Oh My God! I couldn't believe my ears when a turned on the car radio to our National Radio Station, the ABC, and there was Paul Ehrlich being given youthful deference by a female interviewer. It was obvious this young thing didn't have a clue to her guest's history of being a gold-plated false prophet. He makes Cock Robin, of the Sky-is-Falling fame, look downright clear-headed.
Actually, it's a miracle he's dropped in on us in Australia, since by his many past predictions he should be half-starved, very thirsty and short of petrol for his plane. Yet this professor of Population Studies at Stanford University is among us again, well-fed and watered and cheerful predicting some fresh apocalypse, this time he's on the global warming bandwagon.
He first started his bizarre career of doomsaying in 1968 and scared the bejeezus out of me and my young friends with his best-selling book, The Population Bomb. "The battle to feed humanity is over," he declared. "In the 1970's, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
This was heavy sh*t for my generation to swallow. The Earth had just turned over its two billionth person and if, he warned, we started nudging 3 billion we were goners! And in 1971 he was hard at it saying mass starvation would be visited on even the richest countries. He added that by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. He even bragged, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Another of his 1970 predictions stated that in 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. Actually, the very opposite happened. So now, if you're near the coast, stick your head outside. That smell is not of rotting fish, but horse manure!
As the population kept climbing to 3, then 4, then 5 billion he kept up with his dire predictions, not missing a beat. It is an indictment of the West's intelligentsia (read: elite academic assholes) that Ehrlich is not only still taken seriously, but rewarded well for scaring us stupid...and stupidly. In 1990, he received a Swedish Royal Academy of Science prize and the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Award" for promoting a "greater public understanding of environmental problems", proving you will be forgiven any wild mistake or exaggeration if it's for a good cause. Amazing!
That explains Tim Flannery, Al Gore and David Suzuki, all made rich by predicting our doom as the prophet class, which likes to think it can see what the masses can't and likes even more an excuse to to control the mob's more unruly appetites. Thankfully a few academics have at least done their civic duty in debunking Ehrlich. Economist Julian Simon was so offended by Ehrlich's claim that by 1985, mankind will enter a genuine era of scarcity...he challenged him to a bet. Name 5 commodities (copper, nickel, gold whatever) that will lose value by 1990. Ehrlich lost and had to pay up. Yet here is this catastrophist loser bobbing up again in Australia now espousing the global warming mantra and the collapse yet to come.
The Way I See It....yet again Ehrlich underestimates human ingenuity and exaggerates our sins. The planet is not toxic; our pollution laws are ever stricter. We're not short of fossil fuels: oil shale is the next big thing. We're better able to survive pandemics. Our climate shows no sign of warming or dangerous disruption. And population growth is slowing at the 7 billion mark - not because we're running out of food, but because wealth is a contraceptive.
We face challenges Prof Erhlich, but see how brilliantly we've met them so far. Those extra billions of people you feared have been fed by even more spectacular advances in farming and breeding techniques, backed by better storage and transport. The U.N. may be slow to act at times but famines can be better handled with the world's food storage capacity. Only in one area do we seem to have gone backwards. We seem more irrational these days and for this Mr Ehrlich you are not only its evidence but its founding father.
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