CD-ROM Aktief 1995 #3/CDA3.iso/survival/ecoscam1.txt

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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 pove