As for global deforestation, "the world is not being deforested; it is being reforested in general."

"And so if you're an objective scientist," he says, "you cannot put a number to the rate of species lost. But I believe we're exaggerating the numbers.

"What's unstated in all this is that when you deforest, you go to zero, that you go to pavement. That's how I put it, that 'you go to pavement.' This is why people get mad at me, because at this point in my talks I show a slide of pavement, but the pavement has weeds growing through it. I can take you to places of abandoned roads in the rain forest that have trees growing out of them."

Trees sprouting from the asphalt! Birds perching on the branches, insects crawling, worms boring, bees buzzing, lizards walking, moss growing on the tree trunk!

"Look at the example of Puerto Rico," Lugo says. "This island has a documented deforestation rate of 90 percent, and it has a documented loss of primary forest of 97 to 98 percent. So here's an island that has lost in the past, in the recent past, up to the '50s - I was already born when the island was at the peak of deforestation - it's lost almost all of its forest.

"The first surprise is that there are more bird species here now than ever, in part due to the invasion of nonindigenous species. The second surprise is that much of the forest has grown back."

On Lugo's conference table is a book open to two photographs.

"Now, where I'm gonna send you today," he says, "is here."


He points to a road that winds through the western fringe of El Yunque, the Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rain forest in the US national forest system. Picture One, an aerial photograph taken in 1951, shows the area on the west side of the road:clear-cut, mowed down, absolutely denuded of trees. It looks like stumps and dead grass. The east side of the road, by contrast, is deep, dark, and flush with vegetation, an untouched virgin rain forest.

Picture Two shows the same area 13 years later: from the aerial photograph, both sides of the road are identical.

"You can see that it recovered," says Lugo. "So, you take your car and you ride through these forests, and you tell me."

Puerto Rico Route 186 is not far away, about 30 minutes by traffic jam. The road is paved but unmarked, slightly more than a lane wide, just enough space for two cars to pass without the sound of impact. You drive toward the mountains, white clouds bunched above, isolated raindrops spattering the windshield, and in five or six minutes there's tropical forest on both sides. Tall ferns, flame trees, mahogany trees, humongous green leafy plants, plus massive clumps of bamboo - stalks that tower 20 or 30 feet overhead.

Julian Simon: The facts are fundamental.

Garrett Hardin: The facts are not fundamental. The theory is fundamental. - from a 1982 debate with the UC Santa Barbara biologist The doomslayer-doomsayer debate, Simon thinks, is an opposition between fact and bad theory, a case of empirical reality versus abstract principles that purport to define the way things work but don't.

"It's the difference," he says, "between a speculative analysis of what must happen versus my empirical analysis of what has happened over the long sweep of history."

The paradox is that those abstract principles and speculative analyses seem so very logical and believable, whereas the facts themselves, the story of what has happened, appear wholly illogical and impossible to explain. After all, people are fruitful and they multiply but the stores of raw materials in the earth's crust certainly don't, so how can it be possible that, as the world's population doubles, the price of raw materials is cut in half?

It makes no sense. Yet it has happened. So there must be an explanation.

Which, Simon discovered, is exactly what has happened throughout history. So if you look at the facts - as opposed to spinning out theories - you find precisely the reverse of the situation described by Malthus. Just the opposite!

Simon acquired his habit of looking up the facts in early childhood, at the dinner table of the family home in Newark, New Jersey. He'd be in some argument with his father over the benefits of exercise, the price of butter, or the health value of air conditioning, and whether from ignorance, pigheadedness, or general perversity, his father would always take some outlandish, off-the-wall viewpoint, such as: "The price of butter is 8 cents a pound."


Julian: "No, it's not, it's 80 cents a pound. It's in the newspaper, take a look."

Father: "I don't have to look. I know it's 8 cents a pound."

Julian: "Do you want to bet? I'll bet you it's not 8 cents a pound."

His father would never take the bet, but Julian would go to the library anyway, look things up in books, and come back with a ream of facts and data. His father, however, couldn't care less.

"I clearly didn't like my father," says Simon.

It's an attitude that drives him crazy to this day - people who know in advance what the truth is, who don't need to avail themselves of any "facts." But Simon loves facts and figures, he loves tables, charts, graphs, information arranged in rows and columns. Tabulations, the slopes of curves, diagrams, pie charts, histograms - he's a regular Mr. Data.

Of course, since people don't particularly like to have their cherished beliefs contradicted by heaps of facts served up on a platter, Simon has never been Mr. Popularity. He got fired from jobs in the navy because he hated the customary ass-kissing, sucking-up, and yessir requirements. Nor has he ever been much for schmoozing, glad-handing, or the latter-day manners of get-along, go-along.

"Socially I was always a bit marginal," he admits. "Also, there always lurked inside me some irreverence for authority and orthodoxy."

None of this held him back academically. He got a bachelor's in experimental psychology from Harvard, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and, two years later, in 1961, a PhD in business economics from the same school.