Hoodwinking the Nation by Julian Simon

Author:Julian Simon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

At Last I Understand the Ecologists

For decades, ecologists have been arguing with economists. Curiously, the ecologists share much in their basic intellectual outlook with economists. Yet they reach radically different conclusions about the environment. This section delves into this particular aspect of the biology-economics divide.

Both groups feel misunderstood, but think they understand the other. Now I recognize that I, at least, have not understood the ecologists well enough, because I have not grasped the grand vision of nature and humankind that underlies their thinking. If I (on behalf of other nonecologists) try to state that vision and why I do not share it, perhaps it will help us talk to each other.

I will try to describe the ecologists' vision by analogy. I came within two weeks of going to medical school after I got out of the Navy in 1956. One reason that I didn't was a preference of mine and others not to take medical drugs except when the need is overwhelming. I feared that my preference would put me at odds with the profession I would be studying and practicing. I'm not sure how much of my preference was due to worry about side effects, and how much to some belief (whose logic I could not pin down) that if disturbance can be avoided it makes sense not to disturb the complex system which is the body. Reading about psychological experiments showing how rats and babies can, under many conditions, choose diets wisely had impressed me, as had Walter Cannon's notion of "the wisdom of the body." I thought it likely that tampering with a very complex system about which we understand so little is inherently dangerous. Medical practice nowadays is much closer to my earlier feelings, of course.

The ecologists' conception of man and nature resembles that conception of the body. Ecologists believe that we ought not make changes in the existing order unless the reason is pressing and unless our knowledge of the likely consequences is extensive, because so many undesirable effects may be indirectly caused by a particular alteration. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson expressed this point of view particularly well with respect to modern fertilizers and pesticides (1962, pp. 17, 20).

Complexity in the system, and insufficient knowledge of it, cause ecologists to worry (if I understand them correctly) that an alteration could knock the whole system out of whack, which will then induce a series of additional changes to compensate, which will then have even worse effects, and so on, until the whole system comes apart or explodes.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world (Carson 1962, 16).

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations (p. 17).

The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral (p. IS).

Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life (p.

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