The president of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Professor Ian Lowe, has just written a book titled A big fix: Radical solutions for Australia's environmental crisis.
In his book, Prof Lowe suggests Australian society will not survive this century unless we make dramatic changes to the way we manage our environment.
Unfortunately he has nothing positive to say about Australian agriculture. His assessment is that we are a country mining our resource base and that:
"We have tried to produce more than the sustainable yield from our agricultural land to meet the costs of our imports, but we are paying the price now in degradation of both cropping and grazing land".
He goes on to suggest that tourism should replace fishing and logging as a future source of income.
Farmers, fishers and timber workers might just prepare to let the media storm that will probably follow release of the book on 7th October wash over them.
But I suggest the book launch be abandoned and the book pulped.
Why? Because in the book, Lowe, a professor of science, suggests we should abandon science.
He states:
"Sustainability science [which he supports] differs fundamentally from most science as we know it.
The traditional scientific method is based on sequential phases of inquiry: conceptualising the problem, collecting data, developing theories, then applying the results ... Sustainability science will have to employ new methods, such as semi-quantitative modelling of qualitative data, or inverse approaches that work backwards from undesirable consequences to identify better ways to progress".
Prof Lowe is suggesting science should not be sequential, that there is such a thing as semi-quantitative modeling, and we should image the worst, no matter how unlikely.
But science has to be sequential. You advance a hypothesis. For a hypothesis to be proven, it needs to be predictive, so you make predictions based on the hypothesis and devise ways of testing the prediction.
There is no way that any of those steps can be taken out of sequence and still be called science.
The wooliness of Lowe's thinking is demonstrated by his second proposition.
The idea of "semi-quantitative modelling of qualitative data" suggests Lowe doesn't want to count the results accurately.
The third proposition could be referred to as the "Chicken Little Principle".
If I say the sky is falling, then there is no time to go through the normal rigour of the scientific method, because by that time the sky will have fallen.
So let's junk science and close down Australia's primary industry base because this particular author feels there is some damage occurring to the environment.
If the book launch goes ahead and it becomes a best seller, I at least hope that it will be sold under the banner of "new age" rather than "science".
Furthermore, Prof Lowe should resign as a professor of science because he has clearly abandoned the discipline.
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