Popcorn: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Water, Water Everywhere

A recent report concerning the sustainability of Egyptian agriculture1 provided some interesting facts about Egypt’s potential water resources. Long pictured as an international basket case in regards to its water supplies and needs, Egypt has routinely been relegated to one of the very last positions waterwise among the world’s nations.

Indeed, the Worldwatch Institute’s “Vice-President for Research,” Sandra Postel, in her book Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, deliberately manipulated the statistics of Egypt’s (and other nations’) water resources by failing to include all exogenous supplies of water in the resource base. She thereby managed to create a considerably more dire situation than was actually warranted.2

But, according to the new Swedish report, “Current estimates indicate that the total groundwater available in the Nile Valley and Delta is about 500 billion m³ …[which can be utilized] on a sustainable basis [at a rate of] about 4.9 billion m³ [per year], [the] estimated …annual recharge rate.”3 Since a per capita supply of 1,000 cubic meters {m·‘) yearly is the accepted benchmark dividing water-scarce from water-adequate nations, it is apparent that this currently untapped supply can provide nearly 10 percent of the water needs of Egypt’s 56 million people.

Treated wastewater “from the Greater Cairo area…[of some] 1.9 billion m³ [yearly]…could [also] become an important supply of water,” providing another 3 percent of the nation’s needs.

The report’s real eye-opener, however, was the supply of “fossil” groundwater — not renewable — available in the Western Desert, New Valley and the Sinai Desert: “preliminary estimates indicate that the total groundwater storage in New Valley [alone] is of the order of 40,000 billion m³ .…” That’s a supply of water sufficient to meet the needs of Egypt’s current population for more than 700 years, without ever tapping the Nile!

Although it may involve considerable engineering and outlays of money to mine the water, the fact is the water is there and the work can be done utilizing already existing technology.

There’s Still Lots of Fish in the Sea…

Over the past five years many negative comments have been made concerning the world’s fragile fisheries; the estimated world catch has begun to decline; all the world’s fishing areas have been overfished; some species of fish are actually in danger of extinction.

Although there is justifiable concern about some of the methods used by commercial fisherman — the huge drift nets for instance and the wasteful unintended nettings — the modest apparent decline in the total world fish catch from 100 million metric tons (MMT) annually to “‘only” 97 MMT, has been greatly over hyped.

In the United States, for instance, the total U.S. fish catch has actually been rising. The table, below, compares totals from the first year after a 200-mile territorial limit was imposed with the most recent available data. Some of the increase is due to the fact that Alaskan waters were formerly fished by foreign fleets and thus the new higher yield really may not have grown by much. Nonetheless, five of the six U.S. fishing areas registered increments in their fish catch over the past 16 years.

…And Plenty of Trees in the Forest

Despite all the overpopulation propaganda to the contrary, United States forest lands, especially in the East, have actually been increasing substantially for decades. As one author termed it, the reforestation of the Eastern United States has been a veritable “explosion of green.”5

Consider these facts; today New Hampshire is 90 percent covered by forest; Vermont, just 35 percent woods in 1850, is 80 percent forested today; Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island are nearly 60 percent forest. In New York State forest cover has expanded by over one million acres a decade. Indeed, throughout the eastern U.S. the forest cover today “is much like it must have been prior to the American Revolution.”

Not only have the forests recovered but so too has much of the life they always supported. Whitetail deer now number more than 18 million — 40 times their number in the late 1800s. Turkeys, which had vanished in Massachusetts, were reintroduced in 1972: a population of 37 birds now numbers over 10,000. Some 40,000 black bears roam in the East; one was recently found wandering the streets of Bethesda, MD, just eight miles from the White House!