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Preserving the Environment
| Article
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20278 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
597 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The Special Section this month deals with the environment. The earth and its environ is our heritage, and we have a responsibility to pass it on to our children in a way that preserves its beauty and its life-fructifying properties. Although opposed to excessive government regulation, in principle at least I support governmental regulation necessary to preserve the environment just as I would support laws that restrict what private owners can do with great art, which is also part of the heritage of humankind.
As long as it is governed by sound research and prudential management of scarce resources, environmentalism constitutes a responsible agenda for human action. These criteria, however, cause me to differ with the contemporary environmental movement. I fear it is led by the same types of guilt-ridden pessimists who have been bombarding us with bad science and doomsday scenarios for as long as I have been following such disputes.
Early in my work in the nuclear weapons area, my colleagues were confronted by the research of a physicist from the University of Pittsburgh who claimed he could prove that the weapons tests were causing cancer. Maybe they were, but this evidence did not show that. For one thing, he was using normalized charts of wind currents, which were quite different from the actual wind currents on the days the tests were held. Second, it turned out the increase was entirely among black children (quite apart from the fact the wind currents would not have reached his selected areas). Why should radiation have affected black but not white children? Obviously some other mechanism was at work, but this did not stop the press from flaunting his work.
In the late sixties, the Club of Rome and the Forrester doomsday scenarios were the intellectual rage. It was easy to show that these models were incompetent, and a small group around Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute did. But the press accepted this nonsense for an additional twenty years.
One professor from the University of Wisconsin protested that the Japanese were destroying the flora and fauna of Southeast Asia. He had a solution. It was to reduce the Japanese population by 50 percent. Apart form this genocidal venture, he would have put a severe crimp in the economic improvement that was required for Indonesia's large and increasing population. Currently we are being bombarded with scare stories about global warming and ozone holes, and by some of the same scientists who have been preaching disaster for
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