Read this post on Josh’s Substack: Powering Spaceship Earth.
Since 1973, the Pacific Legal Foundation has been suing the government and notching victories. I joined the launch webinar for their new Environment and Natural Resource practice last week to discuss policy barriers to flourishing and development with them (the webinar is on YouTube and linked below).
PLF could not have chosen a better day to host a webinar about this topic. Why? Because July 24, 2025, marks two diametrically opposed events. First, it was Earth Overshoot Day. And second, it was Pioneer Day.
We’re not overshooting. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.
Earth Overshoot Day marks “the date when humanity will have used up nature’s entire annual budget of ecological resources and services.” According to Global Footprint Network, humanity uses resources equivalent to almost two Earths. Fortunately, the one thing you should know about the analyses underlying these kinds of estimates is that they’re bunk.
Before diving into the details, step back. If these estimates were correct, then surely we could point to stacks of lost minerals and resources. Humanity must have entirely consumed many of the elements Earth’s bounty provides us. We must have spent our stock of many of Spaceship Earth’s supplies down to zero. At least, according to the internal logic of the ecological footprint.
Well, what are they? Which resources have we run out of? Several species of animals and plants (too many!) have died out. Extinctions of this kind have at times been humanity’s fault. Though at the same time, extinctions have been common since the beginning of life.
Yet the actual empty gauges in our storehouse are few. The journalist Ed Conway, author of Material World, for example, started a series devoted to this question. It ended after a single entry. Here’s how Conway explains it (with my emphasis):
All of which is why it’s about time I informed you, dear readers, that I failed. After a single post (Malachite) I’m taking the decision to retire the Lost Materials series. Why? Because in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything.
The underlying process here is unsurprising to most economists. As a resource becomes scarce, it becomes more valuable. And so do its alternatives. As Andrew McAfee documented in his book More From Less, this creates a natural incentive to economize on resources. Resource consumption has been in decline at the same time that global prosperity has skyrocketed. McAfee puts it this way, “dematerialization happened because of the combination of two powerful forces: capitalism and technological progress.”
With this in mind, the appearance of precision in saying that we are collectively using 1.8 Earths is statistical malpractice. Discard it. It is not a useful tool for understanding environmental tradeoffs. The supposed overshooting misses the mark.
A better way to think about our environmental management and policy questions is that we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
Our environmental rules and laws have become a twisted form of themselves, better understood as anti-environmental laws. The so-called Magna Carta of environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), was a chief target during the webinar. NEPA, rather than protect the environment, has become a tool to create delays that do much more harm than good in environmental terms. NEPA’s role is now to slow solar farms, kill transmission lines, discourage mining projects that would enable battery development, and to pull staff away from active fire prevention and forest management to fill out paperwork instead.
The reason for this is that environmentalism focuses on limits, rather than humanity’s response to environmental changes. It entirely ignores humanity’s proven track record of confronting and solving shortages through innovation. Infamously and incorrectly, Paul Ehrlich predicted growing suffering. As he put it in a 1970 interview, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”1 It’s hard to think of another person who was as influential as he was incorrect. The world is far from perfect, but we are wealthier and more capable than ever.
The pioneering story of innovation
On the webinar, PLF’s Paige Gilliard made the case for an abundance approach to environmental challenges. Speaking about how humans harness the natural world for good:
The scarcity mindset really ignores these benefits. It sees all human impact on the environment as a negative. And as a result, it’s restricting our access to these resources that are necessary… What makes the abundance mindset unique is that it recognizes the ability of humans to adapt to their environment, but not just adapt to survive, but adapt to make it better.
Charles Yates, another of PLF’s attorneys, weighed in on the same note:
The long-term vision for PLF in environmental law is to transform it. And what I mean by that is to transform environmental law and regulation from a tool of scarcity and restriction to a platform for prosperity and abundance. … To shift away from the sort of zero-sum thinking that’s really pervaded environmental law and regulation.
This is exactly the right shift needed in environmental policy today, a philosophical reorientation. And it echoes the spirit and history of Pioneer Day.
Each July 24, Utah commemorates the arrival of pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. It was no paradise.2 The historian Jerry Enzler says the early pioneers described the Salt Lake Valley as “an interminable waste of sagebrush.” And quotes one new resident saying it was “The paradise of the lizard, the cricket, and the rattlesnake.”
Most apt, however, is Enzler’s final note about the area. “The Mormons transformed the valley,” he concludes. Today, the valley is home to more than a million people.
Likewise, the environmental challenges we face today—air quality, climate change, and other forms of pollution—require transformations of the human environment. They’re invitations to build better. They ask us to pioneer again.
Since at least the 1960s, the dominant strain of environmentalism includes a denial of humanity’s capacity to solve problems like these. It urges less for all, instead. Though this form of environmentalism argues that such limits and controls protect the planet, it’s really selling humanity short. It’s a philosophy of retreat. Wanting more for all of us isn’t a betrayal of environmentalism. We need to take our responsibilities seriously, but also trust in our ability to make tomorrow better than today.
Or, as Mark Miller, PLF’s director of this new division of environmental optimists, concluded, “The future is not built on fear or control. It’s built on freedom and innovation.”
Law, Land, and Liberty Webinar
You can also read Megan Jenkins on motivations for PLF’s work here:
[1] There are so many debunkings of Paul Ehrlich’s work in this area that it is a wonder he still receives attention. To understand how poorly Ehrlich’s predictions have fared, consider how today’s demographers predict shrinking global populations. In 2018, Charles C. Mann wrote a piece in praise of the wizards feeding us all. Just two years ago, in 2023, CBS aired an interview with him. Human Progress wrote an excellent critique. And, in response to the same 2023 CBS review, David Henderson noted this heartwrenching letter in the WSJ by Kenneth Emde of Woodbury, Minnesota: I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.
[2] It’s common folklore that no one believed the Utah area to be worth settling. This stems from a misquotation of the explorer Jim Bridger supposedly saying that he would pay $1,000 for the first bushel of corn grown because it could not be done. In reality, he simply advised against bringing people in large numbers to settle before they knew if the area would be suitable for farming. A longer excerpt of Bridger’s advice from Enzler’s biography: “[I]t would not be prudent to bring a great population to the basin until they ascertain whether a grain would grow or not. I would give one thousand dollars if I knew an ear of corn could be ripened in these mountains.” In contrast to the folklore, the historian Leonard Arrington’s book, The Great Basin Kingdom, notes that conversations with Jim Bridger and others “increased” the confidence of the pioneers in the potential for settling in the area. Though this might have been about the Bear River Valley farther north. At the same time, in Arrington’s biography of Brigham Young, it’s suggested that Jim Bridger advised that it was too cold to grow crops in the areas north of Salt Lake (pages 141 and 172).