Editor, the News-Herald:

Never underestimate the ability of the Left and the Greens to make disaster-laden mountains out of political molehills. Further, never underestimate the Left’s ability to reach large numbers of people with ideas that have little if any merit, but which get incredibly wide dissemination and therefore &uot;respect.&uot; This week, we note the utter idiocy of Mr. Charley Reese, a syndicated columnist syndicated for this newspaper who wrote concerning the lack of resolve and respect for Earth Day.

From that seemingly innocuous beginning, Mr. Reese went on to what we consider to be a very dangerous proposition.

In his column in question, Mr. Reese waxed lyrical about the plight of the global farmer. He waxed lyrical about the plight of the earth and how destitute and polluted it has become (which is utter nonsense, for the world is less polluted now than it has been, and the trend is clearly toward a cleaner, not a dirtier environment… at least in the 1st world. The Third World, on the other hand, hasn’t the money yet to fix its environment; but that’s another story for another time). In the process, he makes the most preposterous statements. He argues that the supply of food is finite.. an argument made down through the centuries, and every time it has been made, it has been proven false, for the supply of food continues to expand to meet the demand for it as the world’s universities (especially those here in the US) continue to genetically produce newer, better, more weather resistant crops [Ed. Note: How many Americans know that the winter wheat crop, for example, has been engineered in recent years to produce a wheat stalk much smaller than before, while producing larger amounts of grain per stalk, requiring less fertilizer and even less water…. genetic engineering at its very best. Our bet is few if any know that; while many are concerned about genetic modified grains as if that shall be a great problem; it is if anything a great boon].

Then Mr. Reese makes what we consider to be the most fundamentally noxious proposition we’ve heard since Mobuto Sese Seko ran roughshod over his people, or since the Hutu and the Tutsi set tribe upon tribe killing hundreds of thousands, or since the Christians and the Muslims set one upon the other in the former Yugoslavia (with the vastly over-matched latter being saved from extinction only by the military prowess of the US). Mr. Reese said:

Six billion humans on planet Earth are about four billion too many. Unless some new predator comes along to thin the herd, we’re going to do just what

deer and other animals do when their population outruns the

food supply– die of starvation and of disease. It won’t be pretty. A food supply that

matches the

population

is called carrying capacity. It is always limited.

If we read Mr. Reese correctly, he is tacitly putting forth the notion that the world needs to kill off 2/3rds of hits present population in order to survive… a proposition that even Milosevic might find onerous.

The Left and the Ecologists have always argued for limiting population while curtailing modern farming, believing that modern farmers cannot produce the food necessary to sustain life. They’ve made this argument for centuries (in the case of the former; and for decades in the case of the latter); they shall make it for centuries into the future… and as they’ve been wrong in the past, they shall be wrong in the future, doubting the brilliance of the human mind and its ability to find new means of production. Charley Reese and the Greens are dangerous. They’ve every right to make these sorts of statements, for that is the right of free men; but the illogic and the historical, continued incorrectness of such statements must be taken to task. We are doing so here.

Sadly, our bet is that Mr. Reese’ theory has already been taught in the public schools and has been accepted as gospel. It’s not. It is anything but.

Dennis Gartman

Editor/Publisher

The Gartman Letter, L.C.

Suffolk