Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.
This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us…
I still can’t get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings. (more)
Well, yes, the extermination of 90 percent of humanity might “save” the planet. It would make the remaining fossil fuels stretch quite a bit further too, no doubt. It hardly needs to be stated that this is not a politically acceptable solution, though; nor is it ever likely to be. All the same, it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that a “respectable” scientist can get up on his hind legs, in public, advocate something like this, and be greeted with a standing ovation.
The headline objection to this kind of approach, however, is that the ten percent of humanity most likely to survive would be exactly the ten percent that the planet could best do without…
(*) UPDATE – Scruggs points out that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and he is right. See comments.
(via Rigorous Intuition)
Pilgrim, there appears to be more to this story and it seems that Pianka has been miscontrued. There are more than a few “respectable” types outright advocating a cull, but I think Pianka is not one.
I’m looking around for more citations on this.
Eric Pianka’s pages at UTexas, specifically What Nobody Wants to Hear but Everybody Needs to Know states, not unreasonably, that if we don’t take serious steps to constrain population growth, the biosphere will ultimately do it for us, although he stops short of advocating a proactive cull of humanity.
Pianka’s Wikipedia page (last para) makes reference to the controversy, and it rather looks as if Pianka’s objections to anthropocentrism have provoked sensationalist coverage. Quite likely he made the Ebola comments in a (slightly insensitive) attempt at devil’s advocacy.
Ah, here’s a transcript of the lecture itself, and it seems that yes, Pianka’s comments have been misreported. He does discuss the prospects of a few candidate microbes that may wipe us out, he does sayd that AIDS is “too slow”, he does comment that Ebola has “greater potential” and he does say, “I actually think the world will be much better when there’s only 10 or 20 percent of us left” – but taken in context, his comments are entirely reasonable.
So, what we have here, going back to the article in The Citizen Scientist, is a case of anthopocentric spin, and it leads to another question about the Texas conference: what exactly was the motive in preventing Pianka’s lecture being videotaped?
Did someone set up us the bomb?
One arm of the power justification industry has Dembski et al, who want to make an assertion of faith equivalent to a valid disproof. The other arm has the rivals of that intellectual class, the terminal technocrats (link to an archived post by my co-blogger). They’re competing for status and influence. I think Pianka was caught in the middle, and mistaken for someone interested in playing that game. There is indeed something that is off the table for discussion.
There is a way to reduce population growth, but it interferes with the power game. Strong enforcement of human rights, especially rights for women, economic justice and environmental protection all correlate strongly with a lower birth rate.
Oh yes, the plot thickens. It turns out that the author of the Citizen Scientist piece, Forrest Mims, is a creationist, and that Pianka was reported to the Department of Homeland Security by “intelligent” design booster William Dembski, who accused him of “fomenting bioterrorism”. See Mims-Pianka controversy at Wikipedia, and connected pages.
I’ll go out on a limb here, and venture that creationist’s opinions and interpretations of anything are always already suspect, to say the very least, and that “intelligent design” propagandists are attempting to retro-fit the creationists’ weird Medieval bullshit with pseudo-scientific respectability. Yeah.