• Thomas R. DeGregori: Bountiful Harvest; Cato Institute; 2002; 207pp.; $12.95
As I begin this review, Earth Day has just passed. As usual, the airwaves and newspaper were filled with outlandish statements by self-proclaimed environmentalists that unless we immediately and drastically change our ways, there will be misery for all living things on Earth. Naive adults and impressionable children received an increased dose of the technophobic hysteria that is now a regular part of their lives.
Fearmongering is easy and often profitable. Debunking of the claims of fear-mongers is much more difficult and usually not so profitable. Hack writers can readily toss off books and stories proclaiming imminent disaster and find mass markets for them, while refutation of falsehood both takes longer and is harder to sell. That is why we owe a special debt to the dedicated truthseekers who work at the latter. One of them is Professor Thomas R. DeGregori, whose book Bountiful Harvest is a marvelous counterattack against the technophobes and environmental doomsayers.
Even while science was making possible unprecedented gains in human life spans and the comfort of living in the 20th century, noisy and ignorant opponents of progress were working to convince people that progress was actually illusory and that disaster was lurking just around the corner. As DeGregori, who teaches economics at the University of Houston, puts it, “The alleged dangers of modern life have become conventional wisdom to large segments of the population.” What makes him angry is the fact that technophobic babble has harmful, even deadly consequences for people.
Food is one of the book’s main topics. Well-fed Americans and Europeans don’t need to worry about getting enough nutrition, but in other regions of the world, especially Africa, the struggle to get enough to eat is as acute today as it was centuries ago.
Genetic modification of crops holds the promise of making it possible to feed populations in poor areas by making plants more drought-tolerant, pest-resistant, and nutritious.
Alas, genetic modification, which DeGregori notes is simply doing precisely what mankind has done on a hit-or-miss basis for thousands of years in breeding better crops, has come under attack by groups of Luddites who fear (or at least claim to fear) that we are somehow creating terrible “Frankenfoods.”
For example, DeGregori mentions the breakthrough of using genetic modification to create rice plants that produce vitamin A, which would be a great benefit to many of the world’s poor who have vitamin A-deficient diets. Unfortunately, he writes, “The potential benefit of vitamin A-enriched rice to the world’s most needy people has not been sufficient to deter Greenpeace from attempting to disrupt the effort…to make it available to the farmers of Asia.” He quotes the bitter words of Florence Wambugu, a distinguished scientist and director of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, who called opposition to gene technology a “northern luxury.”
DeGregori launches an equally forceful attack on a cornerstone of green, technophobic thinking, namely the “precautionary principle.” This principle says that risks are unacceptable. If an environmental or technological change could conceivably lead to any harm, then it must be opposed. In other words, humans should not act unless they have perfect foreknowledge of all possible consequences of their acts and can therefore say with certainty that there would be no adverse consequences.
DeGregori writes, “This may sound like a prudent course of action, but it would in fact hold public policy hostage to those with vivid imaginations who are most vocal in proclaiming their phobias.” This so-called principle would, if taken seriously, paralyze society and stifle progress, but it appeals to people who think in simple slogans.
Oh, and by the way, our current infatuation with “natural” living is not particularly new. DeGregori has the bad manners to show that the Nazis also embraced that ideology, favoring vegetarianism and organic agriculture as integral parts of the “new, pure civilization that was to be Germany’s future.”
DeGregori’s conclusion regarding the similarities between Nazism and contemporary environmentalism is a good summing up point.
He writes, “An apocalyptic view that the earth is threatened with imminent destruction absolves one from having to understand the consequences of one’s actions, since the good of saving the planet cleanses any wrong that one may do in saving it.” That indeed is the mindset of our technophobes and this book is a welcome rebuttal to it.