How many big environmental schemes must lead to terrible results before we realize that nature is complex and that mankind's power to control it is limited? There's a long history of man assuming he can readily manipulate complicated natural phenomena. Not all such attempts result in disaster, but some do.
Do you remember the 1990s spotted owl scare in the Pacific Northwest? Environmental activists feared that logging was destroying the habitat of the owls, whose numbers were dropping. They felt certain that if logging were banned in the region, the spotted owl would enjoy a comeback. So the federal government halted logging on millions of acres, killing thousands of jobs in the timber industry.
But it didn't work. The Seattle Times reported in 2008 that the spotted owl was "closer than ever to extinction." But man wasn't the cause. The trouble is that an aggressive cousin of the spotted owl, the barred owl, moved into the region, killing some spotted owls and competing with others for limited supplies of rodents. The effort to save owls may have been noble, but it didn't help the owls, and it cost a lot of people jobs.
In a separate but similar case, residents of Kentucky are battling the ill effects of a scheme that reintroduced elk to their state. Starting in 1997, 1,500 elk were hauled to Kentucky and set free. Elk had existed in Kentucky prior to the War Between the States, so some people thought they should again roam Kentucky's hills. The plan was "heralded as an important ecology and tourism program," The Associated Press reported.
But the elk did what animals do: They multiplied. There are more than 10,000 elk in Kentucky today, and they are damaging yards and gardens and causing serious crashes on the state's roads. Just since 2005, more than 100 elk have died in car collisions - and that doesn't include the far greater number of collisions that are believed to have occurred but that were not reported to law enforcement. If you've ever had the misfortune of striking an ordinary deer in your vehicle, you know how harrowing that is. Imagine hitting a 700-pound elk instead! In frustration, Kentucky has had to resort to allowing residents to hunt the elk and thin the destructive herd.
It's not that the motives of those who brought elk back to the state were bad. Who, after all, wouldn't marvel to see a majestic elk on a rural hill? But it just wasn't possible to predict exactly how the elk would behave when they returned.
This was a relatively narrow experiment in nature that quickly got out of hand. So shouldn't we be skeptical of environmentalists who feel certain that man not only can accurately predict but can control "global warming" - a far more complex subject than managing an elk herd - by doing things such as harshly clamping down on manufacturing and energy production?
Isn't it wiser to acknowledge that there are things about nature that mankind can't easily control - and that real harm may be done by costly, dubious attempts to control those things?