Bully for Earth: It Takes a Licking but Keeps on Ticking
My friend Herb Henrikson, the Caltech physics engineer, has sent me an article by John Tierney (New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 1990) suggesting that the Earth is not in mortal danger and that our rising population will actually make life better.
To the environmentalists, of course, these notions are the most appalling heresy. In fact, Henrikson warns that I will be “confronted with a barrel of snakes” if I even mention them.
“You can challenge the existence of God. You can disbelieve in Jesus Christ. You can spoof the astrologers. But wrinkle a skeptic’s brow at a conservationist like Paul Ehrlich and you will find yourself standing all alone at the cocktail party.”
Tierney writes of a Titanic confrontation between Ehrlich, Stanford ecologist, author of “The Population Bomb” and chief guru of the “doomsters,” and Julian L. Simon, University of Maryland economist, same for the “boomsters.”
Ehrlich holds that increasing population will exhaust the Earth’s resources, raise prices of finite commodities, bring poverty and famine and raise the death rate. Simon holds that man’s increasing technical resourcefulness and productive capacity will outrace any population increase and that life will be better.
For years they have ridiculed each other publicly. In 1980 Simon proposed a wager. He offered to bet Ehrlich $1,000 that over the next 10 years the prices of five metals (to be chosen by Ehrlich) would decrease. Ehrlich and two colleagues took the bet, choosing chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten ($200 worth of each). Last fall they paid Simon the $1,000 plus $576.07, representing the combined drop in the prices of the five metals, adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, the Earth’s population grew by 800 million; since 1968, when Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” the population had grown by 1.8 billion, but the average person was healthier, wealthier and better fed; infant mortality had decreased and life expectancy had increased.
I have also read reassuring thoughts about the Earth’s durability from three other formidable thinkers:
In his “Bully for Brontosaurus” (Norton), evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould says not to worry about the Earth. “The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).”
Noting that he is an environmentalist himself, Gould warns against two fallacious tenets: “that we live on a fragile planet subject to permanent ruin by human malfeasance; and that humans must act as stewards of this fragility in order to save our planet. We should be so powerful! Nothing within our power can come close to conditions and catastrophes that the Earth has often passed through and beyond. The worst scenario of global warming under greenhouse models yields an earth substantially cooler than many happy and prosperous times of a prehuman past. . . .”
Charlton Heston sends me a quote from Michael Crichton”s latest book, “Jurassic Park,” which reads, in part: “You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants and animals died, and the Earth was clicking hot for 100,000 years, life would survive somewhere--under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread. The evolutionary process would begin. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety, and of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the Earth would survive our folly. Only we would not. . . . If we are gone tomorrow, the Earth would not miss us.”
In his collected essays, “A Long Line of Cells,” the brilliant biologist Lewis Thomas makes much the same complaint about this focus of environmentalism:
“We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. . . . In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.
“But it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the Earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impenetrable to death.
“We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. Nor is it a new thing for man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today. Man is embedded in nature.”
Let’s don’t worry about the planet; let’s worry about us.
