Dialogue: Apocalypse now? Nah, no sign of it

By JOHN GARDNER

One of the less obscure topics at a conference of computer users which I attended recently was a series of site reports on the year 2000 bug. You remember it - the scare that had us all filling our basements with bottled water and toilet rolls.

From every site the report was more or less the same. Not a trace of significant trouble. But more striking was the tone in which the reports were delivered. It was almost always tinged with disappointment. We had been promised disaster and it hadn't arrived. It was all a media beat-up, the wired ones complained.

You may recall that when midnight struck and the air wasn't full of the shriek of crashing aeroplanes the Jeremiahs were still reluctant to abandon their prophecies. "Well, just wait until February because of Leap Year or until April because of the financial year, then you'll be sorry," they lamented.

By this time they had no takers. Yet there had been plenty of believers because nothing goes down better than a good dose of doom.

All newspaper people are familiar with the accusation that we concentrate on the bad news and ignore the good news. And for the most part, wriggle as we might, we are guilty as charged and that, dear reader, is because that's really what you like. There have been newspapers devoted to good news and they have all failed.

There is a deep vein of pessimism in the psyche that likes to be justified. If the play had been called "Lots More Golden Weather" it wouldn't have hit the same nerve as End of the Golden Weather.

There is a constant appetite for prophesies of doom, and it is constantly fed.

Once it was divine retribution that was feared but in this secular age the two most fertile fields for foreboding are health and the environment.

A random sampling this week has produced a forecast that bowel cancers will increase because changes to farming methods have robbed food of its anti-carcinogenic properties. The proposition appeared to be that infections on plants contained protective salicylates which blemish-free modern plants don't have.

Then there was the prediction that we are on the edge of an Alzheimer's disease epidemic. This was, in fact, a cunning bad news take on what is, in fact, a good news story. The reason for the higher incidence of Alzheimer's, as is true for some cancers, is that the condition occurs mainly in the elderly and as more of us are living to attain that status we are more at risk.

Finally there was a report, in what seems to be a weekly series, that the northern ice caps are shrinking faster than predicted. Now I know better than to buck the trend, and the last thing I would tempt is an attack of greenery by suggesting that we should not all fret about Mother Earth, but it is possible to raise a sceptical eyebrow.

Prophets of doom have a poor hit rate, excepting the biblical types who seem to be able unerringly to sniff out the plagues of locusts and pillars of salt.

In 1970 it was forecast confidently that population would outstrip food production in 10 years. Famine would stalk the world. But in fact, since that time the amount of food for each person globally has increased by 26 per cent and food production grew by 60 per cent between 1980 and 1997.

But that has only been increased by more raping of the land? Well ... no, actually - the total amount of land devoted to crop-growing has barely increased over the past 60 years.

Famine nowadays is almost always associated with war and civil unrest as the dreadful example of Africa illustrates clearly.

It is a bit unfair to point the finger at the 70s ecology doomsters, exemplified by Paul Ehrlich who predicted 100 to 200 million people would starve to death each year.

They were walking in the footsteps of Malthus, a connoisseur's gloom merchant whose message has never lost its appeal. For instance, Peter Jay's latest analysis of political economy concludes that a Malthusian denouement can be ruled out. But the thesis was first expounded in 1798 and we're still waiting for it to arrive.

Even if you grant the perils of increasing population, the predictions of that exponential growth have proved overstated. The accepted estimate in the 70s was that by 2000 the world population would reach seven billion. It is, in fact, six billion - an unimaginable number, granted, but a fair bit short of the estimate.

Fertility rates around the world are dropping and most developed nations, including New Zealand, are now worrying about population levels falling below replacement levels.

Meanwhile, of course, despite the toxic chemicals and the vile food additives with which we are told we are all being poisoned, life expectancy has risen hugely in most places. And, popular belief notwithstanding, if you look at developed countries, air and water quality has improved recently. They catch salmon rather than cholera from the Thames now.

Now I'm not saying disaster won't strike and that we won't all come to a sticky end. But suppose that dinosaurs had had brains bigger than a walnut. Their equivalent of Paul Ehrlich would have been worrying about overbrowsing and breeding rates but their nemesis came about because a thundering great rock came hurtling in from outer space and made a mess of the ecosystem.

I'm not saying sleep easy in your beds. But if you're looking for Apocalypse you may not find it in the direction the prophets would have us gaze.