Margo Westaway’s Market News gardening-columns are ‘gems’ of earthy lore – not to mention humour and wit. Besides the eat-your-own healthy garden produce benefits, the column connects us directly to the soil’s natural processes and life-forms.
Being so grounded in reality, it’s surprising that her letter takes umbrage at Gwynne Dyer’s commentary on predicted resource and agricultural “peaks” – the scientifically-based projections of ‘shortfalls’ in these key resources in the future
As a former university professor in the U.S. and here at home, let me assure Ms. Westaway that a university’s liberal arts vision – that is, its programs, instructional staff and visiting lecturers like Gwynne Dyer – encompasses for students an academic exposure to, and critical discussion of, a wide diversity of ideas – ideas which definitely may not be familiar or comfortable. Generally, I have found that students of university age and maturity are unharmed by such ideas; rather, their progressive, intellectual development is much the-better for such a scholarly experience.
Unfortunately, her letter seems to call for ‘soft-pedalling’ the challenging political and environmental issues that confront us; for her, engagement with these issues is just “doom and gloom.”
In my life-sciences field, it is known that in just the past 40 years, the world has lost more than 50 per cent of its vertebrate wildlife (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish).
Is soft-pedalling, or being silent about this unnatural catastrophe productive? And who believes that a social and economic system, which has this effect is a healthy one?
To be silent is to be complicit in the destructive status quo.
If those sadly-extinguished life-forms could speak, I doubt they would have been comforted by the notion that humans just haven’t reached their own peak potential yet; nor, either, would the (temporarily?) surviving 50 per cent.
Tom Crowley
