www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005103
Advertisement BOOKSHELF We're Doomed Again Paul Ehrlich has never been right. BY RONALD BAILEY Thursday, May 20, 2004 12:01 am EDT Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. Naturally, Mr Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award--and a Heinz Award for the environment. In "The Illiad," the prophetess Cassandra makes true predictions and no one believes her; Mr Ehrlich makes false predictions and they are widely believed. The gloomier he is and the faultier he proves to be as a prophet, the more honored he becomes, even in his own country. Any thinking person will thus want to know, accolades aside, what actual effect "One With Nineveh" will have on the intellectual environment. The title is taken from "Recessional," the poem in which Rudyard Kipling warned Victorian England that it, too, could fall, like the capital of the ancient kingdom of Assyria. Mr Ehrlich--writing with his wife, Anne--asserts that "humanity's prospective collision with the natural world" means that "what is at risk now is global civilization." "One With Nineveh" begins by recycling the now familiar catechism of environmentalist doom, but most of it is devoted to the Ehrlichs' hugely ambitious plans for reorganizing the world's economy and systems of government to ward off apocalypse. Homer used the word hubris to refer to this aspect of human nature. The "prospective collision with the natural world" is supposed to happen when human population, economic growth and technological progress reach some horrible point of intersection on a chart of global doom. In the Ehrlichs' simplistic summary, environmental Impact equals Population x Affluence x Technology, the notorious I=PAT identity. One notes that the three factors aren't merely added together; History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology, far from harming nature, actually promote its flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams clearer, the forests more expansive. While the Ehrlichs put forward a few good ideas--such as replacing income taxes with consumption taxes and eliminating government subsidies--most of their analysis consists of antimarket screeds and hackneyed corporation-bashing. Globally, women are having fewer and fewer babies, so the world's population will likely peak at around eight billion in 50 years or so. The agronomist Paul Waggoner has argued that if farmers around the world can raise their productivity to current US levels--even using current technology, nothing newer--they can easily feed 10 billion people, with better diets. And they can do so, according to his projections, using half the land they now farm, thus sparing more land for nature. The chief hope for that result is precisely the market that the Ehrlichs decry, and the economic dynamism that comes with it. Of course, there are environmental problems, although not the global warming the authors fear. Alas, the Ehrlichs and most of their ecological confreres miss the central reason for it: the tragedy of the commons, where nobody owns a resource--forest, fish, water--and thus no one has a reason to protect it. By contrast, enclosing the commons, by assigning owners, internalizes costs and benefits, and allows markets to determine the value of any given resource. With characteristic wrongheadedness, they advocate instead eroding property rights, thus enlarging the commons and tending to make environmental problems worse. In 1971, Mr Ehrlich told Look magazine: "When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left.
|
http://csua.com/feed/