The long history of eco-pessimism - spiked

The long history of eco-pessimism - spiked:

• Climate change isn’t the first eco-apocalyptic idea, and it won’t be the last.

"In December last year, veteran naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough warned attendees at the United Nations climate-change summit that the ‘collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon’.
This pronouncement was very much in keeping with Attenborough’s long-standing neo-Malthusian views, from his insistence that he has ‘never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people...
...Needless to say, climate Armageddon is just one among many predicted environmental catastrophes that somehow failed to materialise. 
Indeed, such prophecies of doom have almost always accompanied the development of disruptive technologies over the past two centuries.
Why is it, then, that 93-year-old Attenborough, a man who has lived through an endless stream of failed eco-catastrophic pronouncements, remains so enamoured of them despite all the evidence to the contrary? 
What makes this especially puzzling is that he came of age during a period dominated by a ‘global soil erosion’ scare, which lasted roughly from the time of his birth to the turn of the 1960s. 
This now largely forgotten episode is well worth revisiting. 
First, because it shows how, like today, the eco-catastrophist narrative can dominate academic and policymaking discourse, and grip parts of the public imagination. 
And secondly because it illustrates how a minority of dissenters who believe in technological progress can – and often do – turn out to be right against a powerful and influential group of pessimists.

• The global soil-erosion scare...

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