First Annual ``Chicken Little'' Award Goes to Stanford University Population Researcher Paul Ehrlich.

Business Editors/City Desks/Science & Environment Writers

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 28, 2001

The Center for Creating the Future Inc., a non-profit think tank based in Fort Lauderdale, has made two awards in the area of environmental analysis. The Center is dedicated to bringing technical information about the future to the informed general public so that we may begin to create our future rather than awaiting it.

1. The Julian Simon Award for Critical Thinking about the Environment. Awarded to: Bjorn Lomborg of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, a clear-eyed look at the condition of our planet and our impact on it. Lomborg's work was described extensively in The Economist (4 August 2001)

The late Julian Simon was professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a "slayer" of "doom and gloom" predictions before he died last year. His work highlighted errors in demographic and environmental forecasts. He made a bet with Paul Ehrlich that the price of five strategic metals would decrease in the following decade (despite a rise in demand for the metals fueled by a growing population). Simon won the bet. (Time Magazine, June 1990)

2. The "Chicken Little" Award for Exaggerated Predictions About the Impending Destruction of Our Environment. Awarded to: Professor Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University for his 30-year track record of erroneous demographic and environmental forecasts, according to the Center. "He has made a career as a media `expert' for doomsday prophecies about the environment," explained Jack Latona, the Center's founder. "Despite an almost perfect record for extreme and extremely wrong predictions, he continues to be quoted as an authority on the future of our planet," continued Latona.

For example, Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb (1968, page xi): "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

He stated in 1976: "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity...in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion."

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote, "Human population grows exponentially, but farm output rises arithmetically, the result, human population will inevitably and repeatedly outstrip its food supply."

In a radio interview (NPR, June 7, 1998), Ehrlich said, "(Malthus) got it as right as anybody would have been likely to 200 years ago."

Jack Latona, replies: "No, Malthus was wrong 200 years ago, and is still wrong, and 200 years is a fair enough test. His mathematical formula that predicts linear increases in food production and geometrical population increases has been demonstrably wrong ever since he said it. It is even more incorrect today: food production is rising more rapidly than the population and food prices are down."

"The Center is concerned with long-range population trends and other environmental issues," explained Latona. "However, predicted disasters of overpopulation and other environmental calamities have not overtaken us. A study of similar predictions going back to Malthus have all turned out to be false alarms. Erroneous predictions can have a negative effect on the making of public policy."

Latona, a lawyer who has been an adjunct faculty member at SUNY Buffalo and Florida Atlantic University, added: "There are two reasons for these failures which should be evident by now. First, straight-line projections are almost always wrong: they're just easy to make. Second, predictions of economic and environmental disasters arise from a fear of technology and change, which many environmentalists see as the causes of our troubles. In fact, technology has consistently been an ally in the struggle for a better quality of life."

The Center believes that as a society we must remain active in our searches for solutions to the economic and environmental challenges that face us. People are unlikely to do so if they are told by experts that doom is at hand and disaster unavoidable.

The Center's general web page is at www.creatingthefuture.org.