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ECO-SCAM -- The Fasle Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse

Ronald Bailey - St. Martin's Press


CHAPTER ONE

THE IMAGINATION

OF DISASTER



The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by men-
acing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.
    --H. L. Mencken

Doom haunts the end of the twentieth century. Millenarian
predictions of impending global disaster are heard on every
side. The fast-approaching year 2000--the end of the Sec-
ond Millennium A.D.--is the benchmark date for all kinds of
dire predictions, prophecies, and fears. Fin-de-millennium
blues also afflict the intellectual and policy elites, and, in-
creasingly, the citizenries of the industrialized nations.
    Soothsayers once sought the portents of doom in the
livers of sheep, in the flight of geese across the sky, and in
the patterns of juggled bones. Modern seers examine the
entrails of equations, measure molecules in the air, or con-
jure with computer models looking for signs of the impend-
ing apocalypse.
    In the last twenty-five years, the modern age has been
besieged by a constant litany of dreadful prophecies:

     "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s
     the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions
     of people are going to starve to death in spite of any
     crash programs embarked upon now.' (1)

     "The limits to growth on this planet will be reached
     sometime in the next one hundred years. The most
     probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrol-
     lable decline in both population and industrial capac-
     ity (2)

     "In the case of recombinant DNA, it is an all or none
     situation--only one accident is needed to endanger
     the future of mankind." (3)

     "Global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation and
     overpopulation are the four horsemen of a looming
     21st century apocalypse."(4)

     "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside
      nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and
      misery for mankind." (5)

Prophets proclaiming imminent catastrophe are nothing
new in the history of Western culture. However, at no time
in the past have predictions of global disaster achieved such
wide currency and been given so much respectful attention
by policymakers and the general public. The approach of
inevitable doom has become the conventional wisdom of
the late twentieth century.
    In contrast to our gloomy century, nineteenth-century
Europe and America celebrated a robust faith in human
progress. And why not? The nineteenth century saw great
strides being made in human knowledge and the advance of
political liberalism. This faith in progress was shattered by
the slaughter of World War I. Subsequently, a sense of cul-
tural disarray and cynicism provided fertile soil for the
growth of the twin totalitarian political faiths--fascism and
Marxist communism. The worldwide Great Depression ac-
celerated the loss of faith in progress in the United States.
The horrors of total war during the Second World War--
forty-five million dead, the saturation bombing of cities, and
the Holocaust in the concentration camps, ending with the
flash of the atomic bomb--further eroded confidence in a bet-
ter future.
    Consequently, nostalgia for a simpler time, when hu-
manity purportedly was not confronted with complex and
apparently intractable political, economic, and social prob-
lems, powerfully attracted some segments of the Westws in-
tellectual castes. Rousseau's romantic notion of the innate
goodness of primitive, "natural" man distorted by the temp-
tations of civilization gained favor. Some radical environ-
mentalists, inspired by Rousseau, now literally urged
modern mankind to return to a hunter-gatherer existence.
The ostensibly more "natural" lives of the earth's remaining
tribespeople are used to reproach a corrupt modern society,
as in Margaret Mead's biased and misleading accounts of
sexual practices and morality in Polynesian
    "The apocalyptic myths of the last several decades have
been cast on a global scale: world depression, world war,
nuclear holocaust, overpopulation, ecological disaster ...
the imagination of disaster has become fixated on world-
wide catastrophe," Michael Barkun observed in Disaster
and the Millennium.
    Modern ecological millenarians, impatient with wait-
ing for the flash of a thermonuclear doom, now claim there
is a "global environmental crisis" threatening not just hu-
manity, but all life on earth. A cadre of professional "apoc-
alypse abusers" frightens the public with lurid scenarios of
a devastated earth, overrun by starving hordes of humanity,
raped of its precious nonrenewable resources, poisoned by
pesticides, pollution, and genetically engineered plagues,
and baked by greenhouse warming. The new millenarians
no longer expect a wrathful God to end the world in a rain
of fire or overwhelming deluge. Instead humanity will die
by its own hand.
    In Christian eschatology, the "Millennium" denotes
specifically the thousand-year kingdom to be established
after Christ's Second Coming as prophesied in the New Tes-
tament's Book of Revelation (20:4-6). Following Christ's
thousand-year reign comes the Last Judgment, and the cre-
ation of "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:1).
    The expectation that the end of the world was imminent
has spawned numerous Christian millenarian sects, such as
the Anabaptists and Hussites in Central Europe, the Rappites
and the Millerites in nineteenth-century America, and more
recently the Jehovah's Witnesses. Millenarian movements
tend to arise in periods of great social and political turmoil,
and this is especially true where modernity begins to under-
mine traditional institutions and established ways of life.
    The Millerites of upstate New York were one fairly typ-
ical millenarian sect. In 1818, William Miller, the group's
founder, calculated that Christ's Second Coming would take
place during the next twenty-five years. Spectacular meteor
showers and a huge comet were taken as unmistakable por-
tents of impending disaster. After several missed dates,
Miller finally predicted that the end would definitely come
on October 22, 1844. On the appointed day many believers,
dressed in white robes, climbed nearby hilltops to await
the apocalypse. "The Great Disappointment" is how the
Seventh-Day Adventists, the modern successors of the Mil-
lerites, characterize Miller's prophetic failure.
    Millenarian aspiration is not confined to Christianity
and Western societies. Traditional societies stressed by
contact with modern Western culture are particularly
prone to outbreaks of millennialist enthusiasm. For in-
stance, in the late 1880s, Native American tribespeople on
the Great Plains and in the West joined the Ghost Dance
cult. Ghost Dance ceremonies were supposed to resurrect
ancestral warriors who would destroy the expanding white
settlements.
    Similarly, "cargo cult" rituals in Polynesia sought to
lure ships and airplanes filled with Western goods to poor
islanders. In one case, natives actually constructed a dummy
runway and mock air-control tower to welcome the long-
anticipated cargo plane. They even made an aircraft out of
sticks and leaves in an effort to woo its mate to the
ground. (8) With the advent of apocalyptic environmentalism
and the rejection of science and technology, it now seems
Western civilization may join the Ghost Dance.
    The great medieval millenarian Joachim di Fiore pro-
pounded the doctrine that history is divided into stages. For
him history was a march from a previous golden age to the
present corrupt society whose evil would imminently be
swept away by a major cataclysm and replaced by a purified
society. Joachim exhorted the faithful to smash their deca-
dent society and thus help bring history to fulfillment. In
Joachim's new age, all hierarchies would be eliminated, har-
mony established, and poverty abolished. This notion that
history proceeds in discrete stages toward final perfection
profoundly influenced many later thinkers including Rous-
seau, Hegel, and Marx.
    In the nineteenth century, millenarian aspirations,
originally spiritual and religious in character, became sec-
ularized and were incorporated into the doctrines of radical
and utopian politics. The greatest millenarian political faith
is Marxism and its more temperate social democratic sects.
    "Marx, with his highly detailed and imaginative pre-
sentation of the eschatology of capitalism, can be described
as the last of the Judeo-Christian prophets, or the first of the
secular ones," wrote British social critic Paul Johnson.(10)
Like the religious millenarians who preceded him, Marx
believed that a corrupt society--in his case, capitalism--
would collapse in a massive crisis ushering in a golden age
of egalitarian harmony.
    According to orthodox Marxist eschatology, the inter-
nal class contradictions of capitalist production doom that
hateful form of society to inevitable destruction. The prole-
tariat led by the Marxist avant-garde will overthrow the ex-
ploiters and topple capitalism into well-deserved oblivion.
Now, with Marxist class warfare relegated to the dustbin of
history, capitalism can no longer be counted on to self-
destruct. Marxist communism's recent disintegration leaves
contemporary radicals with an "agency problem."
    "Ecological alarmism . . . incorporates many aspects of
Marxist theology, especially the idea that capitalist soci-
ety . . . is ultimately self-destructive," writes Johnson. (11)
For many modern leftists the "global environmental crisis" is
the new "agent" of history which will eventually destroy capi-
talism. In the reinterpreted radical vision, capitalism, in-
stead of strangling itself to death on its class contradictions,
will choke to death on its own wastes. Radical environmen-
talists are now the earth's vanguard class who will lead the
struggle to bury capitalism and Western materialism.
    Self-described "revolutionary leftist" and founder of
the Institute of Social Ecology Murray Bookchin flatly de-
clares that "the immediate source of the ecological crisis is
capitalism," which he pointedly calls "a cancer in the bio-
sphere." (12) He adds, "I believe that the color of radicalism
today is not red, but green." (13)
    According to Michael Barkun, the social visions of mod-
ern secular millenarians embrace "the disappearance of
want and hierarchy, the leveling of distinctions, the eleva-
tion of the downtrodden." (14) Like the followers of earlier
millenarian movements, both spiritual and political, radical
environmentalists stress egalitarianism, the special insight
of adherents, the imminence of the apocalypse, and the sal-
vation of the faithful after the cataclysm.
    The modern environmental movement strongly attracts
"radical egalitarians," says University of California at Berke-
ley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. "Radical egalitari-
ans view environmentalism as the best thing that they've got
going to attack corporate capitalism." (15) He adds, "Egalitar-
ians believe that the environment is threatened by man-made
things, just as man is. Humanity's institutions, in the egali-
tarian view, are no less the source of inequalities among hu-
mans than they are the source of destruction for the
environment. To defend the environment is therefore to
erode inequalities." (16)
    For example, social ecologist Bookchin argues that
we must change our repressive industrial capitalist society
into "an ecological society based on non-hierarchical re-
lationships, decentralized democratic communities, and
eco-technologies like solar power, organic gardening, and
humanly scaled industries." 17 In 1976 arch-environ-
mentalist Barry Commoner concluded in The Poverty of
Power that "it may be time to view the faults of the U.S. cap-
italist economic system from the vantage point of a socialist
alternative," while the "deep ecologist" Arne Naess calls on
humanity to adopt a much lower material standard of
living. (18)
    Ecological mystic and founder of the radical group
Earth First! David Foreman asserts that Western society is
"rotten to the core" and says he plans to help build "an
egalitarian, decentralized, ecologically sound" society that
will "emerge out of the ashes of the old industrialized
empire" after the ecological apocalypse.(19)
    Environmental millenarians, like their medieval fore-
bears, declare that humanity can only avert total ruin if
society repents and quickly adopts their sweeping proposals
for radical social restructuring and economic redistribution.
    Richard Hofstadter tagged this type of apocalyptic dem-
agoguery the "paranoid style" of politics. Political para-
noids believe that all of humanity's ills can be traced "to a
single center and hence can be eliminated by some kind of
final act of victory over the evil source.... the world con-
fronts an apocalypse of a sort prefigured in the Book of
Revelation." (20) As we have seen, the contemporary focus of
evil is the "global ecological crisis."
    The political paranoid, like the modern radical envi-
ronmentalist, "traffics in the birth and death of whole
worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human
values. (21) Environmental doomsters believe themselves
uniquely capable of seeing the impending catastrophe while
the rest of humanity remains stubbornly blind to the danger.
"Ecologists are the saved" who believe that they "are better
able to plan man, space, and the environment than existing
institutions," concludes historian Anna Bramwell. (22)
    Predictions of doom have become more numerous in re-
cent years for a more mundane reason as well--they work.
Fears of ecological collapse motivate voters and political in-
stitutions to adopt environmentalist policies. Environmental
scientist Fred Singer notes that the first Earth Day in 1970 If
"showed that frightening the public gets results. We have
been hit by one doomsday prediction after another ever
since." (23)
    Bill McKibben, an environmental writer, lets the cat out qa
of the bag in his overwrought rendering of the alleged global
crisis, The End of Nature: "The ecological movement has
always had its greatest success in convincing people that we
are threatened by some looming problem...." (24) Essentially
apocalyptic threaten, "If you don't do what I tell you to do,
the world will come to an end."
    Wildavsky calls the use of doomsday predictions a form
of political pressure, the "Armageddon complex." He notes
that apocalyptic "bring all the dangers of the future into the
present, hold them over people, and say the most terrible
things will happen unless [their] views are accepted. If we
are not freezing to death from nuclear winter, for instance,
then the greenhouse effect is going to fry us to a crisp. The
solution, of course, will be local, state, national, interna-
tional, and intergalactic regulation to prevent these awful
things from happening." (25)
    A sizable portion of the contemporary environmental
movement has goals far beyond merely preserving wilder-
ness, protecting endangered species, recycling garbage, or
even trying to prevent global climate change. American
"Green" political activists are building "support for a
political outlook that merges ecological and social activism,
with a strong emphasis on participatory democracy and
political and economic decentralization. The Greens have
helped sustain a hopeful alternative voice in a period
characterized by a distinct shortage of idealism on the
left. is (26)
    In fact, "social justice" has long been on the agenda of
environmental egalitarians. Paul Ehrlich wrote more than
twenty years ago: "Many of the suppressed people of our na-
tion consider ecology to be just one more 'racist shuck.'...
Slums, cockroaches, and rats are ecological problems, too.
The correction of ghetto conditions in Detroit is neither
more nor less important than saving the Great Lakes--both
are imperative." (27)
    As recently as 1991, Ehrlich reaffirmed that the "envi-
ronmental crisis" can only be resolved through the "creation
of a new civilization" which will deal with "the inequitable
distribution of wealth and resources, racism, sexism, reli-
gious prejudice, and xenophobia." (28) In 1970, Denis Hayes,
chief organizer of the first Earth Day, forthrightly declared,
"We demand a lower productivity and a wider distribution."
He argued that the growing environmental movement shared
"a single unified value structure" which stood against "ex-
ploitation, imperialism, and the war-based economy." (29)
    The editors of the influential leftist magazine The Pro-
gressive warned in their special 1970 Earth Day issue that
the "new Four Horsemen--Overpopulation, Pollution, the
Famine of Resources, and Nuclear War--are riding relent-
lessly on their mission of destruction." (30) The Progressive's
editors added, "The true ecological crusaders and the peace
crusaders have a common objective--a world to save from
war, poverty, racism--and pollution." (31) Twenty years later,
the peace movement and the environmental movement are
now virtually indistinguishable.
    The environmental movement's widening social justice
agenda includes not only preventing the construction of in-
cinerators and nuclear power plants, fighting over landfill
sites and recycling campaigns, but also opposing the Per-
sian Gulf War, supporting native treaty rights, and organiz-
ing the inner city poor to demand more public housing. (32)
    The largest student-run political organization on
America's campuses, the Student Environmental Action
Coalition (SEAC), calls for a "broader definition of envi-
ronmentalism," and issues of social justice, recast as "en-
vironmental equity," dominated the group's 1991 national
conference in Boulder, Colorado. Randolph Viscio, SEAC's
national coordinator, declared: "Poor housing is an envi-
ronmental issue. Fighting for equality in an impoverished
community where a company wants to put a toxic waste
dump. Building coalitions with labor and minority groups.
It's not that these are very new issues. They just haven't
been given the attention they deserve." (33)
    In response to these social justice concerns, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency has begun to broaden the
scope of its regulatory activities by focusing on "environ-
mental equity." For example, the EPA plans to analyze how
the siting of environmental nuisances like landfills and in-
cinerators specifically affects poor people and minorities.(34)
    An increasingly influential wing of the modern envi-
ronmental movement consists of the adherents of the religio-
mystical worldview known as "deep ecology." Deep
ecologists are even more radically egalitarian than those en-
vironmentalists whose roots are in a social justice tradition.
They urge us to shun a narrow ethical focus on humanity
and adopt a "biocentric" view which treats humans and all
other species as morally identical. "Man is no more impor-
tant than any other species," concludes Earth First! founder
Dave Foreman. (35)
    Calling for "greater environmental humility," many
deep ecologists are frankly antihuman. Foreman says, "We
are a cancer on nature." (36) And the highly regarded "eco-
theologian" Reverend Thomas Berry doesn't mince words
either: "We are an affliction of the world, its demonic pres-
ence. We are the violation of Earth's most sacred aspects."(37)
Some deep ecologists welcome the AIDS epidemic as a
means of population control,(38) while others, like Christo-
pher Manes, shout the slogan "Back to the Pleistocene," and
urge us to tear down modern civilization and become tribal
hunter-gatherers as our ancestors were ten thousand years
ago.(39) This strong antihuman and anticivilization inclina-
tion has caused some friction between "deep ecologists"
and environmentalists who stem from the more human-
centered social justice tradition.
    Unlike secular millenarians who express their utopian
hopes in political rhetoric, deep ecologists do not shrink
from using frankly religious and salvationist language. "If
we seek only personal redemption we could become soli-
tary ecological saints among the masses of those we might
classify as 'sinners' who continue to pollute," writes Bill
Devall.(40) Devall, a professor at Humboldt State University
in California, wants to organize society along explicitly
egalitarian and communitarian lines.
    The environmental problems of "technocratic-
industrial societies" are "coming to be understood as a crisis
of character and of culture," he writes.(41) What is needed is
a "new ecological sensibility."(42) There is a chilling simi-
larity between the old Marxist aspiration of molding a
"New Soviet Man" and the deep ecologist's desire to create
a "New Ecological Person."
    Devall adds that "deep ecology goes beyond the so-
called factual scientific level to the level of self and Earth
wisdom."(43) Less generously, one critic fumes that environ-
mentalism has become "like a new religion, a new pagan-
ism, that worships trees and sacrifices people."(44)
    Millenarians, both secular and religious, look forward
to a transformed humanity, and radical environmentalists
also wish to remake a flawed human race. In his seminal
article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," histo-
rian Lynn White, Jr., blamed environmental degradation on
Judeo-Christian teleology, which he decried as having in-
stilled in Western culture a "faith in perpetual progress." In
1967, White asserted, "More science and more technology
are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis
until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one." 45 And
this call to "rethink and refuel our nature and destiny"(46)
has not gone unheeded. Environmentalist Victor Scheffer
believes that "if religion can be defined simply as a binding
philosophy, the start of environmentalism was a religious
reformation."(47) Another advocate declared that "environ-
mentalists are the lay priests of a different gospel that can
help save us."(48) We are bombarded by demands that we
must convert to the new environmental gospel.
    In this vein, Paul Ehrlich writes that we must undergo
a "revolution in attitudes" leading to a "transformation in
human thinking comparable to the one that accompanied
the agricultural revolution and in a much, much shorter
time."(49) Similarly, eco-doomster Lester Brown is calling for
an "Environmental Revolution" in the 1990s. He adds, "The
Agricultural Revolution began 10,000 years ago and the In-
dustrial Revolution has been under way for two centuries.
But if the Environmental Revolution is to succeed, it must
be compressed into a few decades."(50) "Our world," he
warns, "faces potentially convulsive change."
    The environmental movement also offers a congenial
home to many neo-Luddites, that is, modern antitechnol-
ogy zealots. The term Luddite is derived from the name of
the apocryphal leader of nineteenth-century England's
machine-breakers, Ned Ludd. Gangs of traditional weavers
outcompeted by modern looms smashed thousands of the
offending machines in the English Midlands in the early
nineteenth century. Today many environmental radicals,
like the Luddites of old, yearn to smash industrial capitalism.
Neo-Luddites like Jeremy Rifkin and Dave Foreman oppose
nuclear power, private automobiles, pesticides, automated
manufacturing, and biotechnology. Some neo-Luddites liter-
ally engage in machine-breaking. The radical group Earth
First! uses "ecotage" or what it calls "monkeywrenching" to
destroy developers' bulldozers by putting sugar in their fuel
tanks or spiking trees with nails so that they shatter saw
blades at lumber mills. Flying debris from the shattered
blades have maimed several lumberyard workers.
    Less militant neo-Luddites have adopted E. F. Schu-
macher's slogan that "small is beautiful" and urge humanity
to adopt "appropriate technologies." Deep ecologists seek
technologies which they deem to be "simple in means, rich
in ends." These neoutopian platitudes beg the question of
just what constitutes "appropriate technology." As Witold
Rybcyznski points out, "appropriate technology" usually
boils down to labor-intensive low technology or at best some
vaguely defined form of "intermediate" technology.(51) Re-
cently the clamor for "appropriate technology" has been
repackaged as a generalized demand that we reduce the
"scale of human activity."(52)
    What makes a technology "appropriate" or "inappro-
prime"? Deep ecologists Devall and Sessions suggest that in
order to determine whether a machine is "appropriate" or
not people ask: "Does this technological device or system
foster greater autonomy of local communities or greater de-
pendency on some centralized 'authority'?"(53) (Fostering
greater autonomy is, of course, "appropriate.")
    Just how nonsensical this question is becomes imme-
diately apparent when one considers the case of computers.
Early in their history computers were expensive behemoths
which social critics almost unanimously predicted would
foster highly centralized and regimented organizations. The
critics (along with everyone else) completely failed to fore-
see how personal computers and dispersed networks would
eventually emancipate people from central control and put
ever greater computing power in the hands of millions of
individuals.
    It probably would have been impossible to develop lib-
erating personal computers without first building main-
frames. And how about automobiles? Certainly cars foster
"autonomy," but few environmentalists would deem them
"appropriate." It is simply unwarranted, but completely
characteristic, hubris for radical environmentalists to think
that they can determine with any degree of certainty the
future benefits and costs of a new technology.
    Modern environmentalism shares the belief--typical of
earlier millenarian cults--that we live in the time immedi-
ately before the end, that our age is special, and that the final
battle between good and evil will culminate during our life-
times. "We just happen to be living at the moment when the
carbon dioxide has increased to an intolerable level. We just
happen to be alive at the moment when if nothing is done
before we die the world's tropical rain forests will become
a brown girdle that will last for millennia," writes Bill
McKibben.(54)
    "Never in the course of history has humankind been
faced with so many threats and dangers," declared the Club
of Rome in 1991.55 Others warn that "we are the last gen-
eration on Earth that can save the planet."(55)
    Like earlier millenarians who saw signs and portents of
the end in comets, meteors, plagues, floods, and droughts,
contemporary enviro-prophets see confirming proof of their
worst fears wherever they turn. "The signs are there for
those who can read them," declares Paul Ehrlich.(57) He
points to hurricanes, heat waves, unseasonal cold snaps,
depleted oil wells, and local famines, along with the tradi-
tional floods, droughts, and epidemics, as portents of the
coming global catastrophe literally anything bad indis-
criminately counts as evidence of impending doom.
    Millenarians like Ehrlich do not accept the culturally
transmitted notions of reality. They selectively fix their at-
tention on information that confirms their strongly held be-
liefs. They ignore information that does not fit or twist it so
that it confirms their views. Even apparently good news is
artfully reinterpreted as a bad omen. For example, the fact
that worldwide farmers grow far more food per acre now
than two decades ago is bad news in the exegesis of the
dumpsters. They claim that more intensive agriculture
means greater soil erosion and groundwater depletion; con-
sequently, more people who are temporarily sustained by
the extra agricultural bounty will later die in misery when
the earth's fertility is exhausted and the long-predicted
global famine finally strikes.
    Sad to say, many prominent modern millenarians
misuse their scientific credentials to lend authority to their
policy pronouncements. They claim certain factual states of
affairs necessarily call for specific ethical and policy re-
sponses. Thus, they try to make the philosophically illegit-
imate leap from an "is" to an "ought," from the domain of
facts to the realm of values.
    Modern doomsayers typically furnish some very qual-
ified scientific data as evidence for the imminence of the
crisis and then strike out boldly to reorganize society com-
pletely to meet the alleged challenge. In addition, apocalyp-
tics claim our predicament is so perilous that we do not
have time for further study of the situation. Despite enor-
mous uncertainties about the seriousness of the alleged
problems, they insist that we must act immediately to rad-
ically transform our society, economy, and values. Or else.
    These "apocalypse abusers" typically extrapolate only
the most horrendous trends, while systematically ignoring
any ameliorating or optimistic ones, offering worst-case sce-
narios in the guise of balanced presentations. Ehrlich re-
cently dropped all pretense to scientific objectivity and
endorsed the "quasi-religious" deep ecology movement. He
commended deep ecologists for eschewing "scientific non-
sense." (58)
   "Normally scientific research leads to scientific conclu-
sions, not to metaphysical manifestos, prophetic outbursts,
utopian reorganizations of society, and political positions,
1 et alone to a set of internationalist positions on the redistri-
bution of wealth from rich to poor nations, which are clearly
identifiable as positions taken by the far left portion of the
political spectrum," observed Edith Efron in her ground-
breaking The Apocalyptics.(59) Physicist Edward Teller
declared, "Highly speculative theories of worldwide de-
struction even of the end of life on Earth--used as a call for
a particular kind of political action serve neither the good
reputation of science nor dispassionate political thought." (80)
    However, radical environmentalists have become very
skilled at portraying scientific findings as part of a "global
ecological crisis." Consequently, politicians and other pol-
icymakers are often forced to respond to the illegitimate
fears fostered by apocalyptic environmentalists. Political
leaders must make decisions--often far-reaching ones
based on very uncertain, and sometimes deliberately dis-
torted, scientific findings. Some environmentalists are not
above lying in what they believe is a good cause.
What about John and Betty Smith who earnestly recycle
their soda cans and newspapers, east fast-food hamburgers
served in cardboard--not Styrofoam--cartons, and carpool
to work? Surely the Smiths are not apocalyptic egalitarian
environmentalists? They are just trying to do their little bit
to "save the earth."
      The Smiths' modest "light green" environmentalism is
an echo of the radical agenda set by millenarians in the
"dark green" environmentalist movement. The Smiths and
their neighbors are motivated by the relentless drumbeat of |
fears and millenarian environmental predictions tapped out
by apocalypse abusers.
    There are more than 450 national organizations, and I
countless ones at the local level, promoting environmental-
ism.(61) While certainly not all of these organizations are rad-
ical, they all share an institutional imperative to find and
publicize an endless series of crises and disasters, since I
without calamities to combat, they have no reason to exist.
Consequently, many of these groups have become quite
skilled at mass-marketing doom.
    Leading environmental organizations, including the Si-
errs Club, Greenpeace, the National Wildlife Federation,
and the Natural Resources Defense Council, pulled in more
than $400 million from a contributor base of nearly four t
million in 1990.(62) Four hundred million dollars is ten times 1
the amount of money that Republican and Democratic par-
ties together raised in 1990. "Ecology is now a political
category, like socialism or conservatism," says historian
Anna Bramwell.(63) Indeed, in 1970 Marion Edey, a founder
of the League of Conservation Voters, argued that environ-
mentalists "must stop acting like a small pressure group and
become more like an unofficial political party. (64)
    And the "unofficial" environmental party has been very
effective in disseminating its message. When 74 percent of
respondents toe New York Times poll agree with the state-
ment, "Protecting the environment is so important that the
requirements and standards cannot be too high, and con-
tinuing environmental improvements must be made regard-
less of cost,"(65) radical ideas have surely taken hold among
average Americans.
    Four hundred million dollars also buys a lot of influ-
ence in the halls of the United States Capitol. George Mitch-
ell, U.S. Senate Majority Leader, warns in unmistakably
apocalyptic tones in his book World on Fire: Saving an En-
dangered Earth of an impending "ecological holocaust" in
which "we risk turning our world into a lifeless desert in
the coming century, and bringing to pass the grim final judg-
ment of a world on fire."(66)
    Meanwhile, Vice-president Albert Gore, who, for more
than a decade and a half, was the leading Congressional
backer of environmental causes, is now calling on his fellow
citizens to "become partners in a bold effort to change the
very foundation of our civilization."(67)  He urges us "to make
the rescue of the environment the central organizing prin-
ciple for civilization,'(68) offering "a global Marshall Plan" to
drastically reorganize the American and world economies
along environmentalist lines.(69)
    Since the 1960s the United States has adopted scores of
new environmental laws and thousands of environmental
regulations. Some have been beneficial and necessary. But
environmental regulation has been expensive, costing the
economy $123 billion in 1991, with the price tag rising to
$171 billion annually by the year 2000.(70) The Environmen-
tal Protection Agency's budget has jumped 31 percent since
1989, while its staff swelled by 23 percent.(71)
    In June 1992, the global environment rose to the top of
the world's agenda when the United Nations convoked its
172 members at Rio de Janeiro for the much-heralded "Earth
Summit." Organizers grandiloquently billed Rio '92 as "the
most important meeting in the history of humanity."(72)
    More than 100 presidents, prime ministers, and
princes gathered for the world's greatest-ever photo oppor-
tunity. The Earth Summit also attracted diplomats from
172 countries, 5,000 journalists, and 17,000 environmen-
talists representing more than 1,400 nongovernmental or-
ganizations.
    The U.N. Conference on Environment and Develop-
ment, as the Earth Summit was officially called, was not
known for understatement. Maurice Strong, the Canadian
oilman who served as its Secretary-General warned in his
opening remarks that humanity's current path "could lead to
the end of civilization" and that "this planet could soon be-
come uninhabitable for people." He concluded that the only
hopes for saving humanity are sweeping changes in "global
culture and value systems." As we have seen, this utopian
call for changes in "values" is a staple of millenarian move-
ments including modern apocalyptic environmentalism.
    The most significant agreements reached at Earth
Summit were the Convention of Global Climate Change, the
Convention on Biological Diversity, and Agenda 21. Even be-
fore Rio, the nations of the world had signed some 170 in-
ternational treaties dealing with environmental concerns.(73)
    The more interesting event--from a psycho-social-
cultural point of view--was the parallel "Global Forum."
The Forum, held in a park near downtown Rio, was adver-
tised as the "world's fair of environmentalism." At the Fo-
rum, radical environmentalists and their allies in the New
Age Spirituality movement hawked their solutions to the
global ecological crisis they believe is looming. These non-
governmental organizations hammered out a series of "trea-
ties" among themselves designed to monitor and pressure
their countries' governments to comply with the official
treaties signed at the Summit.
    The most surprising thing about the Earth Summit was
how little the natural world and the environment were ac-
tually mentioned. Usually, the alleged environmental crises
were simply stipulated and the conversation and speeches
turned quickly to outlining schemes for drastically redistrib-
uting the world's wealth in order to achieve "global equity."
    The U.S. and many other nations signed Agenda 21, the
ambitious 800-page blueprint for global environmental reg-
ulation and economic planning for the twenty-first century.
To implement Agenda 21 programs, the developed coun-
tries are expected to give the Third World $125 billion an-
nually. At the Summit, one got the impression that many
poor countries anticipate the arrival of Western aid much
the same way that Polynesian "cargo cults" wait for goods-
laden ships to dock.
    Agenda 21 is the Mother of all Five Year Plans! A U.N
Sustainable Development Commission will be established
by the General Assembly under the authority of the
Secretary-General to oversee Agenda 21. The spectacular
failure of Soviet economic central planning has not dimmed
the enthusiasm of environmentalists for global ecological
central planning.
    To ameliorate or prevent impending doom, apocalyptic
simultaneously recommend the creation of a huge coercive
international bureaucracy while promoting decentralized
"participatory democracy" at the local level. They wish to
turn the whole world into one gigantic "commons." The no-
tion of a "global commons" is akin to the old-fashioned
Marxist demand for the abolition of private property.
    Historian Anna Bramwell notes the contradiction be-
tween the radical environmentalists' "small is beautiful"
values and their belief in global planning. "Their method of
returning to the natural world involves mass planning and
coercion," she notes.(74)
    As the United Nations Conference on the Environment
and Development showed, the doomsters reflexively turn to
the international control of whatever they deem the prob-
lam to be -- population, food, climate, or carbon dioxide. Not
incidentally, international regulation of the problem would
also enhance the doorsteps' own power and prestige.
    Another disturbing and disheartening aspect of the rise
of radical environmentalism is the growing pressure on sci-
entists to manipulate research findings in order to attract
funding. "It is well known that Congress has a short attention
span--so short that it often appears capable of dealing only
with crises. Because everyone else is crying 'crisis,' respon-
sible scientists are forced to join the chorus or risk losing their
research programs," avers Harvard University researcher Pe-
ter Rogers.(75) He adds that the phony crisis atmosphere en-
gendered by this dismal process causes environmentalists,
politicians, and citizen's groups to demand immediate ac-
tion, which is not what most scientists had in mind at all.
    The father of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer,
appalled by the devastating power of nuclear weapons, once
declared that scientists had now "known sin." Scientists
have indeed "known sin" in the last fifty years, but not the
sin of eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as implied
by Oppenheimer. Instead their besetting sin is far more
mundane greed.
    After three years and two billion dollars, Manhattan
Project scientists succeeded in making three atomic bombs.
The project's two billion dollar budget would add up to
more than $16 billion today.(76)
    At the dawn of the atomic age, the physicists were the
first scientists to enjoy vast government largesse. The great
national laboratories like the Argonne National Laboratory
outside Chicago and Lawrence Livermore near San Fran-
cisco were built and funded as technical citadels devoted to
the struggle against Soviet communism. "Government was
evidently to be a far more benign and generous patron than
most scientists had believed possible," concluded Alice
Kimball Smith, in her history of the Federation of American
Scientists.(77)
    Indeed, federal research spending has now ballooned to
more than $76 billion annually,(78) and scientists at govern-
ment and university laboratories have become a powerful
political lobby. The ideal of the dispassionate and objective
analysis of the natural world has sometimes been thrown
aside in favor of naked interest-group politics and the scram-
ble for funds.
    Climatologists are fairly recent entrants to the govern-
ment science funding frays. In the 1970's, the $50 million
Climatic Impact Assessment Program (CIAP) was the first
intensive scientific study of humanity's impacts on climate.
In the 1980's, some climatologists began warning against an
eroding ozone layer and catastrophic increases in the earth's
average temperature. Subsequently, they have been re-
warded with new grants of federal monies; the climate
change research budget, for example, climbed to $1.1 billion
in 1992 and will increase by 24 percent in 1993.79
    Of the scores of scientists interviewed in the course of
researching this book, nearly every one of them mentioned,
unprompted, how scarce research funds are and how they
need more money for their work. Most of them believe in
good faith that their work is important and possibly even
vital for the future well-being of mankind. Therefore it is not
surprising that some are tempted to try to attract more
money by linking their efforts to whatever the latest crisis is.
Thus the politicization of science has led inexorably to
interest-group lobbying and to the erosion of the standards
of objectivity, threatening the very foundations of the sci-
entific enterprise.
    This intense competition for funding has also led to a
steep increase in "science by press release." Scientists work-
ing on environmental problems have been particularly
prone to issuing their results without the normal benefit of
having their work reviewed by their scientific peers. For
example, Ehrlich popularized The Population Bomb by
making several appearances on Johnny Carson's "Tonight
Show." The publication of the classic eco-doom study The
Limits to Growth was orchestrated by a public relations firm.
"Nuclear winter" first came to the public's attention in an
article by astrophysicist Carl Sagan in the popular newspa-
per Sunday supplement Parade, and was also handled by a
public relations firm.
    Science by press release has also been used to publicize
lesser "crises" such as the carefully choreographed Alar
scare in which the Natural Resources Defense Council used
a public relations firm to promote the bogus "story" of poi-
soned apples to CBS's "60 Minutes." In each case, the pub-
lic was alarmed and new enduring environmental myths
were added to the accumulating conventional wisdom of
doom, but later scientific analysis severely weakened the
original catastrophic claims. The problem of science by
press release has become so bad that the National Academy
of Sciences issued a report in 1992 calling on scientists to
stop the "questionable research practices" of misrepresent-
in8 speculations as fact, and releasing research results, es-
pecially to the popular press, that have not been evaluated
by fellow scientists and judged valid.(80)
    Unfortunately, not only do scientists have an incentive
to cry "crisis," so too do the environmental advocacy groups
need crises. Without them, how could advocacy groups jus- i
tify their pleas for donations? Nearly every American gets
bulk quantities of junk mail warning of ozone depletion,
topsoil erosion, resource depletion, diminishing biodiver-
city, and global warming. The money the advocacy groups
collect is spent on lawyers, lobbying, propaganda, and the
salaries and perquisites of the headquarters staffs. The me-
dia also have a strong incentive to report "crises"--they
must sell newspapers and airtime after all. So there it is--an
iron triangle of scientists pleading for research funds, inter-
est groups who need crises to justify their existence, and a
press that needs to sell papers. It's no wonder people are
frightened.
    It is, however, far easier to raise fears than to allay them.
The apocalyptic factoids manufactured by radical environ-
mentalists develop a life of their own once they are fixed in
the popular imagination. Who does not still hear the "facts"
of overpopulation, impending global famine, and resource
depletion discussed at cocktail parties and congressional
hearings?
    The hallmark of a truly scientific statement is that it
must be made in a way that permits experiments to reveal
that it is false. It is also logically impossible to prove a
negative. For example, just as it is impossible to prove that
there are no unicorns, so too it is impossible to prove that
the world will not come to an end imminently.
    On the other hand, pseudoscientific claims can never
be proved wrong. For instance, we will see in a later chapter
that it is difficult to imagine what evidence would ever con-
vince population alarmist Paul Ehrlich that global famine
will not occur in the next three decades. Ehrlich and Lester
Brown have time and again predicted that world food prices
will soon skyrocket and hundreds of millions starve in mas-
sive famines. Like earlier millenarians they insist the catas-
trophe is imminent, predicting global famine beginning in
1975, 1980, etc. Yet world food prices continue to fall and
global famine recedes ever further into the hazy future.
Unfazed, the gloom peddlers simply postpone doomsday,
claiming that humanity has somehow gotten a temporary
reprieve. How many times can doomsday be delayed before
the soothsayers of doom admit that perhaps their prophe-
cies are wrong?
   Half a century's woeful experience indicates, however,
that crying wolf never erodes the popularity of the frightful
predictions. "One clearly wrong prophecy, or even a whole
string of them, rarely discredits the prophet in the eyes of
those who believe in prophecy," notes Daniel Cohen in
Waiting for the Apocalypse.(81) And this is especially true for
contemporary environmental predictions of doom.
Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of doom is simply
wrong. Humanity is not running short of food or minerals,
and in fact life for most human beings has dramatically
improved over the past half century.
  So why do so many people in the developed world
believe in apocalyptic environmentalism? The attraction of
Apocalyptic thinking is strong. One survivor of millenarian
enviromnentalism, Eric Zencey, recalled, "There is seduc-
tion in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days,
one's actions, one's very life, take on historical meaning and
no small measure of poignance.... Apocalypticism fulfills
a desire to escape the flow of real and ordinary time, to fix
the flow of history into a single moment of overwhelming
importance."(82)
Daniel Cohen believes that every generation grows up
convinced that it is the last generation in history. However,
the method by which the end is to be brought about changes.
For Cohen's generation nuclear war was the agent of the
apocalypse. "We believed passionately that there would be
such a war, and like the early Christians we were sure that
this Judgment Day would come within our own lifetimes,"
he writes.(83)
     The glare of the atomic explosions at Trinity and Hi-
roshima still illuminates all the subsequent prophesied
dooms that have so beset the last melancholy half century.
   So, let us turn now to the beginning of doomsday--July 16,
1945.




NOTES

                  Notes to Chapter One

1 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Sierra
  Club-Ballantine, 1968), i.
2 Donella Meadows, et at., The Limits to Growth (New
  York: New American Library, 1972), 29.
3 Liebe Cavalieri, "New Strains of Life--or Death," The
  New York Times Magazine (Aug. 22, 1976), 67.
4 Michael Oppenheimer, "From Red Menace to Green
  Threat," The New York Times (Mar. 27, 1990), A27. Op-
  penheimer holds the Barbra Streisand research chair at
  the Environmental Defense Fund.
5 Nigel Balder, "In the Grip of a New Ice Age?" Interna-
  tional Wildlife (June 1975), 33-35.
6 Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making
  and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge,
  Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983). See es-
  pecially 95-109,282-293.
7 Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Ha-
  ven: Yale University Press, 1974),205.
8 Witold Rybczynski, Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to
  Control Technology (New York: Viking, 1983),77.
9 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York:
  Basic Books, 1980),97.
10 Paul Johnson, The Enemies of Society (New York: Ath-
   eneum, 1977),88.
11 Ibid., 89.
12 Steve Chase, ad., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Be-
   tween Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman (Boston:
   South End Press, 1991), 57-59.
13 Ibid., 58.
14 Barkun, Disaster, 185.
15 Aaron Wildavsky, interview, Oct. 30,1991.
16 Aaron Wildavsky, The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism
   (Washington, D.C.: AmericanUniversityPress,1991), 74.
17 Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a
   Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 155.
18 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and the
   Economic Crisis (New York: Knopf, 1976),262.
19 David Foreman, cited in Chase, Defending the Earth,
   73-75.
20 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American
   Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), xii.
21 Ibid., 29.
22 Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History
   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),16.
23 S. Fred Singer, "Lowering the Gloom," Time (Sept. 14,
   1987), 12.
24 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random
   House, 1989), 174.
25 Wildavsky, Radical Egalitarianism, 238-239.
26 Brian Tokar, "The Greens: To Party or Not?" Z Magazine
   (Oct. 1991), 42.
27 Paul Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, "Impact of Population
   Growth," Science 171:1212-1217 (Mar. 26, 1971): 1215.
28 Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, Healing the Planet:
   Strategies for Resolving the Environmental Crisis (New
   York: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 242.
29 Denis Hayes, "Earth Day: A Beginning," The Progressive
   (Apr. 1970), 7.
30 "Action for Survival: A Prologue by the Editors," The
    Progressive (Apr. 1970), 3.
31 Ibid., 5.
32 Tokar, "The Greens," 42.
33 Randolph Viscio, cited in Keith Schneider, "Student
   Group Seeks Broader Agenda for Environmental Move-
   went," The New York Times (Oct. 7, 1991), A12
34 John Bushman, "Environmental Hazards to Poor Gain
   New Focus at E.P.A.," The New York Times (Jan. 21,
   E 1992), C4.
35 Dave Foreman, cited in John Fayhee, "Earth First! And
   Foremost," Backpacker (Sept. 1988), 23.
36 Dave Foreman, "Only Man's Presence Can Save Nature,"
   Harper's (Apr. 1990), 48.
37 Thomas Berry, quoted in Murray Bookchin, "Will Ecol-
   ogy Become 'the Dismal Science'?", The Progressive
   (Dec. 1991), 20.
38 Ibid.
39 Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmen-
   talism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little,
   Brown, 1990), 237.
40 Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living
   As If Nature Mattered (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1987),
   14.
41 Ibid., ix.
42 Chase, Defending the Earth, 3.
43 Devall, Deep Ecology, 65.
44 Charles Bushman, director of the National In holders As-
   sociation, cited in The New York Times (Dec. 23,1991),
   A12.
45 Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic
   Crisis," Science (Mar. 10,1967), l206.
46 Ibid., 1207.
47 Victor Scheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in
   America (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
   1991),7.
48 Archie Ruprecht, "Ask Not for Whom the Owl Hoots,"
   letter to the editor, The New York Times (Mar. 14,1992),
   24.
49 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, Healing the Planet, 251.
50 Lester Brown, et at., State of the World 1992 (New York:
   Norton, 1992),175.
51 Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes: A Review of Appro-
   priate Technology (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1980),
   182.
52 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, Healing the Planet, 238.
53 Devall, Deep Ecology, 35.
54 McKibben, The End of Nature, 194.
55 Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Glo-
   bal Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of
   Rome (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 127.
56 Anita Gordon and David Suzuki, It's A Matter of Sur-
   vival, cited by Daniel Kevles in "Some Like It Hot," The
   New York Review of Books (Mar. 26,1992),32.
57 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, Healing the Planet, xiii.
58 Ibid., 258.
59 Edith Efron, The Apocalyptics: How Environmental Pol-
   itics Controls What We Know About Cancer (New York:
   Simon & Schuster, 1984),44.
60 Edward Teller, cited by Starley Thompson and Stephen
   Schneider, "Nuclear Winter Reappraised," Foreign Af-
   fairs (Summer 1986),983.
61 Scheffer, The Shaping, 180.
62 Terry Anderson and Donald Leal, Free Market Environ-
   mentalism (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991), 94.
63 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 39.
64 Marion Edey, cited in Scheffer, The Shaping, 139.
65 Riley Dunlop, "Public Opinion in the 1980s: Clear Con-
   sensus, Ambiguous Commitment," Environment (Oct.
   1991),32.
66 George Mitchell, World on Fire: Saving an Endangered
   Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 225.
67 Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Hu-
   man Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992),14.
68 Ibid., 269.
69 Ibid., 295-360.
70 John Cushman, "Federal Regulation Growing as Quayle
   Panel Fights It," The New York Times (Dec. 24, 1991),
   A1.
71 Ibid., A14.
72 Christina Lamb, "Summit in danger of crashing to
   earth," Financial Times (Nov. 7, 1991), 21.
73 Hillary French, Worldwatch Institute Press Conference,
   Jan. 15, 1992.
74 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 31.
75 Peter Rogers, "Climate Change and Global Warming,"
   Environmental Science and Technology 24:4 (1990),
   429.
76 Robert Norris, et at. "History of the Nuclear Stockpile,"
   Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Aug. 1985), 108.
77 Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists'
   Movement in America 1945-47 (Chicago: University of
   Chicago Press, 1965), 522.
78 Colin Norman, "Science Budget: Selective Growth," Sci-
   ence (Feb. 7, 1992), 672; William Broad, "Swords Have
   Been Sheathed But Plowshares Lack Design," The New
   York Times (Feb. 5, 1992), A12.
79 Norman, "Science Budget," 673; Edward Rubin, et at.,
   "Keeping Climate Research Relevant," Issues in Science
   and Technology (Winter 1991-92), 50.
80 Boyce Rensberger, "Science Panel Cites Research Fraud
   Problem," The Washington Post (Apr. 23, 1992), A11.
81 Daniel Cohen, Waiting for the Apocalypse (Buffalo,
   N.Y.: Prometheus, 1973), 248.
82 Eric Zencey, "Apocalypse and Ecology," North Ameri-
   can Review (June 1988), 55, 57.
83 Cohen, Waiting for the Apocalypse, 166.