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FIVE
Environmentalist Fantasies
Politics and Ideology
Masquerading As Science

Every age has its peculiar folly: some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.

—Charles Mackay,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

 

Nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by others, whether or not the story is true. . . . In the news game these days we don't have the staff, time, interest, energy, literacy or minimal sense of responsibility to check our facts by any means except calling up whatever has been written by other hacks on the same subject and repeating it as gospel.

— John le Carré, from The Tailor of Panama 

 

 

I mentioned in the Introduction that one of the things that first turned me from being an eager apologist for anything pronounced in the name of Science to taking a more skeptical view was the discrepancy between what the world was being told about such things as pesticides and holes in the ozone layer, and the accounts that I heard from people I talked to directly, who specialized in such fields. Once again we have a massive body of evidently wrong information being delivered to the public, endorsed by an authoritative stamp of science. The difference here, however, was that for the main part the working scientists in these areas seemed to have a reliable picture of the way things were in the real world. But nobody was hearing from them. The lurid accounts of a despoiled and poisoned planet accelerating in a headlong rush to doom were coming from popularizers and activists with other agendas, or from institutional administrations with an eye on political visibility and funding. So I've grouped the selection of topics that this applies to into one section. (It also makes organizing the references easier.)This is a highly politicized area in today's world. Compared to the long-established and prestigious institutions that we've talked about so far, the environmental sciences are new arrivals to the scene of experiencing constant public awareness and exercising a voice in the running of society's affairs. Departments which thirty years ago consisted of a few dedicated specialists running on a pittance, whose subjects and terminology few on the outside had heard of, today wallow in lavish federal funding, send delegates to internationally reported conferences, and provide headlines for the evening's news. This makes them a target for invasion and takeover by the kind of opportunism that thrives wherever the limelight shines and the reward system beckons. In such circumstances the integrity of preserving truth is quick to suffer, since the object of the game was never to discover and report truth for its own sake in the first place, but to mold the beliefs that affect what is construed as success.

Environmentalist issues are also the kind of thing that can easily lead scientists feeling a need to "make a difference" to allow ideology to bias their professional judgment. Of course, scientists have as much right to an opinion on these matters as anyone else. The danger comes when authority earned in some totally unrelated field is accepted—by themselves as much as anyone, in some cases—as qualification to speak for "science" on matters in which their information is really no different from anyone else's, being drawn from the same sources.

If being an environmentalist means preferring to eat wholesome food, drink clean water, and not be poisoned by the air one breathes, then surely we're all environmentalists. But in many of its manifestations the term these days has come to mask an ideological campaign rooted in disenchantment with technology and hostility toward the Western style of capitalist industrialized civilization. At its extreme, this assumes the form of a neo-Malthusian world view that sees us heading inexorably toward a disaster of overpopulation and diminishing resources, making such pursuits as abundant wealth and cheap energy foolish delusions that would simply produce too many people and hasten the day when everything runs out. I happen to disagree, but these are perfectly valid concerns to hold.

New technologies create new resources. And when breakthroughs occur such as harnessing a qualitatively new realm of energy density, they do so on a scale dwarfing anything that went before, opening up possibilities that were inconceivable within the limits of earlier paradigms. Powered flying machines were impossible by the sciences known to the Greeks and the Romans, and spacecraft unattainable by the engineering of the nineteenth century. The average Englishman today lives a life style that commands more accessibility to energy, travel, communication, and variety than was available to Queen Victoria.

A resource isn't a resource until the means and the knowledge exist to make use of it. Oil was of no use to anyone until the industries had come into being to extract and refine it, and produce devices capable of applying it to useful purposes. Oil is nothing more than hydrogen and carbon configured into molecules that lock up a lot of energy. Both elements are plentiful, and it seems far more likely to me that human ingenuity and a sufficiently concentrated energy source will produce cheaper, more convenient alternatives long before the last barrel of the stuff we're squabbling about today is pumped out of the ground. A suitably concentrated source would be nuclear, when the world gets over its present phobia, and the disincentives that arise from the commitment to the current worldwide commercial and political infrastructure lessen. This is one of the reasons why nuclear technology—not just in energy generation, but for eventually obsoleting today's methods in such industries as metals extraction, refining, and processing; chemicals manufacture; desalination, all forms of waste disposal, to name a few—represents a breakthrough into the next qualitatively distinct realm, while the so-called alternatives, do not. 142 

In earlier societies that existed before the days of life insurance, retirement pensions, social services, and the like, children were an economic asset. They contributed to a family's productivity, and having a couple of strong sons to run the farm provided the security in later years. But since half the family on average would be girls, not all the sons might be fit and healthy, and with untold perils lying in wait along the road from infancy to adulthood, it was better start out with a dozen or so to give two strong sons reasonably good chances of making it. In today's modern state, by contrast, children are an expense to raise, to educate, and to prepare for life; families are correspondingly smaller—and raising families in the traditional way ceases to be the automatic choice of a great number of people, in any case. The result is that as wealth and living standards improve, new factors come into play that cause populations to become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Thomas Malthus never dreamed of. And neither, it seems, do his ideological descendants today, who apply results taken from the population dynamics of animals, who consume resources and create nothing, to humans. No big noise is made about it, but the populations of all the advanced industrial nations are now reproducing at below the minimum replacement rate—to the point that some European states are offering cash incentives for couples to have larger families. (Malthus was obsessed by the geometric growth rate of population, compared to what he assumed could only be an arithmetic growth for food supplies. But once a decline sets in, the collapse is geometric too.)

But for populations where traditional values and customs still exist alongside the increased longevity and reduced mortality that come with the shift to industrialization, of course, for a while, the population is going to increase as numbers adjust to come into balance with the new conditions. It's a sign of things getting better, not worse. 143 The increases happening in the Third World today are following the same pattern that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century and in America in the ninteenth. But since the 1950s, the UN projections for the future global population have consistently been revised downward, meaning that the curve is already leveling out again.

No one is questioning that the world today is experiencing social and political problems that are perhaps going to call for some radical reappraisals of long-held attitudes and cultural values to solve. But abandoning the gains we have achieved in improving the quality of life as far as material comfort and security goes would be an irrational reaction and contribute nothing to the solving them, besides being a travesty in throwing away unquestionable triumphs of the human intellect. Some would argue that our material gains have been taken too far, and that's the largest part of the problem. Maybe so. But the point I would contend is that our material problems are effectively solved. We have the knowledge and the ability to ensure that every child born on the planet can grow up with a healthy and well-fed body, an educated mind, and the opportunity to make of themselves as much as they are able. The real problems that confront us are social and political—deciding who gets what share, and who gets the power and authority to make such decisions.

But they should be acknowledged as social and political issues and dealt with openly as such, not hidden behind a facade of phony science. The main victim in the end can only be real science and its credibility. That's what this section is all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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