Frankly, it’s hard for me to feel too sorry for John Stossel. Stossel is the libertarian-esque reporter for ABC who recently got himself in trouble thanks to sloppy work by him and/or his producer. He ended up reporting not once, but twice, that test results from a lab showed that organic vegetables had just as much pesticide residue as non-organic residue. The only problem was the lab hadn’t actually tested for pesticide residue.
A lot of libertarians and conservatives rushed to Stossel’s defense. Why? At best he and those worked with him were very sloppy. The reprimand ABC handed Stossel was more than appropriate, though going beyond that would have been overkill.
Rather than argue that what Stossel did or didn’t do was minor, I’d really like to see the sort of standard that ABC set for Stossel apply to environmental reporting in general. But that will never happen. The bottom line is this — critics of the radical environmental establishment get but one mistake before people start calling for their heads, while proponents of the radical environmental view can make mistake after mistake after mistake and still have their words treated as Holy Writ.
Case in point: the other day the U.S. Department of Agriculture released figures estimating that in 2000 both corn and soy crops reached record levels. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following commodity markets for the past few years — it continues a trend of very large crops worldwide with an attendant steep decline in prices. To countries around the world that subsidize farm crops, including the United States, this is a double-edged sword since the plentiful food means coughing up more and more subsidies (and more and more money sucked out of my pocket and yours).
But it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Where are the food riots? Where is the worldwide starvation? Where is the economic collapse? In 1997, WorldWatch and its itinerant doomsayer Lester Brown predicted that all of this and more was upon us. The world was headed toward a cliff and unless it adopted WorldWatch’s crash program, serious trouble was ahead.
In 1997 the food market looked a little different than today. Grain prices were rising dramatically and worldwide production of food was falling. To Brown this could mean only one thing, “The deterioration of the earth’s ecosystem is slowing growth in world food production during the nineties and ushering in an era of scarcity.” A WorldWatch press released said that “deforestation, the buildup in greenhouse gases, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, overfishing, air pollution, and the loss of plant and animal species” were all converging to bring crop yields and food production crashing down around our heads.
The result was going to be hell on earth. “As demand starts to outrun supply, grain prices are rising… People unable to buy enough food to feed their families are likely to take to the streets. The resulting political instability could effect the earnings of multinational corporations, the performance of stock markets, and the stability of the international monetary system.”
The solution was straightforward. All the world needed to do to save itself from this ecological and economic crisis was to begin “stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, raising the efficiency of water use, protecting cropland from conversion to nonfarm uses, reducing air pollution, stabilizing aquifers, stabilizing soils, and protecting the earth’s biological diversity.”
So why was Brown so wrong (other than the fact that he makes his living being wrong)? Anyone who wasn’t wearing environmental blinders at the time could have surveyed the landscape in 1997 and understood the increase in food prices had little to do with environmental degradation. Just a few years before, in 1994, food production had reached record highs for many crops, so the declines in food production and grain yields Brown was so worried about were in comparison to recent record levels. This is especially the case since crop production and food prices tend to follow a cyclical trend of boom and bust as high production and low prices tend to cause farmers to stop planting as much or leave farming altogether and low production and higher prices lures farmers back and encourages existing farmers to plant more food; elementary supply and demand.
Plus, in both Europe and United States at the time, governments were attempting to lower food production by removing subsidies (many of which are starting to be put back into place), and there was a major disruption in normal food supply thanks to political and economic instability in Russia which had little to do with environmental degradation and much to do with political degradation in the former Soviet Union.
So, today there aren’t food riots and the economy in both the U.S. and the world is humming along. Where, then, are the brave voices standing up saying “enough” to WorldWatch scare tactics — not to mention predictions that are less accurate than the typical newspaper horoscope? Why do the legions of critics who would say “throw the bum out” when Stossel proves inaccurate, willing to give Brown platforms for his erroneous views decade after decade?
Instead, WorldWatch is still quoted widely and taken seriously by major news outlets who almost never inconvenience Brown by mentioning what he might have said three or four years ago, much less point out his singular record of failure over the past few decades. In fact WorldWatch is, if anything, more popular than ever now hopping on the “digital divide” bandwagon as well as traditional environmental concerns. In fact, the observant reader might wonder just what Brown would have to do to lose his privileged place as the media’s most popular prophet of doom. Apparently Brown can pretty much predict anything that he wants and, so long as it fits the radical environmentalist paradigm, whether or not his claims have any similarity with reality is irrelevant to the major media.
On the other hand, if you’re a conservative or libertarian or even a liberal concerned about the increasingly anti-science bent of contemporary environmentalism, the slightest error in judgment or failure to fully document claims will cause the furor of the environmental gods on high to be unleashed in vengeance against the evils of the right wing “brownlash.”
All in a day’s work for the media gatekeepers.