Page 106 - Bus101FlipBook

6-24 Ethics & Social Responsibility [CH 6

 In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil
supplies would last only another 13 years.
 By 1949, the secretary of the Interior said the end of the U.S. oil
supplies was in sight.
 In 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the United States
had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter,
according to the American Gas Association, is there is a 1,000 to
2,500-year supply.
st
These oil predictions have continued on into the 21 century.
Conserving Resources
The Sierra Club and Bantam Books
published, in 1968, Stanford University Biology
Professor Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population
Bomb. This book became the alarmist manifesto
for population controls when Professor Ehrlich
predicted, through his research, worldwide
famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to
overpopulation, along with other major societal
upheavals. Ehrlich advocated immediate action

to limit world population growth that has
continued into this decade. The United Nations
along with agitated non-governmental- Caribou grazing inside the Arctic National Wildlife
organizations regularly call for industrialized Refuge, Alaska. Mindful of rising oil and gasoline
nations to limit the world’s population using the prices, Congress voted to remove the obstacles to
opening the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge
cry of “sustainability for the planet,” and they to oil drilling. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
never really define their expected outcomes.
These organizations only present their
‘doomsday’ scenarios, while never offering solutions that deal with advancements in
science, chemistry, engineering or food production.
Organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the State Department’s Agency for
International Development promote doomsday scenarios to the world’s poverty-stricken
people—as they did in Kyoto and Paris talks for climate and sustainable population
control—saying that poor countries would develop if only they would deal with their “over
-population” problems. What some call overpopulation problems result from socialistic
government practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe, house and feed

themselves. Poor countries are rife with farm controls, export and import restrictions,
restrictive licensing, price controls and gross human rights violations that encourage their
most productive people to emigrate.
Overlooked in these ‘sustainability arguments’, and not even mentioned, are the
engineering and agronomy advancements that have been made, and continue to be made
with increased crop yields on the same acreages and advancements in brining lands thought
unproductive and incapable of commercial production into viable productivity. These
agricultural issues have been continually studied and researched since the 1950’s. One key
leader was Norman Borlaug, an American Agronomist, who developed grain varieties of
wheat that initially doubled the tonnage harvested, earning him the title of the "Father of
the Green Revolution". He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He is credited with
saving over a billion people from starvation. His basic approach was the development of
high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure,
modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, chemical
fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers. His grain breeding and technology has been
successfully applied to the Indian Continent, South East Asia, Mexico, South America, and
applied in Africa. The detrimental effects have been when governments restrict the use of
agricultural engineered production, then crop yields decline. Borlaug’s research and
developmental work has continued, increasing food production to even greater levels.

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