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02-02-2008, 07:22 AM
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Isn't all this talk of an apocalypse getting a bit boring?
Chris Berg
January 27, 2008
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THIS year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich's influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and '80s.
Ehrlich's book provides a lesson we still haven't learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.
It's easy to predict environmental collapse, but it never actually seems to happen.
The anniversary of The Population Bomb should put contemporary apocalyptic predictions in their proper context. If anything, our world and the environment just keeps getting better.
Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early '70s. And these doomsayers weren't just cranks or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.
Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.
These predictions were picked up by people eager to push their own agendas. And a subgenre of films arose to deal with the "inevitable" environment and population crisis. Soylent Green (1973) depicted a world where all food was chemically produced, and other films imagined dystopias where amoral bureaucrats strictly controlled the population just the sort of things advocated in The Population Bomb.
In retrospect, these fears seem a little bit silly. The green revolution that was brought about by advances in agricultural biotechnology came pretty close to eliminating the problem of food scarcity. Nor did the alarmists expect the large changes in demography and fertility rates that have occurred during the past few decades.
Nevertheless, for people in the 1970s, predictions of apocalypse through overpopulation and famine were just as real as the predictions of an apocalypse caused by climate change are today. And, just like today, environmental activists and their friends in politics were lining up to propose dramatic changes to avert the crisis.
For instance, the vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation wrote just last week in The Age that we needed to imagine global suffering before we can tackle climate change through "nation-building" whatever that is.
But there are substantial grounds for optimism on almost every measure, the state of the world is improving.
Pollution is no longer the threat it was seen to be in the 1970s, at least in the developed world. Changes in technology, combined with our greater demand for a clean environment, have virtually eliminated concerns about pungent waterways and dirty forests. Legislation played some role in this, but as Indur Goklany points out in his recent study, The Improving State of the World, the environment started getting better long before such laws were passed.
Goklany reveals that strong economies, not environment ministers, are the most effective enforcers of cleanliness in our air and water. Indeed, the world's 10 most polluted places are in countries where strong economic growth has historically been absent Russia, China, India and Kyrgyzstan have not really been known for their thriving consumer capitalism.
Other indices, too, show that humanity's future is likely to be bright. Infant mortality has dramatically declined, as has malnutrition, illiteracy, and even global poverty.
And there are good grounds for hope that we can adapt to changing climates as well. History has shown just how capable we are of inventing and adapting our way out of any sticky situation and how we can do it without crippling our economies or imposing brutal social controls.
Environmental alarmists have become more and more like those apocalyptic preachers common in the 19th century always expecting the Rapture on this date and, when it doesn't come, quickly revising their calculations.
Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment. But four decades after The Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more cheerfully.
Chris Berg is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.
| http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinio...e#contentSwap1
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02-02-2008, 02:11 PM
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If anything, our world and the environment just keeps getting better.
| You... can't be serious... can you?
I don't believe in any kind of apocalypse, but I do believe the quality of life will continue to decline, AS IT HAS. http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/HRQOL/Trend...ry=1&Measure=1
So, since everything is getting better... I wonder why health is on a steady decline.. care to explain? |
02-02-2008, 02:25 PM
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"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861
Remember, remember, the 11th of september The Gunpowder Treason and plot;
I see of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot..... |
02-02-2008, 03:24 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios  You... can't be serious... can you?
I don't believe in any kind of apocalypse, but I do believe the quality of life will continue to decline, AS IT HAS. http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/HRQOL/Trend...ry=1&Measure=1
So, since everything is getting better... I wonder why health is on a steady decline.. care to explain? | People are living longer. Care to explain?
By most measures, we are better off today than we were 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago.
There are a number of possible reasons for your question, from the caloric intake to how people assess their own health.
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02-02-2008, 06:32 PM
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Originally Posted by Toro People are living longer. Care to explain?
By most measures, we are better off today than we were 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago.
There are a number of possible reasons for your question, from the caloric intake to how people assess their own health. | Great. People are living longer, shittier lives. This is a cause for celebration, really! Break out the champagne and streamers. |
02-02-2008, 10:18 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios Great. People are living longer, shittier lives. This is a cause for celebration, really! Break out the champagne and streamers. | Its fascinating that you are complaining on a medium that makes communication and commerce easier which didn't even exist as a ubiquitous entity 15 years ago.
Things sure are terrible.
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02-02-2008, 10:45 PM
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Originally Posted by Toro Its fascinating that you are complaining on a medium that makes communication and commerce easier which didn't even exist as a ubiquitous entity 15 years ago.
Things sure are terrible. | I'm not saying it's all bad. I have personally led a relatively happy life, but I also don't pay income tax, and was saved from watching rubbish propaganda media by some friends of mine. But I see the majority of American's leading empty useless little lives, living in poverty and repression. People have lost their sense of purpose, accepting increasingly shitty jobs and shittier pay. Jobs that remove them from any kind of meaning in life. The average credit card debt is 15 thousand dollars, people are digging ditches for themselves, buying shit they don't need with money they don't have, only to be in so much debt that they have to get another job.... It's not any kind of life to be leading, and this speaks of many working class families busting their ass to feed their kids.  |
02-02-2008, 11:53 PM
|  | Great promise | | Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Australia and bloody dry it is too
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Rep Power: 160 | | And on the other hand.... http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinio...801097280.html Quote:
Green revolution could still blow up in our face
Colin Fraser
February 3, 2008
It's too early to dismiss the prediction of the world running out of food.
IF YOU happen to have a copy in your bookcase of Paul Ehrlich's sensational and much-maligned book, The Population Bomb, perhaps you should resist the temptation to donate it to your local op shop.
Forty years ago, Ehrlich, a learned Stanford professor, predicted that food shortages and a rising population would soon starve millions and create world-wide disaster.
His ominous forecasts caught the imagination of the public and were a considerable contributor to the rise of the anti-global warming movement.
But, as Chris Berg pointed out on this page last week, they proved spectacularly wrong.
As the crisis years passed without accelerated starvation, Ehrlich emerged with egg on his face. Many observers, like Berg, began to suspect that he and other doomsayers were simply pessimists. Soon the wider climate change debate moved on and claimed centre stage.
Ehrlich's timing was doubly unfortunate. His focus was specifically on the world's ability to grow the food an expanding population would need for survival. His theories were discredited by the arrival of the so-called green revolution. The credit went to new seed varieties, new fertilisers, more scientific crop selection and multiple cropping. The rise in rural productivity, particularly in India and China, was spectacular. It was felt that similar gains could be made worldwide.
Remarkably, the real driver of the green revolution has escaped popular attribution. It was the arrival in the 1950s of cheap electric and diesel pumps, which have enabled millions of small farmers to tap groundwater. Without that water there would have been no revolution.
Where an Indian peasant needed an ox and a full day to irrigate an acre, now he could lift the water to irrigate 10 or 20 times as much land.
But year by year the water tables have been falling. More powerful and more expensive pumps have been needed to lift water from greater depths and water quality has deteriorated. When the deep underground water is tapped out, land at the surface commonly subsides.
It is a worldwide phenomenon. In California, for instance, markers show where the land surface originally lay, some 30 feet above the present levels.
Many experts maintain that when water is pumped from the underground reserves, it is replaced by annual (meteoric) rainfall. But other scientists hold that deep groundwater was never rainfall but (plutonic) water created in deep upheavals in the earth and locked below for thousands of years the same water that escapes as steam from volcanoes. As this water is removed, the shattered rocks from which it has been drawn close and rainwater cannot enter from above.
It comes as a surprise to most lay observers that in an age in which scientists can probe the planets, no equivalent techniques are available that can measure the size of the deep basins and the amount of water in them.
However, Tushar Shah, head of the International Water Management Institute's groundwater station at Gujarat in western India, has said: "21 million tube wells are sucking India dry. When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."
In the general climate change debate, evidence of change has often relied on using periods of a few years far shorter than the longer natural sweep of global events. Timetables for predicted climate change upheavals have been notoriously changeable and scarcely admirable for their precision. More than half the world's people depend on groundwater for their drinking water and food.
So perhaps 40 years is still too early to dismiss the Ehrlich forecasts. If water is not assured, plainly the green revolution that keeps Ehrlich's food apocalypse at bay cannot continue.
All this has special relevance for Australia, site of the world's largest groundwater basin.
The long-held official estimate that the Great Artesian Basin holds 8700 million megalitres is wildly improbable in the light of the imprecise techniques available when it was adopted. So are the claims that the basin has lost less than 0.1% of its volume in the more than 120 years since pumping began. In fact, the number of bores that have ceased to flow greatly exceeds those still flowing. There also have been great falls in measured pressures.
Ehrlich is not yet done. Water is still the key.
Clearly, the $30 million water research program initiated by the outgoing federal government should be of the highest priority.
Colin Fraser is chairman of Solutions Unlimited, a non-profit Melbourne consultancy specialising in water and climate change issues.
| Good that we're discussing it at least - we need to keep our rulers apprised.
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02-04-2008, 09:26 AM
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Originally Posted by Helios I'm not saying it's all bad. I have personally led a relatively happy life, but I also don't pay income tax, and was saved from watching rubbish propaganda media by some friends of mine. But I see the majority of American's leading empty useless little lives, living in poverty and repression. People have lost their sense of purpose, accepting increasingly shitty jobs and shittier pay. Jobs that remove them from any kind of meaning in life. The average credit card debt is 15 thousand dollars, people are digging ditches for themselves, buying shit they don't need with money they don't have, only to be in so much debt that they have to get another job.... It's not any kind of life to be leading, and this speaks of many working class families busting their ass to feed their kids. | What majority of American's do you think you're seeing exctltley? Seeing as how you don't live here. Please do tell us what kind of life we should be leading. Or are you not familiar with the concept of freedom.
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Last edited by Bern80; 02-04-2008 at 09:28 AM.
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02-04-2008, 04:49 PM
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Originally Posted by Bern80 What majority of American's do you think you're seeing exctltley? Seeing as how you don't live here. Please do tell us what kind of life we should be leading. Or are you not familiar with the concept of freedom. | I do live here, genius. Get your false accusations straight before you throw them at me. Thanks, citizen.
As far as the kind of life you should be leading: you need to figure that out for yourself. I'm not trying to tell you how to live... just pointing out what I have seen in the 5 states I have lived in. Your freedom is being taken away day by day, and unless you wake up sooner than later you wont be familiar with the concept yourself.
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"Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'tis time to part."
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02-04-2008, 10:29 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios I'm not saying it's all bad. I have personally led a relatively happy life, but I also don't pay income tax, and was saved from watching rubbish propaganda media by some friends of mine. But I see the majority of American's leading empty useless little lives, living in poverty and repression. People have lost their sense of purpose, accepting increasingly shitty jobs and shittier pay. Jobs that remove them from any kind of meaning in life. The average credit card debt is 15 thousand dollars, people are digging ditches for themselves, buying shit they don't need with money they don't have, only to be in so much debt that they have to get another job.... It's not any kind of life to be leading, and this speaks of many working class families busting their ass to feed their kids. |
People are digging ditches for themselves?  Heaven forbid!
I thought you said you were saved from listening to propaganda. That's all your post is.
When you want to talk about empty, useless lives, I'd say someone gliding through life in mediocrity, never really hurting but neither excelling at anything, has a LOCK on empty and useless.
Migh come as a shock to you, but most Americans I know are quite proud of the fact they EARN what provides for them and their families. You make it sound like one should be ashamed to earn his keep.
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02-04-2008, 11:22 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios I'm not saying it's all bad. I have personally led a relatively happy life, but I also don't pay income tax, and was saved from watching rubbish propaganda media by some friends of mine. But I see the majority of American's leading empty useless little lives, living in poverty and repression. People have lost their sense of purpose, accepting increasingly shitty jobs and shittier pay. Jobs that remove them from any kind of meaning in life. The average credit card debt is 15 thousand dollars, people are digging ditches for themselves, buying shit they don't need with money they don't have, only to be in so much debt that they have to get another job.... It's not any kind of life to be leading, and this speaks of many working class families busting their ass to feed their kids. | those poor individuals....if only the government would tell them what to do and take care of them.....
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02-04-2008, 11:54 PM
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Originally Posted by GunnyL People are digging ditches for themselves? Heaven forbid!
I thought you said you were saved from listening to propaganda. That's all your post is.
When you want to talk about empty, useless lives, I'd say someone gliding through life in mediocrity, never really hurting but neither excelling at anything, has a LOCK on empty and useless.
Migh come as a shock to you, but most Americans I know are quite proud of the fact they EARN what provides for them and their families. You make it sound like one should be ashamed to earn his keep. | Although I appreciate your backhanded insults once again, you misunderstand my argument.. once again. I've seen the suffering and poverty you claim doesn't exist in America first hand. Many young men of lower economic status either join the military are go to prison. It's a simple fact of life for them.
When did I say American's aren't proud of providing for their families? All I'm saying is to take the power and money invested in the government, and return it to the people. Are you really too shortsighted to understand my argument? It's not tough, and it would work out to everyone's benefit. Not the poor, not the middle, not the rich. Everyone.
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"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom."
"Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'tis time to part."
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02-06-2008, 04:54 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios Although I appreciate your backhanded insults once again, you misunderstand my argument.. once again. I've seen the suffering and poverty you claim doesn't exist in America first hand. Many young men of lower economic status either join the military are go to prison. It's a simple fact of life for them.
When did I say American's aren't proud of providing for their families? All I'm saying is to take the power and money invested in the government, and return it to the people. Are you really too shortsighted to understand my argument? It's not tough, and it would work out to everyone's benefit. Not the poor, not the middle, not the rich. Everyone. | So your a communist then? |
02-06-2008, 06:47 PM
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Originally Posted by Helios When did I say American's aren't proud of providing for their families? All I'm saying is to take the power and money invested in the government, and return it to the people. Are you really too shortsighted to understand my argument? It's not tough, and it would work out to everyone's benefit. Not the poor, not the middle, not the rich. Everyone. | It's not the Feds who are sticking it to my family. The state of Oregon is the one screwing my family. We are given $4-5000 a year in Federal Taxes but the state of Oregon takes $1500-2000 each year.
I must say I'm very thankful that Bush pushed for an increase in the child tax credit. It's more than just a credit on the books. If you don't us it all to cover taxes owed, they give it all to the family. I bring in $4000 a year in Federal taxes that I didn't put in.
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