Matt Ridley has an article in Wired Magazine on the environmental scares of the past decades called “Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times“.
‘From SARS to mad cow disease to acid rain to ozone holes, the environmentalists cannot resist the temptation to invoke apocalyptic prophesies to scare the public witless’
This is an article you need to read. Click on the link and review a little history.
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.
This article is a great history lesson about the environmental scares of my lifetime. Each one even more scary that the last. I would recommend doing a little Internet research on a few of them after you have read the article if you are not familiar with a particular scare. It can be utterly fascinating to see what was predicted and what came to pass.
The small point I would like to make today is that these scares are interesting in general besides the specific doom and gloom predictions. In my lifetime these scares always called for drastic government action on an unprecedented scale instead of the “repent to God” answers of the distant past. One could be forgiven for asking why.
The reason is clear. Those behind these scares have a collectivist vision that most people should have rejected after horrific results of the 20th century socialist experiments. It does not take a lot of reading about the hells built by Stalin and Mao to understand that collectivist action by force leads to pain and misery. But what if the very survival of humanity itself demanded collectivist action at the point of a gun? Well now; then the State Worshiping collectivists would have something to sell to the masses. And so; you see that they are green on the outside and red on the inside — watermelons.
In modern times, science is done by large groups with big budgets provided by the State. Big Science then gives the State answers which tell us that we need the State to be all powerful to “save us”. Science now takes the place of the theologian of the past telling the masses that salvation lies in obedience to the elite masters.
Not all men and women who are called “scientist” are practicing honest science. Remember that at all times.
On the Mark 