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When soft theory beats hard truth…

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In “Hard Truth Against Soft Theory,” Canadian columnist David Warren says,

I have been around for some time now, so that the name Paul Ehrlich is familiar to me. I spotted it in media accounts of the latest imposture, in which a “global extinction event” is said to be unfolding, on a scale with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine my non-surprise upon discovering that Ehrlich was among the co-authors.

One might actually read the predictions he made in The Population Bomb (1968), or any of his subsequent works, for that matter. Catastrophes he predicted by 1975 have not occurred. The world’s population has doubled, but food production has significantly outstripped this growth, with only modest increases in land under agricultural cultivation.

To be fair, on the other hand, Ehrlich’s book How to Know the Butterflies (1960) has stood up admirably to the passage of time.

Among humankind at large, some remain hungry, but most are better fed. Indeed, among the poor in more and more places, the growing health problem is not famine but obesity. Moreover, where famine occurs, the cause is almost invariably political: wars, and fallout from the schemes of totalitarian regimes, sometimes compounding natural disasters that would not of themselves have caused human suffering on anything like the scale.

In no case of which I am aware was the cause a failure of the known laws of supply and demand; rather bold political interference in the normal operation of them. God did not create a world in which human enterprise would not be rewarded, and in the plainest general material terms: where we sow, we harvest.

We should have begun to realize what is the more spectacular feature of our natural environment: its ability to accommodate our needs. There may well be limits to the “carrying capacity” of the planet, but by now it is evident that they are nowhere near what the doom-mongers decide arbitrarily. Not neurotic fret, but Thanksgiving, should characterize our response to this miracle.

With great ease, and the assistance of sensational mass media, anecdotes are deployed against this truth. More.

Indeed. If Earth is fine-tuned for life, as it is, we should expect stability, durability, and rebalancing.

Yes, our environment could be seriously damaged or destroyed, but many cataclysms later, it actually hasn’t been. Why is it the people who say humans are just animals who also credit us with the power to destroy life that was not granted to the greatest extinction events perpetrated by nature?

Essentially, listening to acrockalypse mongers is a choice. It is perhaps past time to gently confront friends and neighbours: If you are listening to legacy media, whose relationship to authoritarian progressive governments is growing ever cozier, and your choice kicks you in the face later, we’ll try to help. But don’t say you weren’t warned.

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