The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 17, 2005

If you're looking for the difference it makes that conservatives now run Georgia, no better example exists than a bill that Gov. Sonny Perdue signed into law Thursday.

It demonstrates that while environmental alarmists most commonly see sweeping edicts from like-minded judges and regulators as the preferred solutions, conservative alternatives exist --- alternatives that don't involve regulatory taking, hidden taxes and artificial limits on growth.

It demonstrates, too, that alternatives exist to having taxpayers buy and hold endangered, environmentally sensitive or historic sites that today's generations are morally obligated to preserve. Responsible stewardship of the land is a Southerner's obligation of birth, the legacy of an agricultural heritage that expected generations of family to inhabit the same earth, to drink and fish the same waters and breathe the same air.

Southerners don't need direct-mail appeals or doomsday alarmists to inform them of their obligations to the environment. They know it. The question always is how, fairly and accurately, to measure the environmental threats and how to invest finite public resources to achieve most good --- understanding all the while that our families will inhabit these spaces for a thousand years or more.

Steven F. Hayward, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and a fellow in law and economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, has been principal author since its launch in 1994 of a yearly Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. The new assessment will be released this week.

In the past, Hayward notes, he and other index authors have pointed out "the major difficulties in developing meaningful indicators, including the lack of consistent high-quality trend data for many environmental problems, and the problem of assigning weights among incommensurate environmental conditions."

The Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, founded in 1995 to honor former U.S. Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.), who was killed in a plane crash in 1991, gathers data on the state of the environment. The Heinz Center chose 103 indicators, Hayward writes. "Of the 103 indicators selected, only 33 (or one third) currently have adequate data on which to base conclusions; another 25 indicators (24 percent) have incomplete data sets. Thirty-one indicators (30 percent) have inadequate data, and another 14 indicators (14 percent) need further development to be of use."

The point is that a responsible, fact-based analysis is always missing in reporting about what's happening in the environment. The public rarely knows, for example, that forests are not disappearing, that the greatest threat to them came between 1850 and 1900 and that since 1920 the forest area has been stable. Between 1990 and 2000, it actually grew by 9.5 million acres. The truth remains hidden, though level-headed scientists, like former University of Georgia professor Harold Brown, author of "The Greening of Georgia," have attempted to offer balance to hysteria.

And, as Brown and Hayward have noted in the past, air quality has never been better, either, despite agenda-group rhetoric that would claim otherwise.

The law Perdue signed last week is called the Georgia Land Conservation Act. It's one of the good stories, often overshadowed in the bumper-sticker rhetoric. The law sets aside $75 million in public dollars, combined with $25 million privately given, to create a fund that will be used to entice Georgians to buy development rights to pastures, farm and timber, and other natural areas It could also be used to buy land for parks and hunting. If the mountain stays green, government doesn't have to own it.

The law sets up a system to buy threatened land, based on established priorities, strip it of development rights, and resell it. It doesn't levy a hidden tax on real estate transactions, as had been previously proposed. It recognizes that conservation is a shared responsibility.

It is, simply, a moderate approach based on sound conservative principles to guarantee that we fulfill our quality-of-life obligation to Georgians a thousand years hence to leave them a green, inhabitable state.

Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at jwooten@ajc.com