But it cannot be ignored. It is a matter not of opinion but of incessant and terrible fact that we are living in a time of slow biophysical cataclysm. Today's species extinction rates, hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than those typical of the last six hundred million years, demonstrate this well enough. Overwhelmed with our daily lives, we find global ecological decline a prospect difficult to take seriously. Forty years or 50, or 100, this is a technical matter.
Any specific prediction is likely to be proven wrong.
It's a reasonable hedge, one that expects the unexpected, and respects the power of adaptation and denial. The difference between 40 and 100 years is, of course, no difference at all. It is perhaps more difficult, today, to accept the full reality of the environmental crisis than it was around 1970, when books like The Population Bomb , Blueprint for Survival , The Closing Circle and The Limits to Growth caught us unaware and undefended, and were able briefly to hold environmental crisis theory at the center of the media storm. They are not. It is almost a tradition to slam Palo Alto author Paul Ehrlich as a hysteric whose predictions have been disproved by time.