Why debate is healthy, stifling it isn’t
Released 08 Jun 2011
Harvey Leach is Federated Farmers Taranaki provincial president
Channel hopping in my ute I stumbled across Afternoons with Jim Mora on National Radio. While I was going to skip it for something more uplifting, I heard leftwing commentator, Chris Trotter, bemoaning the lack of respect for expertise. Being a farmer my ears pricked up, only to discover that Mr Trotter thinks that all science is settled. Trotter was complaining about Prime Minister John Key, calling into question the motives of Massey University eel expert, Dr Mike Joy, going to the BBC as a kind of environmental whistleblower. Proving one man's trash is another man's treasure, or whatever the eel equivalent may be, other scientists behind a scoping study on the Waikato River found that native eels thrive in pastoral streams over forest streams. While these scientists caution about nutrient inflows and farmers are working damn hard on that, it seems pastoral nutrients are important to eels.
Chris Trotter's claim, that science is effectively settled, is frankly the stuff that comes out of the bulls on my farm. If you look at science and strip away its genteel veneer, you'll find conflict and controversy. From Galileo to Charles Darwin's seminal theory on evolution and modern day physics, you'd be amazed the passions that theories stir, almost to the point of violence. From mass extinction to dark matter, science is far from settled and that's a healthy thing. These intellectual brawls occur because theory is not fact. Scientific theory is just a proposed explanation of something by way of observation or experiment, whereas facts are verifiably real as the nose on your face.
I don't know Rachel Stewart that well, but within Federated Farmers, she has a good reputation as a thinker. Like science, farming is full of ideas and the conflict of ideas. It seems hosting Professor Bob Carter has made her blood boil to the point of calling us Neanderthals. I don't know you, but Professor Bob Carter has some serious academic grunt behind him. Being an adjunct Research Fellow at James Cook University in Queensland, he is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than 40 years professional experience. With degrees from the University of Otago and Cambridge University, he's no academic weakling. Nor can he be or resemble a Neanderthal, given they became extinct 30,000 years ago. What genuinely concerns me is how rigid and orthodox some like Rachel have become on the climate change debate in a "if you're not for it, then you're against the planet" kind of way. This is the sort of stuff that could have come from the mouth of a green George W Bush. There are plenty of warnings from history about closed mindedness and Nazi Germany looms large, having purged music, science and literature of any Jewish trace, including one Albert Einstein.
Instead of getting bogged down in the whole climate science debate, the point I wish to make is about ideas and how open we are to have them challenged.
Only a couple of weeks before Professor Carter came to our meeting, the journalist Rod Oram, ex-NIWA man Dr Jim Salinger and Lincoln's professor of trade and environmental economics, Caroline Saunders, presented the opposite point of view in New Plymouth and Hawera. The funny thing is that these seminars were given prominence on council websites and were hosted in council run facilities. As a ratepayer, I'd like to know if they were charged hireage and what I have to do to get similar promotion for Professor Carter's return. The difference is that Federated Farmers didn't kick up a fuss about Oram, Salinger and Saunders. We didn't call this ‘council-led propaganda' or denigrated them as some ‘gang of three'.
This is perhaps the most perplexing thing about Rachel's column - the total contempt for someone else's point of view, even though they have the credentials to express it. That's unhealthy in a democracy and is more the stuff that led to the old Soviet Union's collapse. In that rigid and extinct country, communism wasn't a theory, but fact as real as the morning sun. It drove everything from education to government to careers and even agriculture. Dissent was met with the gulag or much worse. The remarkable thing is that the Soviet Union trundled along like this for 74 years until 1991. Hard as it seems to believe today, for 74 years, communism was as real to those inside the Soviet Union as our ability to breathe air. It was a reality, but a distorted one that eventually fractured into the countries we know today.
It makes you wonder how history will look back on the climate change debate, doesn't it.
