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Our Greatest Risk
| Article
# : |
20080 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,837 Words |
| Author
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Earl L. Butz
Earl L. Butz is dean emeritus of agriculture at Purdue
University and a former U.S. secretary of agriculture. |
Americans live in a risk-filled world.
We have always been daring adventurers and big risk takers. From the western-bound prairie schooner of two centuries ago to the heaven-bound rocket challenger of our day, Americans have risked their lives and their fortunes to conquer new frontiers.
In these adventures, some Americans did lose their lives, some their fortunes, and some lost both. Yet all were driven to risk, spurred on by the dream of something better than what they already had.
The payoff has been great. We enjoy the highest and most widely distributed level of affluence in the world. True, there is poverty among us, but poverty is relative. Ours is a nation where even people on welfare live well--private housing, hot and cold running water, private baths, central heat, telephones, radios, TVs, automobiles, education, and food from broad supplemental feeding programs are a few of the basic amenities enjoyed by even the poorest in America.
These advances, however, have not been without their cost. As a growing population presses against a limited resource base, we are properly concerned about soil loss and water depletion; we appropriate tremendous sums behind the banners of clean air and pure water; and we are told that chemicals poison the food we eat. Animal rights activists protest the way we produce our meat and milk, raiding biological laboratories to "free" research animals being used to advance human health. The growing risk of risk taking, and the drive for a "safe" environment, may easily slow the level of opulence for all of us.
Organic food evangelists and sustainable agriculture advocates, among others, often lend their voices to support measures that would move our modern agriculture back a generation or two.
Our goal should not be to eliminate risk entirely, either to the environment or in the food chain, but rather to strike a reasonable balance between risk and benefit; in other words, to optimize the risk-benefit ratio.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, U.S. surgeon general from 1981 t0 1989, has written, "There is risk in everything we do, so we need to concentrate on the differences. The chances of your being killed in a motor vehicle (1 in 6,000) are much more real than are threats from pesticides. Yet that doesn't keep us off
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