Responses Needed…
Responses are needed to the Wall Street Journal book review of April 1, 2007. Letters to the editor can be sent by email to: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com or Fax: 1-212-416-2255 Attn: Ned Crabb. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/guidelines/ before submitting. Editorial Page Submissions, including the Op-Ed page pieces, should go to: fax: 1-212-416-2255 Attn: Tunku Varadarajan or email: edit.features@wsj.com.
For the original editorial, see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120700566688178565.html.
Below is one person’s response to the article above…
Sir,
If your reviewer Martin Wooster is giving an accurate impression of Mr Connelly’s work, then neither are worthy of promotion of their views in the WSJ.
From reading other reviewers as well as Mr Wooster’s particularly inflammatory account, it appears that Connelly is basing his whole argument - as have so many before him - on a simplistic assumption that amounts to little more than blind faith.
All of what might be classed as ‘the infinite growth worshipers’ seem to use this exact same argument: ‘We were lucky in the past: therefore we will always be lucky in the future’. None of them appears to have any concept of the nature of exponential growth, where the numbers involved in the past are orders of magnitude smaller than those in the future. Every gambler would see through the folly of Connelly’s complacent advice: it is to be hoped that Wall Street Journal readers are intelligent enough to see through it too.
Despite those lesser orders of past magnitude, the world’s population has still lurched from one starvation event to another for centuries, and, had Connelly and friends truly considered past trends and actually learned from them, they would be projecting vastly more starvation in the future. It is strange how they can project a continuation of ‘being able to cope with’ population growth in the future; but can’t seem to bring themselves to project all the suffering that goes along with it at the same time: funny that! Even with tremendous efforts, among scientists and humanitarians, to increase food yields and redistribute resources, we have only just been able to keep 2/3 of the geometrically rising population adequately fed: but things are rapidly taking a turn for the worse - as anyone familiar with exponential curves would have expected as a certainty.
All too soon, (perhaps already) that 2/3 will be a number in excess of the reliable total world food production, and people in the ‘developed’ world will begin to starve alongside ‘the usual sufferer population’. One would have thought that the recent quadrupling of wheat prices; the sudden and simultaneous rice and maize shortages, might have given complacent (or downright mischievous) Connelly and, his champion, Wooster, some indication that perhaps attacking the one measure that could end the suffering for good, might not be so very wise.
Well, actually, no: one wouldn’t have thought this, because experience has shown that the ‘Connellys’ of this world just don’t listen, and they don’t want to listen; and they can always find ‘Woosters’ to trumpet their cause. So we all have to put up with this same old false argument being rehashed over and over again; and with simultaneous attacks on any group that attempts to point out the sheer folly.
The really sad part of it all is the way otherwise respectable publications like the WSJ can be taken in and tricked into promoting such incredibly dangerous propaganda. Do wise up WSJ: soon, it may not be just the ‘third world’ that feels the pinch of generations of bad advice from the likes of Connelly and Wooster.
Sincerely,
Steve Hawkins
Luton
Bedfordshire
UK
April 9th, 2008 at 9:11 am
At least to me, it appears the book, Fatal Misconception, by Matthew Connelly is itself predicated on widely shared and consensually-validated preternatural thinking that fails to account for the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth in our time. Matthew Connelly, Ben Wattenburg, Ronald Bailey, Phil Longman and a remarkably large number of population biologists, demographers, economists and commentators of all sorts are ignoring good science. What is most alarming about this failure to examine scientific evidence is this: the research by Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., and David Pimentel, Ph.D., appears to have profound implications for the future of life as we know it on Earth.
One consequence of this elected refusal to examine good science could be that humanity will soon be confronted with huge problems of our own making. When potentially catastrophic challenges become evident in space-time, people will have no means of understanding what is happening, let alone knowing how to ably respond. The people who are to face dreadful circumstances could be our children, yes, the ones whose futures we are recklessly mortgaging and righteously threatening, not only by what we are doing but also failing to do by remaining hysterically blind to admittedly unwelcome science of human population numbers.
We appear to be unwilling to see how the human species has unexpectedly and inadvertently precipitated a colossal predicament by our unbridled overconsumption, overpopulation and overproduction activities, the ones now occurring on the surface of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit…not overrun, I suppose. We are willfully denying that life as we know it and the integrity of Earth could become endangered by our adamant and relentless insistence upon endlessly increasing per capita consumption, absolute global human population numbers and large-scale industrial globalization, regardless of the soon to become, patently unsustainable gigantic scale and rapid growth of these distinctly human overgrowth activities on a relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Matthew Connelly’s book, Fatal Misconception, appears to be based upon a potentially lethal misperception. Its expressed understanding of human population dynamics is a mistaken impression, one that is outdated and directly contradicted by apparently unforeseen scientific evidence with more explanatory power and a more adequate reality-orientation.
Evidence from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel appears to be clear, reasonable, sensible and elegant. The family of humanity needs to wake up. That’s for sure. Perhaps that awakening can be facilitated by top-rank scientists and leaders like Dr. Bill Ryerson, Dr. Richard Grossman, Dr. Lindsey Grant, John Rennie, Dr. Caroline Ash, Ted Turner, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Dr. Ken Smail, Robert Hoffman, Phil Henshaw, John C. Feeney, Andy Revkin, Dr. E. O. Wilson, Dr. Stuart Pimm, Khrishnaraj Rao, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Ashok Khosla, Dr. Peter Vitousek, Dr. Gretchen Daily, Jim Lydecker, Ken Whitehead, Dr. Melissa K. Nelson, Dr. Dee Boersma, Dame Jane Goodall, Helena Norberg Hodge, Dr. Lester Brown, Dr. Michael Glantz, Dr. Janine Benyus, Wang Suya, Mike Roddy, Tenney Naumer, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal, Dr. Jan Janssens, Dr. Alan Thornhill, Dr. Al Bartlett, Dave Gardner, Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, Magne Karlsen, Eric Bushnell, Dr. Bill Rees, Dr. Jason C. Bradford, Dr. Peter Raven, Aubrey Meyer, Dr. Herman Daly, Dr. Martin Rees, “Trinifar,” Dr. Jeffrey McNeely, former Senator Timothy Wirth, Wren Wirth, Dr. Donald Kennedy, Al Gore, Dr. Bruce Alberts, Walter Kistler, Bob Citron, Dr. John Holdren, Dr. Chris Rapley, Dr. John Schellnhuber, David Wasdell, David Blockstein, Hazel Henderson, Catherine Budgett-Meakin, Dr. Carl Pope, Dr. Chris Flavin, Dr. Walt Reid, Dr. Bob Watson, Achim Steiner, Dr. John Guillebaud, Dr. Ernst von Weizsaecker, Dr. Tim Palmer, Deborah Byrd, Bruce McClure, Dr. Vivian Ponniah, Dr. Seti Shastrapradja, John Seager, Dr. John Rowley, Dr. Tony McMichael, Dr. Joseph Romm, Dr. Stanley Salthe, Dr. Keith Wilde and Dr. Gary Peters.
Apparently, too many people in my generation of leading elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable; we choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; and we act accordingly. But, despite all our shared fantasies and soon to be unsustainable activities, Earth exists in space-time, is tiny and bounded, and has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends. Whatsoever is is, is it not?
We need new leaders who possess intellectual honesty and moral courage. Too many of our current leading officials and ‘experts’ are evidently bereft of these virtues. They eschew good science, reason and common sense in favor of the politically convenient and economically expedient. Whatever serves these ends is all that matters. Wealth and the power it purchases seem to rule their lives……and the wholeness of the human world.
With new leadership will surely come novel ideas, better judgements, more reality-oriented decision-making and sustainable action plans that will replace the soon to become patently unsustainable business-as-usual production, unrestrained consumption and unregulated propagation activities of the human species.
If the relatively small planet we inhabit is finite, then the endless consumption, production and propagation activities of so dominant a species as Homo sapiens cannot continue much longer, let alone indefinitely. This is not rocket science. It is simply the way the world works, I suppose; most people of average intelligence who give unadulerated thought to this matter would agree, I believe.
Surely, all of us can at least agree that the Earth is not like a teat at which the human species can eternally suckle. Earth has restricted resources and, therefore, by its very nature cannot be a foundation for the endless growth of human activities, especially given the colossal scale and unbridled growth of production, propagation and per human consumption.
Are there no limits to the seemingly endless growth activities of the human species? Yes, I do realize this question practically answers itself. Even so, there are adamant economists, demographers, politicians and ideologues of all sorts who self-righteously dispute reasonable and sensible responses to the question.
From my point of view, Matthew Connelly’s book is like many others in that his book ignores the best available scientific evidence and, instead, embraces an unscientific perspective for the sake of political convenience, economic expediency and the maintenance of the social status quo.
Although it goes without saying, still I need to report that my point of view could be fatally flawed and does not objectively correlate with what is somehow real. With diminishing vision and waning faculties generally, we cannot rule out the possibility that I have lost my mind and, even worse, lost touch with blessed science itself.
Sincerely,
Steve