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by Stewart Truelsen

Before Al Gore there was Lester R. Brown and the Worldwatch Institute, and long before him there was Robert Malthus, an English economist of the late 18th century. All three shared the view that humankind is altering the world’s environment in a headlong rush to environmental disaster, human misery and social upheaval, if not the end of the world itself.

At a time when the world’s population was only 1 billion, Malthus predicted food scarcity would keep a lid on population growth. He said as population bumped up against the limits of the world’s food supply, famine, poverty, disease and war would bring things into balance. Malthus was right about food being necessary for human existence. But he was wrong about the world being unable to feed itself. The United Nations recently concluded that growth in global agriculture is more than sufficient to meet world food demand in the year 2030, even if the population is 8 billion by then.

In his 1991 book, Saving the Planet, Brown said humankind was doomed because of "our inability to comprehend the scale of the ongoing degradation of the planet and how it will affect our future." But the reality is that the world is making progress, particularly on the conservation front. In a recent 15-year period, the annual rate of soil erosion in the United States declined by 40 percent.

Brown, who now heads the Earth Policy Institute, used to warn about the consequences of acid rain. We don’t hear as much about acid rain today. Its place has been taken by global warming, the subject that former Vice President Al Gore addressed in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Yes, the climate is changing. The Earth and its climate are dynamic and always will change. In the 1950s, we were told a nuclear war was almost inevitable and it would be followed by a nuclear winter that would plunge us into another Ice Age. Nowadays, we are warned that global warming will heat up the planet and plunge us into an expanding sea.

Gloom and doom scenarios can be used to push the agenda for a new world order and vast changes in the economy and personal freedoms. Worldwatch Institute’s latest agenda includes eliminating modern livestock production. These agendas will never be realized, of course, unless we become sufficiently frightened about the future, or we become complacent about shedding the light of reality on such doom and gloom scenarios.

Stewart Truelsen is a regular contributor to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s weekly Focus on Agriculture series.