...When I was a student ... my earnest teachers used to tell me the world was running out of food, and show pictures of starving Indians, which made me worry a lot.
They were repeating the hot theories of people like green guru Prof Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Explosion sold in the millions.
“The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich preached. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
He was wrong, of course. Better crops, better communications, better transport, better education—and see now. Famines are now virtually unknown outside of war zones.
But such apocalyptic talk was everywhere then. Take the Club of Rome, a top think tank, which in 1972 warned the world’s economy was about to hit a wall. We were running out of oil, gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc, it warned in Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book in history.
Panic spread. “We could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade,” warned US president Jimmy Carter.
Except we didn’t. Instead, we’ve now got bigger reserves of all the things the Club of Rome said would soon be used up, except for tin.
But those panics about resources were nothing compared with the full-blown hysteria that was now being whipped up over the environment.
These eco-scares really took off in 1962 after Rachel Carson published her Silent Spring, using now disputed or discredited evidence to claim DDT was such a menace in the food chain we had to ban it to save whole species.
So DDT spraying was largely halted to save birds and fish, even though that meant killing tens of millions of Third World children, who were left with no good protection from the malarial mosquitoes against which the DDT had been used.
Never mind! We were too busy then panicking over a fall (sic) in global temperatures. In April 1975, for instance, Newsweek ran an article, The Cooling World, warning of “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change”, exposing us to floods, “catastrophic” famines, “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded” and “drought and desolation”.
The panic attacks were now coming in waves. There was “acid rain”, which the United Nations in 1986 blamed for damaging a quarter of Europe’s trees.
Now, of course, we know “acid rain” is hardly harmful, and Europe’s trees are blooming.
There was then the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, also in 1986, that was said to threaten millions of people with death and so terrified women that the International Atomic Energy Agency said as many as 200,000 had abortions. Now we know that the true death toll so far is fewer than 60.
There was the warning by British officials in 1996 that more than 500,000 people faced death by BSE, a brain disease they could catch from infected beef. Now we know—after eight million cattle were slaughtered—that the threat was wildly exaggerated, and the 100 or so victims might not have even got the disease from eating beef.
But don’t stop panicking! So we panicked instead about bird flu, with newspapers running screaming headlines such as: “Pandemic Could Kill 150 Million, UN Warns”.
But now we know the UN was just plucking figures from the air, and there’s still no proof this disease, caught from heavy exposure to sick birds, can leap from human to human.
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Remember the fear that the world’s computers would crash the second the clocks ticked over to the year 2000? Planes would fall from the sky thanks to this Y2K bug, which the world spent an estimated $300 billion “fixing”. But what happened at midnight? Tick, tick, tick . . . er, tick.
