HOW SELF-INTEREST, FALSE PROPHETS, AND IGNORANCE MISLEAD JOURNALISM ON RESOURCES, ENVIRONMENT AND POPULATION GROWTH Julian L. Simon The Washington Post, Nov. 6, 1988: "Increasing Development Of Md. Farmland Sparks Concern. Md. Farmland Disappearing At Rapid Pace...[T]he continued loss of farmland could force Marylanders to buy higher-priced goods shipped in from elsewhere..." Dec. 31, 1988: "`We have got this goal to save farmland so we can feed ourselves...' said John Musselman, who heads the effort to preserve 20,000 acres of farmland in rapidly developing Howard County [Maryland]". For two decades now, almost every newspaper and television story about population growth and natural resources has erroneously announced bad news. Here are some examples of the good-news facts which journalists run away from as if positive rather than negative trends were the devil to fear. *All raw materials have been getting more available rather than more scarce. Prices of food, metals and other raw materials have been declining for at least two centuries -- and as far back as we know. *In the United States, the quantities of the main pollutants in the air -- particulates and sulfur dioxide -- have been decreasing. And the quality of our water, as measured by drinkability data, has been improving. *Many reliable statistical studies show that population growth does not hinder economic growth. *Most important: It took thousands of years for life expectancy at birth to increase from the low 20's to the high 20's. Then in just the past 200 years, life expectancy in the advanced countries jumped from the high 20's or low 30's to well over 70. The progress is not confined to infant mortality; the death rate has declined in all age groups. And since World War II, life expectancy in the less-advanced countries has leaped upward perhaps 15 or 20 years, now rivaling the advanced countries in many places. Headlines are not only wildly at variance with these facts, but often they are even at variance with the main thrust of the story. Here is a single recent example. In the Washington Post of July 11, 1984, a story was headed "Chinese Statistics Indicate Killing of Baby Girls Persists." That certainly is terrible. But it applies only to a few thousand persons. In contrast, thebody of the article tells us that "Life expectancy is now 69 years for Chinese women and 66 for men, an increase of 20 years over the past three decades." What could be a more extraordinary good-news story than that fact -- unless one wishes there to be fewer Chinese? And the gain applies to fully a billion persons. Even when the good news is acknowledged, it is given a bad- news twist. Examples: "Low Energy Prices Viewed as Threat to Conservation" (Washington Post,March 27, 1988, p. A14), and "Good Crops a Bad Sign" (Washington Post, August 14, 1985, p. A2). THE VANISHING FARMLANDS SCAM Let's now consider in depth a case where the failure of the press and television is undeniable and inexcusable. Even the original purveyors of the false facts have 'fessed up and now agree that the widely-reported scare was without foundation. These were some typical headlines: "The Peril of Vanishing Farmlands" (The New York Times) and "Farmland Losses Could End U.S. Food Exports" (Chicago Tribune). "Vanishing Farmlands: Selling Out the Soil" (Saturday Review), and "As World Needs Food, U.S. Keeps Losing Soil to Land Developers" (Wall Street Journal). The "crisis" ? The urbanization-of-farmland rate supposedly had jumped by a multiple of three from the 1960's to the 1970's, from less than one million acres per year to three million acres per year. This assertion was wholly untrue, as we shall see. Nor is there reason to regret "paving over". Hard though it is to believe, all of the following are true at once: Knowledge- based increase in food productivity provides us ever more food per person on less and less cropland. The price of unprocessed food continues to fall, as it has throughout human history. Farmland prices have been falling rather than rising since the 1970's. Meanwhile, the quantity of trees and the recreational area increase, and people abroad eat better than ever. Moreover, this logic-defying process by which all good things increase at once can go on without limit, so far as we can tell. For the details, I recommend to you my The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, 1981), or at least my article, "Are We Losing Our Farmland?" in The Public Interest of Spring, 1982. The entire "crisis" was hokum. This was not a regrettable but understandable exaggeration of a real problem, but a non- problem manufactured by the Department of Agriculture and some members of Congress out of whole cloth under the guise of concern about food production for the starving world. The crisis was created for the benefit of a) the environmentalists, and b) people who own homes that abut on areas which might be developed into housing developments, and whose vistas and ambience might thereby be affected. The connection between the farmland scare and prevention of housing construction has been documented for California by Bernard Frieden in The Public Interest of Spring 1979. This scam was not only refuted at the time by almost all of the data, but it has since been acknowledged to have been wholly wrong by the USDA agency that manufactured the "crisis," the National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS). The story has an authentic public-servant hero, too, which should have appealed to any red-blooded journalist with even an anesthetized nose for a dramatic story. But for much more than a year no one was willing to write about the story even when it was documented and called to their attention. When newspaper and television stories about "vanishing farmlands" first began to appear around 1979, I was living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, the heart of the Illinois farm belt. The front-page of the News-Gazette carried the same 1970's scare stories about the world's food supply that deliciously agitated the intellectual trendsetters in Washington and New York. The farm page, however, printed exactly the opposite news -- agricultural prices were falling and production was increasing all over the world. The Champaign-Urbana paper, and other papers in agricultural states, got the facts straight (at least on the farm page!) because those facts were directly relevant to the farmers in the area, who could see the trends when they went to market. Farmers were worrying about too much food production rather than too little when they made their planting decisions each year. The issue caught my attention because my research has shown that population growth is a benefit in the long run rather than a barrier to world development. The apparently-impending shortage of farmland was thrown at me as a counter-argument, along with the related assertions that the world was in danger of running out of copper, oil, water, and you-name-it. Even without research, there were good reasons to believe that the USDA-NALS vanishing-farmland assertions were wrong. First, huge changes usually do not occur rapidly in major sectors of our economy or in the economic side of society, and therefore the report of any sharp change is immediately suspect. Second, each and every one of the previous doomsday scares in connection with population growth had turned out to be a non-scare. Third, local Champaign-Urbana farmland-preservation enthusiasts -- the environmental movement was particularly strong in the area because of the presence of university faculty and students, especially the biologists and political scientists -- were campaigning to prevent pieces of the county's farmland from being converted to a shopping mall, an industrial complex, and even second farmhouses for farm families' grown children. The numbers that these persons were publicizing would have been laughable if they were not being used toward a serious purpose and in a politically effective manner. My research began with these numbers. The Champaign County Soil and Water Conservation District, the federal Farmer's Home Administration, and the editorial page of the C-U News-Gazette asserted that 30,000 acres of county cropland had been urbanized from 1960-1978, an average of 1,667 acres per year. But as of the latter date, the entire area -- the city of Champaign-Urbana plus the only village, Savoy -- totaled only 18,695 acres, according to aerial maps. Those maps also showed an average increase in urbanized areas of only about 320 acres a year, a far cry from the publicized 1,667 acres. Soil Conservation Service data indicated an average of 538 acres per year from 1958 to 1967, and there seemed no obvious reason why the rate would have increased. And most important, any casual motorist in the county could see the impossibility of almost 10% of the county's 640,000 acres ever having been paved, let alone that much since 1960. Furthermore, standard data from the Census of Agriculture showed that most of the county was being farmed. A few phone calls established that the 30,000-acre number originated with the Newsletter of the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and that same Newsletter carried other numbers that were obviously preposterous. One farming county supposedly had lost 47% of its farmland between 1960 and 1978. After a bit of prodding, Department of Agriculture acknowledged that the Newsletter numbers were "grossly inaccurate." But the people publicizing the numbers had never bothered to check their data even though the data defied belief. One can only assume that the numbers were used so uncritically -- including by the editorial writers of the News-Gazette -- simply because they fitted preconceptions and values. To make a very long story very short, several scholars-- including William Fischel of Dartmouth, Clifford Luttrell of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, then-President Emery Castle of Resources for the Future, and John Fraser Hart of the University of Minnesota -- began to dig into the data. We all found that the 3-million-acres-a-year rate was most implausible in light ofvarious sets of data from other sources, and given the nature of the surveys from which the NALS estimate was drawn. Shortly, we began to get a great deal of help from H. Thomas Frey, a geographer who had been the keeper of the urbanization and other land-use data for the Economic Research Service of the USDA for many years. Tom could find no support for the scary new numbers in the standard set of sources from which he yearly distilled his estimates, and he had no reason to believe that the rate had increased from the rather constant rates over several previous decades. So he kept us alerted to useful pieces of information as they appeared. This was the situation: Everyone agreed that in 1967 the total urban and built-up area in the United States (excluding highways, railroads, and airports) was between 31 and 35 million acres, It was also agreed that the rate of urbanization was slower in the 1960's than in the 1950's. Yet NALS said that over the ten years from 1967 to 1977, there was a 29 million acre increase in urban and built-up land. That is, over the course of more than two centuries, in the process of reaching a population of about 200 million people, the U.S. built towns on between 31 and 35 million acres. NALS asserted that suddenly in the course of another 10 years, and with a population increase of only 18 million people, the urban and built-up areas increased by 29 million acres (almost none of it due to transportation) -- a near-doubling. To put it differently, the long-run trend in the decades up to 1970 was about one million acres of total land urbanized per year, and constant or slowing down. The Soil Conservation Service in conjunction with NALS asserted that the rate then jumped to between 2 and 3 million acres yearly from 1967 to 1975 or 1977 (depending on which version you read). It is hard to understand how thoughtful journalists, let alone USDA researchers, could believe the NALS scenario. But believe it they did -- or at least they promulgated the scenario widely. This credulity belies the picture of journalists as hardboiled skeptics. Tom Frey also began to have a personal problem. He began this episode as an amiable organization man who went through channels, did everything by the book, and was accommodating whenever he could be. But the widely-publicised estimate did not square with the facts as he knew them, and he so informed his superiors. They systematically bypassed and ignored his assessment at each level all the way to the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland. As time passed, Frey became stronger and more outspoken even as the heat upon him intensified, and even though no one else in the USDA would speak up for his position. The pressure was always indirect, but its presence was sufficiently unmistakable that Frey worried about his future. He was forced into confrontation with Michael Brewer, research director of NALS. And his manuscripts were altered to the extent that he refused to put his name on them. Still, the more pressure his superiors put on him, the more strongly Frey insisted that his estimates were correct. And he distributed his estimates to those he felt would make use of them. He hardened into an authentic hero. He was not a whistle- blower in the conventional sense because he never "went public" himself. But he did his job effectively and with courage, the sort of government servant that the public deserves but whose existence we sometimes doubt. There were two bases given for the publicized 3 million-acre number; NALS shifted from one to the other when either was criticized: 1) A small-sample re-survey of part of the 1967 sample "inventory" of farms, done by the Soil Conservation Service. (A similar inventory had previously been done in 1958.) 2) The 1977 sample inventory. Seymour Sudman, an expert in research design, joined me in a technical analysis showing that there were so many flaws in both the 1975 re-survey and the 1977 survey that both should be considered totally unreliable. The flaws included an incredible boo-boo that put the right numbers in the wrong columns for big chunks of Florida. (Though I talk about "bases" for the NALS estimate, this may be giving it too much dignity. The 3-million-acre figure was presented in a booklet entitled "Where Have the Farmlands Gone"-- of which 500,000 copies were sent out -- weeks before the NALS "study" even opened its doors in the fall of 1979. Everything else that NALS did may be seen as an effort to defend its initial position. This would seem to have been a choice bit of business for the press to have exposed -- but it never happened.) Various government agencies were mobilized to rebut our criticisms. USDA had claimed that farmland was decreasing, to support the idea that farmland was being urbanized. But we showed that farmland was in fact increasing. The Journal of Soil and Water Conservation then wrote about the aftermath: [T]he new information [that Illinois farmland was increasing rather than decreasing] came out of a feud between the Illinois Department of Agriculture [then headed by John Block who became Secretary of Agriculture under Ronald Reagan] and Julian Simon... Simon's assertions did not sit so well with Illinois agriculture officials. They decided to contact the Bureau of Census in Washington because they could not believe that land in farms had increased. The Bureau responded that the 1969 and 1974 censuses had under-enumerated land in farms. That is, the Census Bureau now said that the earlier acreages for Illinois were really higher than the published figures showed, and hence there could have been an actual decline even though the record showed an increase. The "[r]evised figures showed that between 1974 and 1978 Illinois' land in farms had declined by 425,000 acres. The earlier figures had shown a 639,000 acre increase." NALS then got the Census bureau to produce a similar adjustment for the U. S. as a whole. "The result: The latest data show a national decline of 88 million acres in land in farms between 1969 and 1978--an annual rate of 9.8 million acres...", wrote The Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. Analysis of the adjustment showed it to be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. And eventually the Census of Agriculture revealed detailed data on the appropriate adjustment showing that land in Illinois farms and in cropland had, as we said, indeed increased from l974 to 1978. Ironically, John Block ran into trouble because of his belief that farmland was becoming more scarce. "Financing arrangements used by Agriculture Secretary John R. Block to prop up his multimillion-dollar farming empire, apparently shaken by falling land values...are raising questions on Capital Hill". His banker explained: "[W]thought we were going to have to feed the world." (Washington Post, June 3, 1984, p. A3). Nowadays, Block is president of the National Wholesale Grocers' Association, which has a stake in cheaper food production. And on July 16, 1988, Block wrote in the Washington Post criticising Lester Brown, who was and is one of the great enthusiasts of the NALS point of view: "In 1980, respected agricultural experts were predicting an impending food shortage and possible mass starvation...but the suggestion that the world [now] stands on the ragged edge of food shortages is preposterous...I don't buy the suggestion that the world is running out of productive land". Yeah man. Somewhere along the line the NALS principals fell out. In the press, NALS research director Michael Brewer accused NALS head man Robert Gray of inflating the key estimate for political purposes. By the time NALS closed down, Gray and Brewer were no longer speaking to each other because of this and related disagreements. After several articles by us academics in technical journals and in The Public Interest and The American Spectator, the urbanization-of-farmland scare seemed to die down a bit, but not before the private American Farmland Trust was organized in 1980 from former employees of NALS. Annually it spends a couple of million dollars a year to "protect" the U. S. from the danger of vanishing farmland. Now fast forward to 1984. The Soil Conservation Service issued a paper by Linda Lee of Oklahoma State University, on leave with SCS, that completely reversed the earlier scare figures and confirmed the estimates by "our side." And the accompanying press release (April 10, 1984, kindly sent by Tom Frey) made it clear that the former estimates were now being retracted. "[T]he acreage classified as urban and built-up land was 46.6 million acres in 1982, compared to 64.7 million acres reported in 1977." Please read that again. It means that whereas in 1977 the SCS had declared that 64.7 million acres had been "lost" to built-upon land, just five years later SCS admitted that the actual total was 46.6 million acres. That is, the 1977 estimate was fully fifty per cent too high, a truly amazing error for something so easy to check roughly as the urbanized acreage of the U. S. With unusual candor, the USDA press release added, "The 1982 data, which correlate closely with data from the 1980 U. S. Census of Population, [the census was not available at the time of the argument described above, but later fully corroborated Frey's estimates based on prior data] are considered accurate because of the availability of better maps, more time for data collection, many more sample points, and better quality control." The press release continued: "The 1977 estimate thus appears to have been markedly overstated." You might say so. It is good that the USDA chose to state the situation forthrightly even though it means acknowledging a mindboggling amount of egg on its face. But how could the USDA earlier on have been that ingenuous -- or that disingenuous? And how could it hold onto those estimates for several years in the face of persuasive criticism from several quarters? It is relevant that the press did nothing to uncover the scam. Even the press-release reversal and "confession" did not evoke coverage even though the original scare story was a front-page headliner for the Chicago Tribune and a cover story for news magazines. After waiting some months for the coverage that never appeared, I decided to contact some newspapers, thinking they would find it an interesting story because of the self-admitted government scam and the authentic "little man" hero who stood up to the "bosses." My across-the-alley neighbor who worked for The Wall Street Journal liked the idea, but the writer to whom he passed the material decided after several months to do nothing. I then got in touch with a reporter from the New York Times who works on related topics, but he was not interested. Nor the Washington Post. Nor the National Journal. Nor some others that I have forgotten. In short, nothing. In late 1985 I got in touch with Gregg Easterbrook of the Atlantic Monthly. Editor Bill Whitworth had excerpted three chapters from a 1981 book of mine, and therefore I figured the Atlantic might be interested and sympathetic. Both found the story appealing, and Easterbrook's piece "Vanishing Land Reappears" was in the July, 1986, edition. It confirms many of the facts mentioned here, and describes the political infighting involving NALS. Did the farmland crisis then vanish for lack of factual support? Fat chance. The false news continues to reverberate. One item that appeared in my mailbox was a July, 1986 newletter of Population-Environment Balance which says that "The National Agricultural Lands Study projects that at the current rate of conversion, Florida will lose all its prime agricultural land by the year 2000". And a July 14, 1987 AP story in the New York Times begins with "City sprawl, highways and other non- agricultural uses are taking American farmland at an annual rate that could involve acreage equal to the entire State of Missouri by the year 2030" (whatever that means). About half of the 00 column inches quote Robert J. Gray of the American Farmland Trust. No other person outside of the Department of Agriculture was quoted. The Fall, 1987 issue of the Newsletter of Californians for Population Stabilization that "The President and the Republican administration admit to the very conservative estimate that 2.1 million acres of agra-land are paved over in the United States on a yearly basis. Experts in this field believe the true figure to be closer to 3 million acres per year." And the 1987 Annual Report of the American Farmland Trust says that "Between 1967 and 1982 alone, urban sprawl accounted for the loss of forty million acres of American farmland...farmland conversion shows no signs of slowing". That statement and the program that AFT rests on it would seem to well justify the word "scam". Would anyone care to bet that this week some U. S. newspaper will not write again that 3 million acres are being paved over? Did the false bad news matter? Following upon NALS publicity, in 1980 Congress provided a tax break to owners who will attach a "conservation easement" to their land which will keep the land out of development and in agriculture in perpetuity. And to ease the owners even more, some states have programs to recompense the owners the difference between the current market value and the value after the easement. That is, as usual the public purse is being tapped to further the purpose of the special interest group. And in 1981 the Farmland Protection Policy Act was enacted by Congress. Hundreds of state and local laws restricting farmland conversion also were passed. And the American Farmland Trust's 1985 Annual Report brags that in that year "Congress adopted...a Conservation Reserve...Conceived and championed by AFT" as part of the 1985 Farm Bill. All this legislation was based on wrong information, and with no reasonable prospect of doing good for the nation, but with much prospect of causing harm to individuals and damage to the nation. So it goes in America. Free-lance journalist Julian Weiss gathered data for the Media Institute on how the print and electronic media handled the farmland-urbanization story. These were some of his findings: 1. "`We cultivated a good relationship with papers around the country,' declares Mr. Gray [NALS director]." Indeed they did. The first move was to mail their booklet with the 3- million-acre figure to 1800 newspapers, three to each newspaper. "Some material in the Study's `package' was `used verbatim' he says." 2. Of the 80 journalists Weiss interviewed in February-May 1983, 72 (90%) still remembered NALS. 3. "63 (86% of those who remembered it) felt that NALS influenced their own coverage of farmland conversion." 4. "Even after dissidents from the Lands Study [members of the staff who told Gray that the publicized estimates were wrong] offered convincing evidence of the distortions contained in the final report...the media...with few exceptions [did not report]these charges". **** Soil erosion is a related and exactly-parallel story. The same USDA press release of April 10, 1984 contained a second quiet bombshell: Erosion has been lessening rather than getting worse as the NALS claimed it was. Indeed, there is no evidence that lost of soil is a public problem, though of course it is a management problem for individual farmers just like maintenance of their farm equipment. But in this case, too, nothing appeared in print (to my knowledge) to make the public aware of this new non-danger and of how the public was misled. THE LARGER PICTURE Environment reporters seem to automatically credit reports of worsening trends by government agencies and environmentalist organizations in preference to those of us who point to improving trends in resources and environment. When shown the facts, these journalists usually say that even if cries of an environmental danger are somewhat overblown, they contain the germ of truth. I hope that the farmland cases sober them a it. There was no grain of truth, only a bushelfull of political deception and journalistic incompetence. Fears about running out of metals, grains, water and energy cannot be be so easily shown to rest on faulty or cooked databecause there have been no recantations by the sources of the erroneous information. But subsequent events have completely falsified the well-publicized 1970's gloomy prophecies of Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Garret Hardin, Daniel Yergin -- prophecies accepted by the entire Global Tomorrow Coalition of more than fifty environmentalist and population-control organizations with five million members. There is little reason to think that these other issues are different in nature from the farmland- urbanization and soil-erosion issues. (Copies of magazine debates with Ehrlich, Brown, and Hardin are available if you want the gory details.) In summary, the press and television have consistently purveyed a wrong-headed vision to the public of resource availability and the environmental condition. In so doing, they have aided and abetted government agencies and "environmentalist" organizations in scaring Americans about such non-problems as the disappearance and erosion of farmland. Years after the original source retracted the alarming reports, the press and environmental groups continue to spread the false information. I come not in anger but in pain. Journalists take pride in their objectivity. But in reporting on population growth, natural resources, and the environment, objectivity goes out the window. The price in economic loss, misguided policies, and damage to national morale has yet to be calculated. But the costs may be fearfully high. /page 1 /article8 washjou1/ April 3, 1989