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Paul Ehrlich Monday Conference How Long - Gene Pool (wmv)

Video: Paul Ehrlich Monday Conference How Long - Gene Pool (wmv)

from ABC Open Archives, 18.02.09

Pool is releasing some ABC archives back to the public for use and re-use.

This clip is from Monday Conference, a weekly one-hour television current affairs program that ran on the ABC from 1971 - 1978. Robert Moore is the presenter and Dr Paul Ehrlich is the guest.

TRANSCRIPT:
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Regarding fossil fuels, you're quite right if you're looking two or three centuries ahead. We can't go on using them, but our descendants will use nuclear power.

DR EHRLICH: Well they may well, and they may not. It’s a very complicated question. We can get into in detail if you like. But I want to go back – why do you say the Dutch will eat well when they import virtually all of their food and all of their fertiliser? If you cut them off from their fertiliser and you cut them off from their food how are they going to eat well? Interesting point.
[Audience laughs]

PRESENTER, ROBERT MOORE: I would like to hear another question on the number of children. That to me seems to be ah rather…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can I come in as a human biologist, sir? (Audience laughs) Because I’m interested in the number of children. It seems to me we’ve met a temporal problem here. How long have we got? Dr Clarke thinks we can get there with an unlimited number of population, Dr Ehrlich doesn’t. Unless we limit population to Dr Ehrlich’s level, how long have we got, Dr Ehrlich?

DR EHRLICH: Well I wish I knew. I would guess somewhere between 10 and 20 years. We may be unlucky or we may be lucky. Surely not til the turn of the century. I think you see these examples all of the time. One of the really silly things in the world is that we think it’s perfectly alright to eat down right to the last bit of protein or calories or what have you.

You’ll notice probably in the Australian newspapers that when the typhoon hit East Pakistan, there was talk of starvation in the newspapers the next morning. Now if a typhoon hit Palermo, California most of us could go on two or three weeks before we are even really seriously in need of food. Now in my view of course, the question is as long as you’re running along the edge, when do you drop off? Now we have no buffer. Now even America’s food surpluses are two or three per cent. We have less than a year’s carryover supply.

So, if we have a climatic disaster of which there are signs, if the food from the sea situation continues to deteriorate and there’s every reason to believe that it will or if we have very bad monsoons in India again or bad weather elsewhere, we could easily go over the brink into a generalised catastrophe in the immediate future – perhaps as early as the Padox prediction in 1975. Nobody knows.

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