votes) the louder they sound the alarms.

Profits from oil sales actually finance a substantial portion of renewable research, most of which will not make a nickel.  Taxes subsidize a whole host of alternative research projects, most of which will also be losers. The difference is the oil companies eat their losses. Taxpayers aren’t so lucky.

The environmental lobbies have been extremely effective in promoting a “green” agenda that is stridently anti-oil and often, in my opinion, anti-capitalist. Corporations like BP, Dow Chemical and Monsanto have fallen in step and also claim to be “green” (at least their advertising says so). It is easy to understand that the oil companies have vested interests that influence their behavior and their advertising.

It is not so easy for people to understand that environmentalists also have their self-serving vested interests. Bernard Cohen, a leading research physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, pointed out to us in an interview a few years ago that “the environmental movement has its own self-interest which the media and the public don’t seem to recognize.” He went on to charge that “the word ‘environmentalist’ has a pure and unselfish meaning. The truth is, environmental groups that have active programs and are winning battles are going to prosper and get foundation support and lots of dues-paying members. So they are under very heavy pressure to pick out issues where they can win political victories. They won a big political victory in destroying nuclear power. They won political victories in getting DDT banned and getting ethylene dibromide banned and getting rid of alar in apples. All of these are technologically nonsensical decisions.”

I’m afraid the same thing is happening today with the trashing of BP and even with some of the crisis-mongering about climate change. When you look outside your window and count up all the ways we depend on oil for our modern life it has to give you pause. No matter how green you might want to live you still have to eat. You still have to have shelter. And heat and cooling. And transportation. And communication. And health care. And police and fire prevention. And environmental protection. And schools and books and computers and an Internet, etc. etc. All of these basic activities today are almost 100% dependent on energy (and materials) derived from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. Well, over 90% at least.

Leaving aside for the moment the energy for all of our transportation needs, we in the U.S. and Canada get about 20% of our electrical energy from nuclear power and about 12% from renewable hydroelectric dams. Most of the rest comes from burning coal, a small percentage from natural gas and a much smaller percentage from biomass. In some parts of the country, and in some parts of Europe wind energy has taken off in the last few years. In the U.S. and Canada it accounts for maybe one or two percent of our electrical energy. In Denmark they claim windmills produce up to 20% of their electricity. Some experts question that figure. They also point out that Denmark has the highest rates for electricity in Europe. Denmark has not been able to shut down any of their coal plants because wind power is unreliable so they need fossil fuels and imported electricity from the European grid to provide power when the wind isn’t blowing. Ironically they also need it when the wind blows too hard because high winds could damage the windmill blades and so they have to shut down.

In addition recent research has shown that wind energy farms not only cause more or less severe health problems to nearby residents, they also save very little if any carbon dioxide emission. This is because wind is intermittent. (So is sunlight.) This means you have to have backup fossil fuel (or nuclear) plants to provide electricity when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. The required stop-and-go cycling of the fossil fuel plants results in a severe drop in efficiency and consequently much more carbon dioxide emissions. That is happening now in Denmark.

Despite the problems I think we should continue experimenting with wind and with solar power. And certainly and especially, with schemes to promote more efficiency in the way we use energy and materials. Here I am in agreement with the greens. We need to be looking for new ways to do more with less. Keep in mind though the “do more” part. Just doing “less” won’t cut it, unless you are willing to have still more unemployment and poverty. More about that next week.

Another objection some people have to oil is the claim that that we have reached the “peak” already in oil resources and the future looks pretty grim so we better button up and conserve what we have, use less, live greener, etc. etc. This objection is in my view shortsighted and plainly mistaken. Expert predictions about how much oil is hidden in the earth’s crust have been almost comically mistaken.

In 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted the U.S. had just enough oil left in the ground to last another ten years. In 1939 the U.S. Dept. of Interior predicted we had enough oil to last another 13 years. In 1944, experts estimated Persian Gulf reserves at 16 billion barrels proved and 5 billion probable. By 1975, those same fields had produced 42 billion barrels and had 74 billion remaining. By 1984, geologists estimated another 199 billion barrels remaining. Etc. Etc.

Like end-of-the-world predictions of religious cults, the peak-day keeps getting further and further off. And it has been the same story with oil and natural gas reserves in North and South America. In fact it has been the same story with minerals, food, and just about all natural resources just about everywhere in the world.

A very recent case in point is Israel; a country that had has often taken pride in achieving a high standard of living in the Middle East without having any oil or gas reserves (or for that matter few natural resources of any kind) in its own territory. Just last week a headline in the NY Times read “Israel Agog Over News On Energy.” It seems that USGS geologists have discovered enormous deposits of natural gas just a few miles off the north shore of Israel. There is almost certainly, they report, enough natural gas there to power the entire country for many years to come and even to export some of it to other countries.

So too in the U.S., Mexico and Canada there is much much more oil and gas to be discovered and used—actually much more than in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq combined. Some of these oil and gas reserves in North America are in Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico but the bulk of them are deep underground in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Rocky Mountains. If we are serious in wanting to become energy “independent;” and if we are serious in wanting to create American jobs that are real jobs; and if we are serious in wanting to choke off funds to terrorist states and groups; the obvious thing to do is to move heaven and earth to accelerate our search and our production capabilities for American oil and gas. That seems to me to be a no-brainer.

Yes, there are environmental problems in drilling and mining for American oil and gas just as there are environmental problems in drilling or mining for anything anywhere.

“Green technology” like solar cells, hybrid batteries, iPhones, windmill turbines, hybrid automobiles, radar, fluorescent bulbs, flat screen television sets, satellites, computers—indeed almost all emerging green technologies–require rare earth elements that today come almost completely from China. The Chinese mines that bring up these rare earths are noted for their severe pollution problems. The Chinese have recently warned the rest of the world that soon they may forbid any exports of these rare earths. Unless we want to abandon all emerging green technologies we will have to find deposits in the western world, mine them and find ways to mitigate the environmental damages. And no doubt we will.

Worthy of note too is that most of these emerging green technologies rely on other common but potentially toxic chemicals that contain cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury and other potentially toxic elements. In other words there is no free lunch when it comes to environmental or economic issues. We may dream of the perfect but we have to be satisfied with the better in order to avoid the worst. In that choice, oil and gas are better than coal. And in the long run they may even, surprisingly enough, be better than biomass, wind or sun.

The point is not to slow or condemn alternative energy programs. And most certainly not to curtail basic research in renewable alternatives. Nor is it to exonerate fossil fuel use which admittedly does have serious pollution consequences even apart from its problematic contribution to climate change. Instead we need to be wise, patient and creative. Let’s not fall for the latest fad and waste precious resources on glamorous but faulty technologies, but work and wait for better alternatives. And realize that even the best will have faults and unintended consequences.

At the moment I think that all things considered nuclear power is the wisest choice for lessening our dependence on fossil fuels with the least risk of environmental damage. I think natural gas is second best. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel but it is much less harmful than coal. And if I had to wager on more distant future sources I would hesitantly bet on fusion power with hydrogen as a byproduct to be used to power vehicles, run lawnmowers and power portable generators. Solar and wind will have increasing use in special locations and for special purposes but in the long run I doubt they will ever be major players in the energy world.

I realize that many will disagree. I wait with some trepidation and much anticipation to your responses.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. You can’t escape my usual plugs for DVD programs. See ENERGY ON EARTH (Science Books & Films labeled this “one of the best films of last five years.”) See also ENERGY AND SOCIETY, GLOBAL WARMING and RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

Charles Sheldon in 1896 wrote a novel In His Steps. The subtitle was “What would Jesus do?” The novel was very popular and was translated into 21 languages. Sheldon thought that Jesus would promote a kind of Christian Socialism, take from the rich and give to the poor. Others after Sheldon took up that question, What would Jesus do?, and gave different answers.

In the American political tradition what I want to know is, what would Jefferson or Lincoln do?

Thomas Jefferson was our first Democratic President.

Jefferson was a classic liberal. That is, as a leading Enlightenment thinker, his most cherished value was freedom, especially freedom from government and freedom from clergy. His biggest worry was that government would become too big, too strong and too tyrannical. As for religion he made his own version of the New Testament in which he deleted all references to miracles and the afterlife but retained the moral teachings of Jesus. He believed in God, but said, “I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”

He would not have approved of today’s progressive Democrats in their zeal to expand the role of the government. In his First Inaugural Address Jefferson advised “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” As to the national debt, “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.” As to social welfare, “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them … .I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”

On the other hand he was no friend of the rich and powerful either. “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

As to foreign policy he advised “commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.” He was not opposed to war when it was justified and he was in favor of guns for citizens and a strong military. “Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every Free State.”

Jefferson did not hesitate to use the military to solve national problems. Muslim pirates in North Africa were kidnapping and demanding huge ransoms for American sailors when he was president. Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy with instructions to use all necessary force to crush the pirates and rescue our sailors. And they did.

He was a strong supporter of science. “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view, the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.” He believed that science would lead the way to get those “saddles” off their backs. And that’s pretty much how it happened.

Like his friend and fellow patriot Benjamin Franklin, he himself was a scientist. As President he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition not to conquer but to discover what the west was like. While he claimed not to hold any territorial or imperial ambitions he also made the single largest addition to the United States territory ever when he authorized the Louisiana Purchase from France.

He was always a friend to educators. “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people … They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

What would Jefferson do today? Would he be a Democrat, a Progressive, or a Libertarian? Would he be a Republican or a Tea Party candidate? You decide.

Abraham Lincoln was our first Republican President.

Lincoln, too, was a liberal in the classical sense of cherishing liberty. But he also cherished union. And achieving a lasting blend of liberty and union proved to be his greatest challenge and his greatest achievement.

Lincoln was friendly toward industry and business. As a lawyer in Illinois, Lincoln often represented large corporations. He himself had once been a small businessman who owned and ran a “grocery” in New Salem. It was a failure. As he later put it, his store “blinked out” and left him in debt for fifteen years (a sum he likened to the “National Debt”). Eventually he did pay it off from his meager salary as a freshman Congressman.

As President he did not have much chance to demonstrate social welfare policy. His job as he saw it was to hold the union together even at the cost of a terrible war.

The story of his relationship with the famous and powerful journalist, Horace Greeley, has relevance for us today. Both he and Greeley were union supporters. Both believed slavery was wrong and must eventually be abolished if America was to survive as a modern state. Both believed the North had no choice but to go to war when Southern states seceded.

Lincoln and Greeley (as well as most people in the North) also thought the secession could be ended with a quick decisive show of union force. However after the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run in the very first battle of the war, Lincoln got this letter from the New York journalist. “I have spent seven consecutive sleepless nights, Mr. Lincoln. The gloom in this city is funereal, for our dead at Bull Run were many and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair. What can I do, Mr. President? If it is best for the country that we make peace with the rebels at once and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.”

Lincoln had no thought of giving up. He held fast to his goal of liberty and union for four bitter years and over 500,000 casualties. He had to ignore oceans of ink spilling vicious and vile personal attacks in Northern newspapers. He had to stay the course after many of his closest friends and supporters had deserted him. In the last year of the war when an embattled Lincoln was running for a second term the liberal abolitionist lawyer and author Richard Dana wrote, “As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers here, no enthusiastic supporters. We went for a rail splitter, and we have got one.”

The rail-splitter won the election. The Union won the war. Slavery was abolished and the union was preserved.

Am I wrong to see some of the “Greeley” attitude today in the clamor to “bring our troops home” immediately if not sooner? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been ugly, long and difficult, though with far far fewer casualties than the wars of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman or Kennedy/Johnson. Many patriots from both political parties want to call it quits and simply get out, “even on their own terms.”

I realize full well that when Jefferson and Lincoln lived and governed, the United States was very different from the United States of today. In 1790 it had a population of less than 4 million. When Lincoln was President the United States had grown to over 30 million, of which over 80% were farmers. The industrial revolution was just getting underway. The communication revolution was not even a dream. But the eloquent words of Lincoln in his 1862 plea to Congress for a constitutional amendment to free the slaves still have relevance.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy future … Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation … in giving freedom to the slaves, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what give and in what we preserve … we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

It held Mr. Jefferson. It held Mr. Lincoln. But slavery to tyrants and to clergy still exists in this troubled world. And some of us still think we are an exceptional country that has often led the way in the past to abolish slavery of all kinds and on all continents. Many of us think that we are still “the last best hope of earth.”

In considering our challenges today another speech Lincoln gave in Philadelphia on his way to take office as President seems especially relevant.  “I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy together so long. It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the mother country, but that something in the Declaration of Independence giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulder of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

Lincoln prevailed in the Civil War. Roosevelt led us to victory in World War 2. After that terrible war Truman and Marshall lifted the weights from many shoulders in our former enemies Germany, Italy and Japan. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Bush and Reagan helped almost half the world escape a totalitarian nightmare brought on by communist ideology and domination. I think Mr. Lincoln would be happy and proud to know that his quest for liberty and union has spread to over half the world. Yes, sixty percent of the world today is free, democratic and making progress toward the goal “that all should have an equal chance.”

To be sure there are still major obstacles to a free, democratic, peaceful, progressive world for all. The Radical Islamic quest is a major one. The rapid growth of government and a soaring national debt in so many western democracies is another. Poverty and disease in developing countries around the world is still another. And the loss of confidence in our own country from our own people may be the most serious threat of all.

What would Jesus do? What would Jefferson do? What would Lincoln do?

It matters little. It’s up to us now.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. You can learn more about the historical background for these difficult issues in some of our new programs. DEMOCRACY: THE BASICS, DEMOCRACY IN THE 21^ST CENTURY. For more on Jefferson and the other founding fathers see our recent program THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, CAPITALISM AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. For more on Lincoln and the Civil War see our recently redone classic program, A. LINCOLN. For more on religion and democracy see: RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY.

“At three o’clock in the morning, our bold cook loudly shouts,

Roll out, roll out, you teamsters, it’s time that you were out.

The teamsters, they get up in a fright and manful wail,

Where’s my boots, oh where’s my packs, my rubbers have gone astray

The other men, they then get up, their packs they cannot find

And they lay it to the teamsters, and they curse them till they’re blind.”

The folk song is from a program we produced many years ago THE ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK. The song speaks to the romance. The reality was another matter. The lumber companies in the 19^th century cut the top off of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. On the one hand their work furnished the lumber that built America. On the other hand it was responsible for probably the greatest environmental disaster in American history, eclipsing the recent oil leak by powers of ten.

Much the same could be said for two other industries that helped build America, iron mining and whaling. For this school year we have resurrected three video programs and converted them into DVDs — THE ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS. The trio offers insight into what work was like, both the romance and the reality, in three key 19^th century American industries.

Author Robert Gard begins the ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK this way:

“The great American woods! Six hundred million board feet of lumber in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota–the Comstock lode of silver, the gold of California, the iron of the huge Mesabi Range, or the oil of Texas–none of these was as great an asset as the white pine of the great American woods.”

That Mesabi Range may not have been quite as big an asset but it was pretty big. And it was pretty important. As a folk song in IRON MINES AND MEN puts it,

“Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid

Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade

‘Good’ cried the Baron, sitting in his hall

‘But iron, cold iron is master of them all.’”

And whale oil to early 19^th century America was what petroleum is to 20^th and 21^st century America. It was the all purpose liquid that lit homes, lubricated sewing machines, provided the base for medicine and cosmetics and the flexible plastic-like material (whale bone) for many of the same purposes our modern plastics satisfy today.

People today, however, especially young people, have little idea what work was like a two hundred years ago. Basic industries like lumbering, mining, agriculture and fishing are sometimes under fire today because of their environmental problems. We white-collar service workers (and that includes most people in the U.S. and Canada today) don’t exactly look down on miners, lumbermen and fishermen but most of us have little experience with the kind of essential work many of them still perform.

In the 19^th century our country, our continent, was economically booming as never before in human history. It was the century of the Industrial Revolution. As late as 1850, however, over 80 percent of the population were still farmers. In their spare time many of these “farmers” also became lumbermen, fishermen and miners. Like many people today, workers then often worked more than one job. But white-collar service jobs were few and far between.

Another big change in work is the change from the still earlier 10,000 year-long agricultural ages in which all of our ancestors lived. African-American activists remind us that most of their ancestors were enslaved by white people in the deep south some two hundred years ago.  Not everyone recognizes that if you go back a few hundred more years the ancestors of practically everyone in America today were slaves, serfs or peasants.

In 1750 for instance, just before the U.S. came into being, over 95% of the people in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Russia, Poland and the Scandinavian countries were not slaves, but they were peasants or serfs. This meant that they were, like slaves, permanently bound to the land, heavily-taxed, exploited and held captive for life. Thomas Jefferson objected: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.” But before the U.S. was founded almost all of our ancestors were to all intents and purposes enslaved by aristocratic lords and clergy left-over from earlier medieval times and still ruling from the saddle.

With the founding of the United States in 1776 as the world’s first modern republic things began to change. Not everyone today recognizes that this was a truly exceptional change.

If you move your attention to other continents like Asia, Africa and the South Pacific the exploitation and the outright slavery gets worse. Much worse.

What does this mean for us today?

For one it means we should be thankful for our blessings. Our ancestors worked hard. They had fun too. But not much. To work as a slave, serf or peasant was not only demeaning, it was nasty. As Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651 the life of man everywhere is “nasty, brutish and short.”

And people did not live very long. On average people lived less than forty years before the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Nor did they travel much. On average not more than twenty or thirty miles from where they were born before railroads, steamships brought some of the bravest and most adventurous to America.

Health care, what there was of it, was cheaper. In the 19^th century lumberjacks could buy for $2 to $10 an insurance coupon that gave them treatment in a lumberjack hospital if they got injured or sick. More often than not they died, either in the woods or in the hospital.

Wages were minimal. Whalers would be out on the ocean for three or four years at a time. When they arrived back in New England one deckhand got ten cents as his share of the profits from the whale oil captured in a four-year voyage. As the script of THERE SHE BLOWS notes, the owners of the vessel were humanitarians and they gave him a ten dollar bonus for his faithful work.

The lumberjacks got paid at the end of a winter’s work and the dangerous spring log drive. Most of them blew their small pay at riverside taverns before returning to their farms to get ready for the spring planting season.

Miners were often lucky to survive much less get well paid. As a reporter for the Marquette Mining Journal wrote in 1890 “we peered down the yawning pits 180 feet deep, walked through two thousand feet of tunnels with soot begrimed miners picking away by candle light.”

Yes, we can thank our lucky stars we live in this post-industrial age. But we can also thank our hard-working ancestors not only for the genes that gave us our very lives but also for supplying the raw-boned base that made our 21^st century world of plenty possible.

What will our great-great-grandchildren say about us?

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. You can access and buy many Hawkhill programs now on Amazon.com, including the three new DVDs mentioned in this article. ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS. To see these and other Hawkhill productions type in the search button: Bill Stonebarger or Hawkhill. See also www.hawkhill.com for complete descriptions including scripts and reviews for many of our programs.

Albert Einstein once claimed that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true science and art.”

What did he mean by “mysterious?”

I think he meant something close to what Bucky Fuller said to me one day many years ago. He was drawing one of his dymaxion domes in the kitchen of his vacation cottage in Maine when I came in the door. Instead of making the usual small talk he pointed to the sunlight coming through the window. It was making a splash across his drawing and he said “beautiful!”

It may also be close to the something that religions have cultivated from time immemorial. The “mystic” in religion is a close relative to the “mysterious” in science. That hint that shivers through your spine with the sense that there is something more out there. Something more in here. There is something we don’t understand. Something much greater than we will ever understand. Some call it God. Einstein did not believe in a personal God or in immortality. He rejected atheism too. When a non-believing scientist asked if he was “religious” he answered, “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

When I produced Spaceship Earth, my first audiovisual program back in the 1970s, it was for me a kind of religious experience perhaps somewhat akin to the one Einstein talked about. I did not discover any new truths as Einstein did when he penetrated the secrets of space and time with naïve genius. I did have a near religious experience though, thinking about the mysteries of space, time, and life. The result was a program that surveyed the universe from the depths of outer space stars, planets and galaxies to the inner space depth of the human mind. It ended up with six parts progressing from the biggest to the smallest. Or maybe I should say not the “smallest” but what I still consider the most powerful, human consciousness. The six parts were: Universe, Biosphere, Living Things, Cells, Atom & Molecules, A Little While Aware. I apparently struck some kind of near religious spark in others. I’m a bit chagrined to admit that I got far more positive response to Spaceship Earth than to any program I have completed in the 36 years since that time. One satisfying memory from those early days is the friend who took Part One: The Universe to show at a Sunday service in his church.

In those same 70s days I read with interest the books of a remarkable doctor who it seemed had an intuitive sense of the mysterious, perhaps similar to Einstein. Lewis Thomas was a specialist in immunology in New York City. He was also in his mature years a remarkable writer. I was especially taken by his first book Lives of a Cell. Dr. Thomas had that rare ability to penetrate the mysterious and then to tell about it in simple moving words. I used inspiration in part due to his book to produce Air, Earth, Fire and Water. It too was well received and this year I have made it available for the first time on DVD.

The “mysterious” in life is sometimes funny as well. The quote my friend Piers McBride sent me qualifies. “I met an old friend yesterday I hadn’t seen for 20 years. And you know he had changed so much he didn’t even recognize me.”

As do quips of Walt Whitman. “A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Or, “oh God, if I am to have so much … let me have more!”

I still get the same thrill of recognition and mystery when I think of some of the stories told about one my heroes, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had a rare combination of intelligence, humility, humor and compassion. One of my favorite tales is the one where a distraught father came into his office to plead for his son’s life. The boy had been sentenced to death by the military for falling asleep on watch. Lincoln, as he did so often, had stayed the sentence. The father pleaded, “but Mr. President, it says here he is not be shot until further orders come from me. And you might order him shot next week!”

Lincoln replied, “my friend, I see you do not know me very well. If your son never faces death until further orders come from me to shoot him, he will live to be a great deal older than Methuselah.”

Great literature of course also qualifies. Not only Sophocles and Shakespeare, but modern authors like A.A. Milne, Robert Frost, Samuel Beckett and Lewis Thomas. I find some of the short poems of Emily Dickenson pregnant with this strange kind of mysterious beauty.

Hope is a thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune–without the words—

And never stops at all.

Einstein was religious but not conventionally so. He, like Calvin, was also a determinist. That is he did not believe in free will. He thought the universe was governed by some inexplicable mysterious force that we could never hope to penetrate with our meager intellects. He also claimed that “human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are as causally bound as the stars in their motions.” This belief left little room or role for human beings in cosmic history, whether you consider that history tragedy or comedy.

I part ways from Einstein here. Instead I like the take that the dancer Martha Graham had on a closely related issue.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening which is translated through you into action.  And since there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it.”

I also like the way Robert Frost put it:

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be–
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
Btu when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

In a youthful poem of my own I claimed that we humans, foolish and ignorant as we may be, can still “add an increment of honest meaning to the not-quite-finished universe.” I can’t prove it. But like the people in Robert Frost’s poem, when was that ever a bar to any watch I keep.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. See Spaceship Earth and Air, Earth, Fire and Water. You can read the entire scripts on our web site: www.hawkhill.com.

P.P.S. Having written this week’s effort I do think the subject deserves fuller treatment, especially as it relates to the connections between religion, science and democracy. Look for more on this topic in weeks to come. In the meantime you might want to check out one of my latest programs, Religion and Democracy that explores many connections between these two powerful ideas.

P.P.P.S. I just watched for the first time in quite a few years another older program of mine, Welcome to the Universe. It is an adaptation of Spaceship Earth for younger students that we have just this fall made available on DVD for a quite modest price. If you have a bright child, age 7 to 11, you might consider buying this program if you want them to experience the mysterious in science. I really consider it one my best efforts and believe that is does touch that chord that Einstein considered the “source of all true science and art.” It also has magnificent music composed and performed especially for this program by my son, Michael Stonebarger.

Remember in Casablanca when Claude Rains, the French police chief, watched Humphrey Bogart kill the evil Nazi commander, then told his flunkies to “round up the usual suspects.”

That’s a bit the way I feel these days about the global warming debate. Each side has pretty much had its say. The left, led by former vice president Al Gore and present science advisor to President Obama, John Holdren, rounds ups its supporters. The right led by environmentalist contrarian Bjorn Lomborg and supported by Nobel Prize winner Freeman Dyson, rounds up it supporters. The result is … not much. This, come to think of it may be, as Winnie-the-Pooh used to say, the best thing.

Do we really think we have that much control over the weather and the climate? I doubt it. I don’t believe that God rewards or punishes us with hurricane, tornadoes or floods. Nor do I believe that our paltry human efforts have that much effect on our weather and climate, for good or ill.

I once read that a single thunderstorm has more energy than the total energy produced in the United States by all of our power companies in an average year. During any given minute, there are according to experts, more than a thousand thunderstorms around the Earth that release more energy than thousands of nuclear bombs. Every minute! I also have read that ants, termites and cows produce more methane every year than our automobiles and power plants added together. The truth is I am not rock-bottom sure of my facts here. But neither are some of the global warming folks. See “climate-gate” emails.

Why are Al Gore and his supporters so insistent that we need to do something immediately if not sooner? And if we do need do something so immediately why did Gore recently buy a gargantuan estate on the California coast that will put a thousand times more carbon into the air than the poor folks of Mali or Haiti who live in huts and tents without running water or sewage treatment? And for that matter why does our President spend so much time on Air Force One using gargantuan amounts of fuel and supposedly scarce resources in order to make speeches on-the-scene (and take vacations) in so many far-off places like Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, California, Maine, Hawaii, and 22 or so foreign countries? And not just once a month or so as every president has done, but he seems to be flying off somewhere every few days! We do have television, radio and the Internet that use a lot less oil and require many fewer reporters, body-guards and hangers-on.

For myself I think we should be more concerned to bring housing, running water and better water and sewage treatment to the Haitians and Malians. And to the Chinese and Indians and Cambodians as well as to some poorer Americans who will suffer the most if we let our economy collapse and move to a no-growth, green life style and Jimmy Carter-like malaise.

I’m afraid the answer is that many far-left partisans are so obsessed with potential government blessings that they can’t imagine that free people will ever manage to do the right things. They are supremely confident we don’t know where our own best interests lie. Or even where it hurts. They want to make sure we do the right thing by enacting into law hundreds of  2000-plus pages of intricate regulation and fiats that their “experts” say will be good for us. And then some suggest that the usual suspects who disagree should be put in solitary. A law professor at a San Diego college suggested recently that the government should just plain ban Fox News.

A recent op-ed article in the NY Times by Ross Douthat has relevance here. He points out that back in the 1970s popular scientists like Paul Ehrlich (a supporting role was played then by the now presidential science advisor John Holdren) preached to the choir and to Johnny Carson’s crowd that overpopulation was going to be the ruin of humankind. Actually you would have been hard put to find many contrarian views among scientists or laymen in those days. Certainly I believed him. Along with the doomsday prophecies about population there was a linked prediction of doom that we would soon run out of oil, or land, of food, or as Newsweek put it on a famous cover in 1973 we soon would be “Running out of Everything!”

Now thirty-five years later it turns out that we have a birth deficit in western countries and we are beginning to worry about not having enough young workers to support us old folks. Worse, we have an “under-consumption” recession problem (a bit like in Roosevelt’s depression days) and in addition and in contrast we have according to many green activists a hedonistic glut of oil, land, food, McDonalds and “everything.”

Douthat admits all that in his NY Times article but goes on to claim that “history rarely repeats itself exactly – and conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.” Well, maybe. But the burden of proof this time is on the other side. Environmental doomsayers, like the proverbial shepherd boy who cried wolf too many times, do not have a good record as seers. As J. Scott Armstrong once wrote, “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”

So maybe we should round up the usual suspects … and then pay as little attention to them as the police chief in Casablanca did.

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. See our programs GLOBAL WARMING, RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE and three new DVDs about work and life in the 19^th century when worries were the opposite of today—that is, too little wealth, too few resources and a shortage of people. See ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS.

An ad appeared in Life Magazine on Feb 2, 1962 with a picture of a large glacier. The headline underneath in bold caps read: “EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER.” (Humble Oil later became part of Exxon/Mobil.)

I don’t think the ad men would recommend this ad for an oil company today. The Sierra Club magazine put a copy of it, without comment, inside the back cover of a recent issue.

I am going to shock some of my green readers (if there still are any) by claiming that, unlike the Sierra Club and despite the BP debacle, I think it is still a pretty good ad. Before you send me to the recycle bin, let me explain.

Oil is without question the single most useful, versatile and valuable substance in the modern world. For high-energy density it has no peers. It is also the basic raw material for a host of other high-priority products. A common view today among commoners and Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, is that we are “addicted” to this valuable substance. I respectfully object. We get addicted to stuff that harms us, like cigarettes, alcohol, heroin. Oil is the very lifeblood of modern civilized life. When Mae West quipped “too much of a good thing is wonderful” she could have been thinking of oil. Without it we would go back to the Dark Ages, or at a minimum to the days before the Civil War in America.

The Sierra Club and all the rest of us depend on oil to power our cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, tractors, motorcycles, lawn mowers, cranes and bulldozers; to produce our food; to provide tires for our bicycles and other vehicles; to take us on nice vacations via auto, airplane, bus or train (including all the wonderful Sierra Club Outings to the High Sierras, Montana, Alaska, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, the Greek Islands, the Arctic, etc.); to ski, to play tennis, soccer, basketball and swim; to produce our medicines; to make our eyeglasses, contact lenses and hearing aids; to paint our houses and shellac our floors; to manufacture anesthetics that make our operations possible and painless; to make the refrigerant to preserve our food and provide air conditioning in our homes, schools and automobiles; to provide the ink to print our books, newspapers and magazines; to produce the plastics, motherboards and screens for our cell phones, TVs, computers and iPads; to make the strings on our guitars and the “ivories” for our pianos (we used to kill cats and elephants); to help produce many of the chemicals that make windmills, solar panels and long transmission lines possible; to supply the asphalt for our roads; and the chemical raw materials to help make just about all of our modern clothing, appliances and furniture. You name it and it probably has some oil in its manufacture.

All this considered I think it is high time to give a little credit to the folks that provide this essential substance, our oil companies. Yes, I think that BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other companies, large and small, along with their multitude of supplier companies and millions of employees around the world, deserve our thanks rather than our obloquy. Yes, mistakes are made and tragedies result as in the current oil-platform explosion and leak. Which large industry has not made mistakes or caused tragedies?

40,000 or more people are killed in automobile accidents every year in the United States and no one condemns the workers and companies that provided the cars. Many thousands of patients die in our modern hospitals due to mistakes and negligent care? We don’t condemn all hospitals, doctors and nurses. Nor do we begrudge these doctors, nurses and hospitals their just incomes. Yet the people who provide us with the most essential substance of all are often demonized and condemned out of hand as though they were drug dealers to our “addition.” Are we also “addicted” to motorized transportation and to modern health care?

Yes, we could go back to mid-19^th century days before Rockefeller and his fellow innovators made oil such a treasured and valuable substance. There would be some advantages it is true. We wouldn’t have to worry about oil spills or global warming. We wouldn’t have to fret about whether our food supply was organic or not. We wouldn’t have to worry so much about health care, unemployment insurance or the national debt. We wouldn’t have to worry about social security funds running low since the average life span was around 40 or so years.

We would have to worry more about creatures like whales and other mammals of the sea being hunted to extinction to provide oil for our lamps and sewing machines. Also for many wild animals of the forests and plains which also might be hunted to extinction to provide needed protein for our overpopulated continent (as did happen with many of our Native-American predecessors in North America). We wouldn’t have to worry about our children getting poisoned by oil-related pollution but we would have to worry about them dying from malaria, dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and many other nasty diseases for the most part controlled in the U.S. thanks to oil-derived insecticides, pesticides and water-purification chemicals. Families would be much larger since most children would die of disease, accident or malnutrition before they reached maturity. The U.S. population then was about a tenth of what it is today. That means, of course, that without modern chemicals like oil and other fossil fuels nine out of ten of us would never have been born.

If we went back a few more centuries—before the Industrial Age began that is–we would discover that almost all of our ancestors were slaves, serfs or peasants who lived a short, nasty, brutish life, quite different from the lives of the aristocrats we are familiar with from our history books and historical novels. (The aristocrats, for the most part, also died young.)

Yes, the oil companies make large profits today. And the CEOs of these oil companies rake in millions in salary, bonuses and stock options. So do sports heroes like Bret Favre, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Lance Armstrong and Lebron James. So do many Hollywood stars and directors. The CEOs of oil companies manage billion-dollar budgets, with hundreds of thousands of workers, operating in some of the most physically, socially and politically difficult and dangerous environments on the globe. The sports stars and entertainers may deserve large incomes because of the entertainment they provide. The CEOs deserve at least as generous an income for their critical contributions to the very existence of our modern world.

And finally, yes, the oil companies profits are sometimes (not always) what some call excessive. These profits also provide a substantial share of the income of most of the pension funds in the western world as well as a substantial share of the funds that research renewable energy possibilities. That’s more than I can say about the large incomes of sports stars and Hollywood celebrities.

Some of you may say, yes, you have a point, but we have to move on, to replace oil with new renewable energy and matter resources. I agree. But. This is going to be a long haul. Renewable energy resources are at present a very very long way from replacing oil and other fossil fuels. What are we going to do for the next thirty or forty years? Kill off 90% of us and then hope to replace the deficit when renewables do arrive in sufficient quantity and quality?

I’m serious. We should be accelerating as fast as humanly possible renewable research and development. And we should be encouraging as much and as fast as possible improvements in efficiency and conservation. But with all the intelligence and all the good will in the world it will not be possible to replace oil and other fossil fuels for at least three or four decades, if not much longer. That is simply the hard truth much as we might like it to not be so.

So in the meantime it would behoove us to muster just a few kind words for oil companies. If oil is an addiction it is an addiction we desperately need to survive. So far as oil goes today “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Especially when that “too much” comes from the land and waters of the U.S. and Canada. The oil we can get here means that much less we will have to import from countries that are not very friendly to our western values.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. For more detail on these issues see: Energy and Society, Energy on Earth, Resources, Populations and Climate Change, Capitalism and Democracy and Science and Democracy. (This is also to let you know you can buy many of our programs now on Amazon.com. Key in “Hawkhill” or “Bill Stonebarger.”)

Mae West claimed that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” And for some good things, it is. Things like health, happiness and yes, even money. For other things though it is problematical.

Environmental progress for instance. Or racial and gender progress for another. Here I think folks on the leading edge of racial, gender and environmental issues today are often their own worst enemies in demanding “too much of a good thing.”

Martin Luther King and all the “freedom-riders” deserve enormous credit for the major advances in civil rights for all in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist leaders of the 19^th and 20^th centuries deserve enormous credit for demanding and getting equal opportunity for women in education, in business, in sports, in politics and indeed in all areas of modern life. And certainly early environmental leaders deserve enormous credit for leading the way to clean up our soil, water and air in the 20^th century.

Today however some racial, environmental and feminist activists, as well as guilt-ridden politicians and supporters, seem to me to be often harming progress in race, gender and environmental issues. How so?

Take race and gender first. There is no question that there are gaps in achievement between definable groups in pretty much any and all fields of human endeavor. Jews are over represented in Nobel Prizes and in many other scientific, artistic and intellectual achievements. Blacks are over represented in professional sports like basketball, football, boxing and track and field. Women are over represented in literary fiction writing, health-care, teaching, social work and other helping professions.

So what?

We have made significant and steady progress in the western world by bringing a good measure of equal opportunity to all people in all of these fields. When we start demanding not only equal opportunity but equal results we are on shaky grounds. Garrison Keillor in his mythical Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon said that “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” If only it could be so in the real world. Here the truth is that demands for equal results often backfire, reduce opportunities for all and sometimes even harm the very people they are meant to help.

For instance. In our zeal to make amends and assure equality in the Great Society days of the 1960s we passed hundreds of civil rights, environmental, social welfare and affirmative action laws that were designed to help minorities, women, the poor, the elderly, the environment and answer any and all needs of society that it was thought were not being met by private enterprises. Government bureaucracies ballooned to administer expensive new programs in unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, help for the disabled, public broadcasting, Head Start, urban mass transportation, war on poverty, environmental protection, consumer protection, etc., etc. Many of these programs were championed by a Democratic President and Congress and were later expanded by Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. I was a strong supporter of this Great Society. Today I realize that the results have been a mixed bag. Some of the Great Society programs have proved to have lasting benefits. Others have not. And some have been harmful.

For instance: unwed mothers got generous help in raising their children so long as they did not have a husband. Minimum wage laws sought to make sure that all workers got a living wage. An unintended result was that African-American and other minority and poorly educated and unskilled males were cut out of the mainstream economic world. It was difficult if not impossible for most of these young men to get a job at the entry level in many industries. (Illegal immigrants were often the beneficiaries. That is another story.)

One result of these well-intentioned Great Society programs was the breakdown of the African-American family (as well as many lower-income white families). As the African-American economist Thomas Sowell pointed out, “the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

Another unintended result was a huge increase in African-Americans males (as well as low-income white males) in prison. In 1950 we had a population of around 125 million people and a prison population of around 250,000. By 2000 the U.S population had doubled but the prison population has jumped 8 times to over 2 million! In 1950 65% of the U.S. prison population was white, 35% was black. By 2000 that was reversed and today 65% of prisoners are black, 35% white. Why are so many lower class males, black and white, into drugs and crime today? The most plausible answer is–we have made it nearly impossible for males with below average abilities and education to get a job and support a family. Sadly, it turns out that too much of a good thing was not so good.

Environmental advocates of the 1960s (like their civil rights cousins) can take deserved credit for their leadership in vastly improving the quality of the air, water and soil in my lifetime. As I pointed out in a previous blog, Pittsburgh in the 1940s was pretty dismal. Today Pittsburgh and just about all cities in the U.S. are much much cleaner and healthier for living creatures of all kinds, including Homo sapiens.

Today though, it seems to me that some of the environmental crusaders have gone off the deep end by promoting anti-growth policies that will end up degrading, not improving our environment. For example: demonizing energy companies, tearing down dams, restricting new developments, discouraging mining, opposing genetic engineering, trashing nuclear power, getting moratoriums on oil drilling, demanding ever more stringent regulations in order to weed out the last microgram of pollution, making corporations and profit-making  dirty words, making “green” lifestyles into a new religion and in general opposing growth. These anti-growth policies will cut back on national and international wealth all right, but they will do precious little for the world’s environment.

Wealthy countries are healthier countries, with less pollution, more freedom and far more potential to innovate. The proven way to create wealth is to rely heavily on the magic of the free-market, not on the heavy hand of the government. If you want to see what government funded “innovation” is like, go to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, many countries in Africa or countries in Eastern Europe before the Berlin wall came down.  I have been to quite a few of these countries and the results I saw were not pretty.

The moral is that while government regulations and government welfare are sometimes necessary and desirable, as with so many things, too much of a good thing is not wonderful. To effectively solve most environmental and fairness problems you also need solid innovative work by free profit-seeking citizens and companies. You need wealth and innovation. You need win-win economics, not zero-sum stagnation. (Incidentally, the 1960s were also noted for large pro-growth tax-cuts by Kennedy and Johnson which did lead to vigorous economic growth as similar policies did in the Reagan pro-growth tax-cutting days. I leave it to readers to assess the situation today.)

Too much of a good thing is wonderful. Sometimes. But sometimes not.

Readers may disagree. Let me hear from you.

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill

P.S. My usual commercial plug. Go to www.hawkhill.com for many new DVD programs that can help make your 2010/2011 school year a positive example of “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

Fourth of July has come and gone and left me with a sad feeling. At my age I am not that fascinated by fireworks any more but I love the flag and patriotic songs more than ever. My wife and I watched the old movie about George M. Cohan on the Fourth. I had a few tears when Jimmy Cagney belted out the great Cohan songs, “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There.”

The sadness comes from realizing I seem to be in a minority today, at least among sophisticated people. In many ways the United States is a far better country today than it was when I was young. Richer, fairer, healthier, less polluted and with far more liberty, prosperity and justice for all. On the other hand it seems to me to be less patriotic, less proud of our heritage and our achievements, including the many that happened in my lifetime.

Think of it. Winning terrible wars against Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Totalitarian Soviet Union; bringing a long postponed new measure of freedom and dignity to African-Americans; pioneering a new world of electronics—computers, TV, cell phones, iPads, et al; shattering the “glass ceilings” for women in education, commerce, sports, arts and sciences; raising the living standards of almost all citizens to heights never before seen in human history; increasing life spans from 45 to 79 years; making our air, water and soil cleaner and healthier than ever before; and becoming without question the world leader in bringing many of these benefits to people in just about every country in this still troubled world.

And yet when her husband was nominated for President our own First Lady could only manage a weak hurrah, “for the first time in my adult life, I was proud of my country.”  Her husband too has been more prone to apologies than to pride in America’s accomplishments. (See Charles Krauthammer’s recent column in the Washington Post.)  Much worse are many professors, like the one at the University of Massachusetts, who claimed, “the American flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” Or the professor at the University of New Mexico who commented after the 9/11 attack, “anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” Or the famous Harvard scholar and pop-star on the college lecture circuit, Noah Chomsky, who says “if the Nuremberg trials were applied then every post-war American Presidents would have been hanged.”  In my younger days Kate Smith made her fame singing “God Bless America.” Today Reverend Wright became famous by shouting, “God damn America!”

Admittedly most of these folks are at the extreme left end of the political spectrum. But sad to say their influence is stronger than you might think even when watered down. It is especially strong in the all-important world of elite secondary and college classrooms as well as the all-important world of communication stars in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. How many of these influential folks put the flag out on this Fourth of July or sang “You’re a Grand Old Flag?”

Finally, I doubt whether many Hollywood directors would consider making a patriotic movie these days. Instead we get movies like Michael Moore’s Sicko (the star is Fidel Castro) and Capitalism: A Love Story (which of course it was anything but), or Oliver Stone’s JFK, Natural Born Killers and his new South of the Border (the star is Hugo Chavez, the villain is U.S.), or for that matter James Cameron’s popular hit Avatar (starring primitive innocence, villain once again is the American military).

These people need to learn a little history. For instance:

As I mentioned in a previous blog, one of the most significant and progressive actions of the United States in my lifetime does not get anything close to the credit it deserves–the Marshall Plan after World War 2.

In all ages before the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the rise of free-market economics, wealth was a zero-sum game. Wealth was land, gold and slaves, peasants or serfs. All of these things were quite limited so if one person, or one group, got a big piece of the wealth pie another person, or group, would have to be satisfied with a small piece. In order to get more wealth there was only one way – war. If you won the war, to the winner went the spoils–more land, more gold, more slaves. If you lost, tough.

Once the Industrial, Scientific and Free-Market Revolutions came on the scene about two hundred years ago, the calculus changed, but sometimes only in theory. Wealth in a scientific-industrial world was no longer based on land, gold and slaves, but on human creativity. On the ever-increasing and ever-renewable capacity of human beings to innovate, to do more with less, to use the heretofore hidden powers of nature to multiply goods and services without limit. And then to share this new wealth in free-market win-win transactions where both sides profit. When it came to wars, however, the old zero-sum ideas still held sway.

After the First World War, for instance, the winning allies France, Britain and the U.S. were still operating on the old idea that to the winners should go the spoils. Following ancient precedent they stole much of Germany’s wealth in land, resources and productive power. They demanded huge financial reparations that helped to cripple Germany for decades to come. The result was what you might have expected. A bitter and proud people fell for the first demagogue who came along, Adolph Hitler. And so we got World War Two and the Holocaust.

Pretty much the same thing happened here in America after our Civil War.  The victorious North led by Radical Republicans made the South suffer. Lincoln would have done it differently, but he was dead. The result was a hundred years of Jim Crow laws and deep poverty throughout the South.

After the Second World War for the first time in human history things changed dramatically. The democratic allies led this time by the United States had finally learned the lesson that wealth was not a limited zero-sum game. Wealth was human creativity and free trade. The best way to assure a peaceful prosperous future for all was not to punish the enemy but to help them recover. That way they could create new wealth that could then be shared with the rest of the world through free trade win-win agreements. (Significantly, one of our war-time allies, the Soviet Union, did not learn the lesson and eventually collapsed itself after punishing East European foes.)

With the Marshall Plan traditional Judeo-Christian ethics (forgive thy enemies, do good to those who hurt you) were able to join hands with free-market economics and scientific creativity to lead the way to a more promising future. Led by former General George Marshall (then the new Secretary of State under President Harry Truman) the United State spent more than a trillion dollars (in inflation-adjusted currency) to help Germany recover from the devastation caused by the war. The result is what you see today. Germany is one of the most prosperous democratic countries in the world and a powerful force for world peace and prosperity.  We see the same good news with Japan and Italy.

We are trying to do the same thing today in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Let’s hope we succeed. It wasn’t easy in the much poorer 1940s and it may be even harder today, even though we have a hundred times the resources now.

But that is the power of an idea. And no, we not only have little to apologize for in the United States, we have every reason to be proud of our spectacular successes in that now departed 20^th century. And indeed of our efforts in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Does past success mean there are no new challenges today? Of course not. But the many strong challenges today—Radical Islam, ballooning deficits, run-away government bureaucracy, soaring unemployment, soaring health care and pension costs, still too much world-wide poverty and disease, energy problems, immigration issues, broken families and even global climate change—are real, but manageable. They are manageable, that is, so long as we have learned the lesson of the Marshall Plan (and for that matter the old Judeo-Christian lesson) of loving your enemies and respecting the power of free-markets and win-win economics.

And in the meantime why not pause once in a while to sing “you’re a grand old flag, you’re a high flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, the home of the free and the brave.”

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. This time I do go back to my sales pitch. I really think our high schools and colleges need a batch of fresh air to provide our young people with a few facts and liberating lessons from history. We can help. See our up-to-date DVD programs: Democracy in World History, Resources, Populations and Climate Change, Democracy: The Basics, Capitalism and Democracy, Religion and Democracy, Science and Democracy, and last but not least our old but still strong classic, Spaceship Earth.

One easy way to tell a windbag from a sage is to measure the Fog Index of their writing. Take the average number of words they use per sentence. Calculate the percentage of words that are three syllables or more. Add these two figures and multiply that sum by 0.4. The resulting number is the Fog Index. This is a rough measure of how many years of schooling you would need to understand what the windbag (or the sage) is writing about.

You might be surprised that the Bible, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and other quality literary texts have very low Fog Indexes. About 6. In other words a sixth grader should be able to understand. The NY Times, Newsweek and Wall St. Journal have Indexes of about 11, high school level.

Some bureaucratic, academic and corporate prose gets up into the high 20s, or even 30s. Graduate school level and beyond. Often way beyond.

In my science classes, and later in my filmstrip, video and DVD productions I often used low fog quotes to make a point. Here are a few favorites.

“I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Anonymous

“Green’s Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.” Buckminster Fuller.

“Everybody lies; but it doesn’t matter since no one listens.” Anonymous.

Cal Coolidge was famous for keeping his mouth shut. When he was introduced to a famous football star of the Chicago Bears, however, he became more loquacious. “Nice to meet you, young man. I’ve always liked animal acts.”

“A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion of infidels.” Walt Whitman.

“An artist is not a special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of artist” Eric Gill.

“When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason.” Piers McBride.

“Oh God, if I am to have so much … let me have more.” Walt Whitman.

“The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.” George Bernard Shaw.

“Dare to be naïve.” Buckminster Fuller.

“Hell, if I could explain it to the average person it wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.” Richard Feynman after winning the Nobel Prize.

“Don’t always follow the crowd because nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Yogi Berra

“No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.” J. Scott Armstrong.

“It has been for me a glorious day, like giving sight to a blind man’s eyes: he is overwhelmed with what he sees and cannot justly comprehend it.” Charles Darwin on first seeing tropical forests.

“A dog is a dog except when he is facing you. Then he is Mr. Dog.” Haitian proverb.

“Ben Wattenberg’s new book is a compelling reminder that we must learn to bear the truth about our society, no matter how pleasant it may be.” Jeanne Kirkpatrick in a review of  “The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong.”

“Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that can wear you out.” Anton Chekhov.

Lady Astor once said to Winston Churchill, “if you were my husband I’d give you poison.” Churchill replied, “if you were my wife, I’d take it.”

“I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.” Anonymous.

“I ran into someone I hadn’t seen for 20 years last week and he’d changed so much he didn’t even recognize me.” Piers McBride.

“We all know that no proposition is so foolish or meretricious that at least two Nobel Prize laureates cannot be found to endorse it.” Walter Gratzer.

Richard Feynman on refusing to read his own obituary before his death. “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time. It takes the element of surprise out of it.”

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not quite sure it is right.” Judge Learned Hand.

In a Sidney Harris cartoon a beautiful maiden is speaking to a hard-working scientist, who is staring at some arcane equations on his blackboard: “I’m your guardian angel and I think it’s time you knew that for the past 37 years you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

Bill Stonebarger, Owner/Manager Hawkhill

P.S. Relax, no sales pitch this week. Take down the 4^th of July flags but save them for Labor Day. Email me for a free copy of our Fog Index poster which gives more detailed directions for calculating the Index. billjane@hawkhill.com