One of the first on record to predict that human beings were doomed was Thomas Malthus in "An Essay on the Principle of Population", published in 1798, stating that population would outrun the food supply, leading to widespread famine. Even though he was pathetically wrong, there always seems to be a large number of people who deny reality and believe mankind is irreversibly creating its own demise. They reject the concept of progress, and don't understand the ability of man to adapt to the circumstances and fix problems before they become unfixable.
The earth is doomed movement did not really get rolling until the last half of the twentieth century. In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb". He wrote that "the battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. In the United States alone, famine will kill 65 million in the 1980's." There may be no other book ever published that got the future as wrong as this one.
Never-the-less, the belief that the earth has a destiny of disaster caused by man continued to gain popularity. Many organizations, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, were formed to save the earth from the evil deeds of mankind, growing into religious cults that proclaimed economic progress must be stopped or else. The Club of Rome published a report called "The Limits of Growth" in 1972 predicting earth would exhaust its supply of raw materials by the late 1980's. Even though these doomsayers are always wrong, they never admit it or give up the quest.
From 1945 into the 1970's the earth experienced a period of global cooling, accompanied by scholarly predictions of a new ice age. In the mid-1970's the National Science Board and National Academy of Sciences published reports on the phenomena, and Newsweek produced an article in 1975 called "The Cooling World". Of course human activity was seen as the primary culprit, with aerosols from fossil fuel combustion increasing the number of tiny particles in the air and reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface. Predictably, the phenomena ended about the same time the mass media discovered it and began hyping its apocalyptic predictions.
The same folks who went ballistic over global cooling in the 1970's are the same people who are now hysterically panic-stricken over global warming. Now the problem is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that is warming the earth's surface. It certainly is happening, but whether it is a long term trend or another in the long history of periodic climate cycles is not yet known. Of course the Greenies blame it all on SUV's and the energy wasting lifestyle of you and me. They would rather tell us how to live our life in pristine harmony with nature and give up all the benefits of progress, without any proof at all that would solve the problem. Regardless, not one of the Greenies will admit that one of the primary causes of the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stares at them every time they look in a mirror.
The biggest source of carbon dioxide is from coal fired electricity generating power plants. The reason so many new coal fired power plants were built was because Greenie hysteria effectively halted the construction of environmentally clean nuclear power plants in America nearly 30 years ago, causing the electric power industry to default to building more carbon dioxide producing coal fired power plants. But they aren't about to acknowledge that inconvenient truth.
If the Greenies want to focus on global threats that truly are a clear and present danger they might consider spending their time attacking the problem of deadly bacteria that are becoming resistant to antibiotics and threaten our very existence. A growing number of Americans are dying each year from these superbugs, and very little is being done by medical scientists to develop new drugs to fight this menace. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that only 10 new antibiotics have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 1998. Right now there are only 13 new antibiotics in development by drug companies compared to more than 60 a decade ago. It appears the American health system is not putting a very high priority on stopping these microscopic killers. Now that is a real problem.
Unfortunately, the Greenies track record with these types of threats is not so stellar either. In fact, perhaps the most damning evidence of the results of their self-righteous crusades hits at the very heart of environmental religion. Rachel Carson is the patron saint of environmentalism, and is often credited with being its progenitor. She published a book in 1962 called "Silent Spring", describing how the insecticide DDT, though non-toxic to humans, was very harmful to a wide range of wildlife. The book created such extensive panic that the chemical was soon banned by most countries in the world.
Prior to Carson's book, DDT was used to control the mosquitoes that spread malaria, which has killed more people than any other disease in history. In fact, according to a recent article in National Geographic, some scientists believe malaria has killed one out every two people who have ever lived. DDT was discovered in the 1940's by a Swiss chemist, and was by far the most effective insecticide for killing mosquitoes ever developed, and at a cost 4 times lower than previous ones.
DDT worked so well that over the decade of the 1950's malaria was basically eliminated in the developed countries of the world, and nearly wiped out in most developing countries. Unfortunately, DDT was heavily overused for agricultural purposes and did create collateral damage to many species of animals. But instead of adopting the more rational approach of limiting the DDT use for agriculture, the result of Carson's book was to eliminate its use altogether.
The unhappy consequence has been the rapid resurgence of malaria around the globe. The World Health Organization estimates that 300 to 500 million people are now afflicted with the disease every year. According to the article in National Geographic, malaria today kills 3,000 children every day in Africa alone. In Zambia, nearly 1 in 5 children die from malaria before they reach the age of 5. A researcher for the National Institutes of Health was quoted as saying, "The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children". These dreadful statistics are the result of environmentalism taken to the extreme, but no one in the cult will ever acknowledge their culpability.
So the real question is, why would anybody ever believe anything the environmental lunatics have to say? Their arrogantly self-righteous prophesies turn out to be false alarms, and sometimes even deadly as evidenced by the results of the Mother of the Movement's call to action. Never-the-less, they continue to pat themselves on the back, declare their moral virtue and slobber over new-found heroes that are "always wrong but never in doubt".
