David Peat

178 From Certainty to Uncertaintypected. New technologies arise, new scientific breakthroughs occur. Yetfor every benefit we reap, there may also be unforeseen risks or sideeffects no one has anticipated.Is the real issue the particular chemical, additive, pesticide, or antibiotic?Or is it their thoughtless and indiscriminate use? Is technologyour enemy or is the enemy uncontrolled human thought?If we cannot predict the future at least we can be sure about certaintrends and alert ourselves to difficulties that lie ahead. As we facethem we will be far less confident in our powers.This, I believe, can also be a positive step. We must heed the warningsthat our knowledge is not supreme. We must realize that we cannotsweep away problems that face us with another dose of technology.It is true that technology will always be essential in our modern world,but it must be kept in its proper place. We must treat it with respectand use it with wisdom. We must acknowledge our limitations andproceed with caution. We are like people lost in a dark wood who mustmove ahead in a tentative way, looking for pitfalls, groping around inthe space before us, and ensuring that our footing is always safe.In prehistoric times the world’s population stood at a few million.Then, with the coming of agriculture around 1000 B.C., it increaseddramatically to 150 million. This population continued to grow, butonly slowly. In the seventeenth century, for example, it took 200 yearsto double the world’s population, and the 1 billion mark was onlyreached in 1825. Today the world’s population stands at 6 billion.Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, infant mortality hasdropped dramatically. In Western Europe there are 6 infant deaths perthousand births, while in Africa the number of deaths remains around90. The increasing number of children reaching maturity and the eradicationof a number of infectious diseases and of epidemics have resultedin an explosion in the size of the world’s population. If presenttrends continue this population will double in less than 50 years.In the face of such a population explosion, food and energy becomecritical issues. Some experts feel that the only way to feed theworld is to rely on ever more intensive farming methods. This meansusing pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and genetically modified crops.Rather than farmers growing several varieties of a fruit or vegetable,