IGM Dr. Doom

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt, Crypto-environmentalist
Re: The Environment, again . . .

My old nemesis, Paul Ehrlich, is back in the news. Despite the fact that every one of his major and dire predictions turned out to be wrong, he is now the Bing (endowed, as you know, by Chandler Bing) Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, where he continues his endless warnings and predictions of the environments’—and humanities—impending demise. In yet another fit of professional pessimism consistent with his entire career, Ehrlich has announced in a recent paper that the discovery, since 1993, 0f 408 new species of mammals, is no cause for celebration. Paul just can’t seem to find any joy in life.
I was going to offer several quotes to strengthen my cause, but Paul is just too depressing. And frankly, I had trouble making sense of his thesis. I’m not claiming he did a poor job—I often have trouble understanding technical data, especially if it involves any kind of statistical analysis. And his work seems to be mostly statistical based on some kind of innate fragility in given ecologies. If I’m reading him right, more variety of species in an ecology makes the ecology even more susceptible to changes in, or loss of, those species. He also said something about some kind of virus, but I wisely ignored all that. At any rate, more species means a more fragile ecology which is more susceptible to our (humanities) evil machinations.
I have long claimed, based on no data whatsoever, that the environment, as a totality, is robust, not fragile. It’s main characteristic, like everything else, is change. Organisms respond to stimulus (stress) and either evolve or die. Certainly things can happen that are detrimental, and I understand the idea that small changes can snowball into large effects. So do you. And that’s my point—I suspect environmentalists are losing the forest for studying the trees. There is too much specificity, too much specialization. No one is becoming a generalist, other than Bill Bryson maybe, and far too many good researchers are willing to depend on the dreaded computer model to assist them in formulating their theories. Science is trying to understand the inter-relationships of the species found in a given ecology, and then uncover the secrets of the relationships between ecologies. This is a wonderful—if daunting—goal. But with the hubris only science seems to engender, (okay, and religion) they consistently believe they are five minutes from figuring it all out. I’ve lost count of how many times a famous scientist has publically stated that we have discovered all there is to know. The last one said it in this new century.
Ehrlich depends almost entirely on models and statistical data, refusing to look at the common-sense, day-to-day evidence around him. I.e., we’re not dead. We haven’t bred ourselves into extinction. We haven’t gone cannibal, like over-crowded mice do. We haven’t run out of resources, or water, or air, or land. In fact we are improving all of those, slowly, fitfully sometimes, but overall things are getting better. Paul’s books won’t sell if his predictions don’t happen. And despite none of them ever coming true, he continues to wear blinders and predict imminent doom. I wonder, with a lingering sense of humor tinged with consternation, who listens to this guy? To quote God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “It’s like those miserable psalms . . . they’re so depressing.”