A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle Page A
Authors: Jerry Pournelle
Tags: Science-Fiction
Ads: Link
Isaac Asimov says we are finished, then what hope have we?
Even when the result is not total defeatism—after all, if we're doomed no matter what we do, why not "tune in, turn on, and drop out"?—the influence of this view is crucial. For millennia the concept of progress has been the driving force of Western civilization. Our philosophy was simple: hard work and study would save us. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Now all that is lost. Western civilization has lost faith in progress. Our only salvation, a new era of intellectuals say, is through Zero-Growth; "Small is Beautiful"; "soft energies"; and the like. Political figures including the Governor of California and the President of the United States base their future planning on this philosophy; they have specifically abandoned the older idea that "knowledge is power" and that good research and technology development will bring about an era of plenty.
Yet—are we doomed? Surely the works which generated that view deserve analysis.
* * *
First: the blurb that opens Ehrlich's book is clearly wrong. My copy was published in 1969, a year in which about 53 million people died from all causes. It takes four seconds to read the blurb, so for one person to die each second, 31.5 million—about 60 percent of all deaths—would have had to be from starvation.
Taking the UN cause-of-death statistics and being as fair as possible by including as "starvation" any cause related to nutrition—diphtheria, typhus, parasitic diseases, etc.—we get about a million, or some 5 1/2 percent. Dr. Ehrlich is off by a factor of ten.
Actually, world agriculture is keeping up with population. At the Mexico City meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975, Dr. H. A. B. Parpia, the senior professional of the UN's Food And Agricultural Organization, told me that just about every country raises more than enough food to be self-sufficient. The food is grown, but sometimes not harvested; or if harvested, spoils before it can be eaten. In many countries vermin get more of the crop than the people: insects out eat people almost everywhere. The pity is that the technology to harvest and preserve enough for everyone exists right now.
Now this essay is not intended to be a Pollyanna exercise. There's no excuse for relaxing and saying that hunger is a myth. It isn't. But simple food storage technologies, and research into non-damaging pesticides and pest control methodologies, could stop famine in most of those parts of the world where that horseman still stalks the land. Other simple technologies—even Mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits—would save lives.
We know how to do it; but we won't unless we're willing to try. We won't get anywhere sitting around crying "Doom!"
Yet according to Dr. Ehrlich's book, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. 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 upon now."
Fortunately that didn't happen; but the doomsayer viewpoint, which did not stop agro-engineers from making efforts despite the flat prediction that their efforts were useless, did invade our schools so successfully that a new generation of students believes in Doom as thoroughly as ever did a Crusader in the holiness of his cause.
* * *
The other side of the coin was expressed in the Hudson Institute's THE YEAR 2000, which points out that the level of rice yield per acre in India has not yet equaled what the Japanese could do in the Twelfth Century. Another analyst, Colin Clark, has shown that if the Indian farmer could reach the production levels of the South Italian peasant, there would be no danger of starvation in India for a good time to come.
In other words, it doesn't even take Miracle Rice, fertilizers, and a high-energy civilization to hold off utter disaster in the developing countries. It only
Even when the result is not total defeatism—after all, if we're doomed no matter what we do, why not "tune in, turn on, and drop out"?—the influence of this view is crucial. For millennia the concept of progress has been the driving force of Western civilization. Our philosophy was simple: hard work and study would save us. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Now all that is lost. Western civilization has lost faith in progress. Our only salvation, a new era of intellectuals say, is through Zero-Growth; "Small is Beautiful"; "soft energies"; and the like. Political figures including the Governor of California and the President of the United States base their future planning on this philosophy; they have specifically abandoned the older idea that "knowledge is power" and that good research and technology development will bring about an era of plenty.
Yet—are we doomed? Surely the works which generated that view deserve analysis.
* * *
First: the blurb that opens Ehrlich's book is clearly wrong. My copy was published in 1969, a year in which about 53 million people died from all causes. It takes four seconds to read the blurb, so for one person to die each second, 31.5 million—about 60 percent of all deaths—would have had to be from starvation.
Taking the UN cause-of-death statistics and being as fair as possible by including as "starvation" any cause related to nutrition—diphtheria, typhus, parasitic diseases, etc.—we get about a million, or some 5 1/2 percent. Dr. Ehrlich is off by a factor of ten.
Actually, world agriculture is keeping up with population. At the Mexico City meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975, Dr. H. A. B. Parpia, the senior professional of the UN's Food And Agricultural Organization, told me that just about every country raises more than enough food to be self-sufficient. The food is grown, but sometimes not harvested; or if harvested, spoils before it can be eaten. In many countries vermin get more of the crop than the people: insects out eat people almost everywhere. The pity is that the technology to harvest and preserve enough for everyone exists right now.
Now this essay is not intended to be a Pollyanna exercise. There's no excuse for relaxing and saying that hunger is a myth. It isn't. But simple food storage technologies, and research into non-damaging pesticides and pest control methodologies, could stop famine in most of those parts of the world where that horseman still stalks the land. Other simple technologies—even Mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits—would save lives.
We know how to do it; but we won't unless we're willing to try. We won't get anywhere sitting around crying "Doom!"
Yet according to Dr. Ehrlich's book, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. 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 upon now."
Fortunately that didn't happen; but the doomsayer viewpoint, which did not stop agro-engineers from making efforts despite the flat prediction that their efforts were useless, did invade our schools so successfully that a new generation of students believes in Doom as thoroughly as ever did a Crusader in the holiness of his cause.
* * *
The other side of the coin was expressed in the Hudson Institute's THE YEAR 2000, which points out that the level of rice yield per acre in India has not yet equaled what the Japanese could do in the Twelfth Century. Another analyst, Colin Clark, has shown that if the Indian farmer could reach the production levels of the South Italian peasant, there would be no danger of starvation in India for a good time to come.
In other words, it doesn't even take Miracle Rice, fertilizers, and a high-energy civilization to hold off utter disaster in the developing countries. It only
Similar Books
