When I fly, I always insist on taking the window seat.  Maybe it’s the 12-year-old boy in me -- I like seeing the world as Matchbox cars and ants-as-people scurrying about.  Even as an adult and a resident of a large metropolis, I'm always curious as to exactly what this modern expanse of planned communities and shopping meccas really looks like from above.

I recently took a flight from New Orleans, across the entire center of the country, into Chicago.  Upon the flight's descent, about 50 miles outside of Chicago, I had a revelation.  Or, more apt, a bit of confusion.  I had flown 800-plus miles, most of it unobstructed by clouds, and all along I was asking myself -- where exactly is this supposedly overwhelming urban sprawl?  Certainly there were splotches or urbanity here and there.  Certainly there were rare specks of civilization within a virtual universe of green and brown.  But sprawl?  Relative to the entirety of the journey, I just didn't see it.

All of this was little more than an interesting observation until the following day, when I read of the United Nations releasing an atlas entitled One Planet Many People -- a book comparing both modern and decades-old satellite photos of certain areas, supposedly showing the global devastation of man.  Interesting.  The intention of the UN project certainly contradicted my observations, but I assumed they had a lot more resources for statistical analysis than I did during the few cross-country trips I've taken -- so I dug into the book.

What I found, however, wasn't actually a shocking exposé on how man is destroying his planet.  A valiant marketing effort, maybe.  Ignoring the pithy comments throughout the volume, and the media's guesswork reviews of it, the book -- when examined beneath the surface -- is actually an excellent exposé on the flaws of the fundamental environmentalist argument.

Missing The "Of"

While environmentalist causes are almost always born anecdotally, they're certainly not always absent of statistics -- and the pages of this UN atlas are chock full of them.  Just enough, as they say, to be dangerous.  You see, the facts and figures sprinkled throughout this book -- and the bulk of the environmentalist argument in total -- are not necessarily invalid, but they always seem to be missing one concept.  That concept is "of."

X number of acres of rain forest have been cut down.  OK, but of how many total?  Cities have grown X amount per year, on average.  I believe you, but how much of our remaining space is left?  Carbon dioxide emissions for the decade were X tons.  Great, that seems like a lot, but what specific events are honestly going to happen because of this?

Unfortunately, the caveat question "of" often elicits a lot of "I don't knows," "maybes," and "possiblies."  Unless you're one who believes the end result must be dire merely because its source statistic appears in print, the numbers presented by the traditional environmentalist argument are rarely meaningful.

Close Zoom, Lost Focus

Fine, so people don't like math -- math is boring, I get it.  People do like pretty pictures -- hence, to prove its point, the UN is releasing an atlas rather than volumes of statistical analysis.  Now, I love nifty satellite photos as much as the next guy -- but upon looking at these pictures, any search for true significance will elicit far less than the proverbial one-thousand words.

Photo after photo -- comparing specific areas decades ago with those today -- you cannot deny that humans have had some effect on the planet.  But how much?  Seeing as the majority of photos are close-ups of specific cities, the best I have to go off of shows that coastlines are colored differently, a few trees are now buildings, and cities are growing.  Yet again, as with most arguments from environmentalists, you're left to assume that merely because some form of photographic evidence exists, it must be enough to be "globally devastating."

Much of focus of the atlas is urban sprawl.  A subject that I -- along with most environmentalists -- have plenty of circumstantial knowledge of.  I live in the suburbs -- exactly halfway between urban-industrial-monstrosity and out-in-the-sticks.  I see on a daily basis where the argument comes from culturally.  City slickers don't like having to drive farther and farther to reach those quaint little villages where time stands still.  Ruralists don't like their sleepy country roads turned into shopping malls, cookie-cutter houses, and golf courses.  More often than not the first and most intense arguments are personal, and the environmentalism is backed into. 

However, When you look at it globally (which, ironically, this atlas from the UN doesn’t often bother to do), the effects add up to a heck of a lot less than "devastating."  Go ahead, look at any global population density map, or just take a cross-country road trip.  There is still plenty of "out-in-the-sticks" for us to eat up.  In the end, even after millennia of seemingly massive population growth, humans still take up a minuscule amount of the planet.  Multiply it by five, ten, fifteen and it still remains basically infinitesimal.

The collection of photographs in this book -- and most photographic environmental evidence, in reality -- only proves one thing: our effects on the planet are really evident only when zoomed in.

Microcosm, Macrocosm, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Beyond the admittedly pretty pictures, this attempt at an atlas of man's destruction crystallizes but one thing: environmentalists love microcosms.  If something can be proven gravely perilous in a 40 square mile area -- even anecdotally -- it must then extrapolate out globally.  It's been the linchpin of the environmentalist movement forever: coal smoke in a few large cities during the early 1900's, a few miles of coastline destroyed by an oil tanker crash, the mere existence of pollutants in relatively tiny metropolitan areas.

We've heard it seemingly forever, but the global devastation never quite seems to happen.  We've been safe thus far -- throughout industrial revolutions, oil landgrabs, and periods of rampant consumption -- and there has yet to be any solid, fact-based rationale to explain how we won't always find a way to grow beyond slight environmental problems.

The doomsday drum, nonetheless, continues to beat.  I got a kick out of Reuters' particular review of the UN atlas, as it summarized the foolishness of the environmentalist attitude perfectly:

Disfigurement?  Maybe.  The face of the planet?  Hardly.  Environmentalists can indeed see the forest, but apparently for something exaggeratedly different than the trees.

Christopher Falvey is editor of The VN/VO.

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