Chris Wyhoon [pictured], is a Western Australian stud cattle breeder and executive officer (livestock and farm business/economics), Western Australian Farmers Federation. He writes:
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Recently I attended a series of seminars outlining the challenges the world has to face in the next few decades, and alarmingly, as the series progressed, the messages became increasingly more negative.
Many doomsayer themes including world starvation, nuclear war & destructive effects of climate change, left countless listeners breatheless.
What compounds this that the numerous ‘authorities’ making these predictions are revered worldwide for their leadership, knowledge and vision.
Don’t get me wrong. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire and I certainly take home key messages that will influence where ‘tomorrow’s fortunes’ will be made. It’s also important to know if the future sees me living in a house or a tent, and eating a grain-fed steak or alternatively, hydroponically-cultivated lentil patties.
However just as futurists often are right, many of these predictions made by the alarmist yet authoritative ‘doomsayers’, prove in time to be hopelessly wrong.
Remember ‘Global Cooling’? The 1970’s experts predicted utter catastrophic effects from a world that is cooling because of heat being lost through the ozone holes that we caused through industrialisation. How things change.
Other environmental predictions from so-called experts and authorities include:
- “By 1995, somewhere between 75% & 85% of all living species will be extinct” – Dr. S.Dillon Ripley, 1970
- ‘The world will be 11 degrees colder in the year 2000 which is twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age’ – Prof. Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University.
- “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by one half – Life magazine, 1970.
Yet forty years earlier, scientists were predicting ‘a warming’ of the globe, well before the level of industrialisation is at today. Go figure??
Other interesting predictions include:
- ‘I think there is a world market for perhaps five computers’ – chairman, IBM 1943
- ‘Everything that can be invented has been invented’ – Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899
- ‘640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody’ – Bill Gates 1981
- The famous author, Jeremy Rivkin, who wrote ‘Beyond Beef’, in his 1995 book, ‘The End of Work’. This predicted that automation, mechanisation and computerisation would cause massive unemployment within the US by 2005. That prediction was followed by the greatest period of post-war job creation in post-war history.
- Paul R. Erlich’s 1968 best seller ‘The Population bomb’ was later to be largely proven wrong.
- Lets not forget of course that the world’s oil was meant to have ran out three or four times since then!!
Although Nostradamus likely gave his predictions for free, as did the worlds-worst futurist, Walter Malthus, the scores of presenters, authors and media derive an enormous & self-sustaining trade carved from the knee-jerk, reactionary dogma associated with imminent doom.
It’s almost like we ‘love’ to hear the Little Chicken story. Long live Henny Penny!! Personally, I’m more of a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ man.
More seriously, Governments seeking increasing popularity use those Malthusian threats to mankind as they propose policies that echo with the same ‘Doomsayer’ emotions of largely brainwashed voters who indirectly supplement the incomes of our learned colleagues.
A new form of Malthusian limit has more recently been utilised by our Federal Government to constrain green-house emissions in order to tackle ‘global warming’. However this can be overcome by sensible, sustainable integration of ‘low-carbon usage’ practices.
In the case of agriculture, the main difficulty in making the necessary adjustments come from poor policies. Agriculture’s failure to prove to the world that pasture and soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution not part of the problem, is leaving the gates wide open for more ‘end of the world’ seminars.
WAFarmers is working very closely at the coalface to encourage further research that will assist our industry in providing the sustainable, long term growth of our agriculture & food industries.
As a food producer, I do take notice of world trends, and agree that all statistics indicate that food demand & food quality standards will increase. It’s up to us to prepare ourselves for those increased demands.
It’s up to the Governments to forget the popularism of the short-term, and instead observe those ‘sometimes useful’ statistics that they calculate, to help build a long-term food industry that will stand the test of any doomsdayer, regardless of the outcome. So what, if they are wrong?
I haven’t yet seen a prediction that there will be too much food produced in the world, nor have I seen a predicted ‘over improvement of farm income’ We would all welcome that, even if Walter Malthus finally gets it right.
END
(thanks to Agmate Rowell)
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