In his article he highlights two intrinsic flaws in the way the worldwide environmental movements have presented their case(s).
First, they stated theoretical, non-verifiable worst-case scenarios as absolute scientific facts – inevitable and unstoppable. Since I was a child I have lived with the ongoing prediction that oil was about to run out NOW, when in fact there is more oil and gas available today than ever before; that the world economy would collapse TOMORROW under a never ending population increase – when despite the fact we have passed the 7-billion mark, population growth has already started to flatten out, and will stop growing completely in about 40 years before beginning a slow shrinkage. Starvation and famine are on the decrease, not increasingly ravaging the world as predicted – and they affect a smaller percentage of the world with every year that passes.
By over-hyping a potential problem “environmentalists” have painted themselves into a corner – they are the boy who cried wolf. Like those false prophets who give a definite date for the world’s end, we keep passing predictions in remarkably good shape. And so we distrust everything they say because the hysteria and overstatement drowns out the core of possible sense that they are preaching.
The second mistake they have made is not to place current facts and trends with-in a long-term historical context. When you are dealing with the environment to get a true picture of how the world works, we need to think in terms of centuries and millennia, not decades. Historically we are enjoying a warm spell in the middle of an ice age, although we had a mini “Ice Age” in the 16-18th centuries. Temperatures have fluctuated and we have been both hotter and colder than we are now; the world has also been both drier and wetter.
The cradle of civilisation and the first bread basket of history, the Middle East, is now a dirty brown smudge on the global map. Climate change is ongoing, constant and the causes are complex and interlinked. (If you think I am just blindly trusting Igo Venter, you should read Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, another meticulously researched and eminently readable book).
The environmentalists have become ever-more strident to compensate for the fact that they are increasingly mistrusted because of a series of sensationalist and inaccurate predictions. In short, they have been the Donald Trump of the Natural World – “the world is going to hell and we need to make things great again, before we all suffer a catastrophe”.
However, I think that Igo Venter, in his article, falls into the same sand trap that the environmentalists do but from the opposite side, (but his fall is not nearly as hard or as far as the environmentalists’). Because there are certain scientific facts about mankind’s effect on the environment that are not in dispute. Since the Industrial Revolution began and fossil fuels became our primary source of energy, carbon levels in the atmosphere have risen at an alarming rate beyond anything yet recorded in millions of years. In the early 1990s CFCs had burnt a hole in the ozone layer, which would have been potentially disastrous if not dealt with. Deforestation is a real ongoing problem in terms of habitat loss, extinction of species, erosion etc. And there are species that have become extinct due to habitat loss or uncontrolled hunting and poaching.
If the world had not acknowledged that CFCs had to be eradicated, and criminalised the use of CFCs, the hole in the ozone layer would have kept on expanding – and no one has ever said that would have been a good thing. If China had not introduced legislation to protect the natural habitat of the Giant Panda, that species would not recently have been taken off the “endangered” list. If the last remaining 300 American Bison (1,900) had not been saved, then reintroduced into protected areas, we would not have close to half a million of these magnificent beasts today.
In other words, by failing to give perspective, just as environmental disaster predictors do, Venter encourages us to ignore facts. We dare not do this ; otherwise carbon levels will continue to rise and we don’t know what all the consequences will be, except that we will have interfered with the earth’s “natural cycle”, and that is a dangerous game to play. Without stopping deforestation, and controlling poaching, we could lose some of the earth’s biological diversity – and that would be tragic and expensive.
Both sides need to use calm, cool heads and not succumb to hyperbole and hysteria. Lets leave that to the politicians – they come and go fast enough (even Robert Mugabe will go soon! Simple laws of nature will triumph).
I do understand why both sides get hysterical – bad news captures the human imagination. Studies have proven it could well be genetic. The more suspicious our ancestors were, the more likely they were to survive. If you constantly suspected the world of wanting to do you harm you were less likely to suffer a deadly surprise attack by a carnivore, or to get a spear in the back, or on returning to your cave to find your woman had been dragged off by some competing horny Neanderthal. (Please excuse the implied misogyny but there seems to be little anthropological evidence that female Neanderthals were abducting men for procreative purposes – possibly because even then females were 10 steps ahead of us males and had worked out that it really wasn’t worth the effort.).
My point is that as a race we have outpaced our evolutionary development in the last few centuries, and so we need to be very careful how we present facts. Our inbuilt negative protection mechanism needs time to adapt to the new world, which is the cumulative effect of our combined brilliance. Hysteria and over-the-top predictions are not useful or truthful, but it is equally unhelpful and destructive to ignore what we are doing to the world around us.
But for all my quibbles, Igo Venter is one of those rare and much needed voices that are encouraging us to grow up, look at the facts, and not listen to the hype. And that is not only good for the environment in general, but is excellent for our individual lives in particular. DM