This article originally ran at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
A few years ago seventh graders at a tony private school near San Francisco were given an unusual Earth Day assignment: Make a list of environmental projects that could be accomplished with Bill Gates’ fortune. This approach to environmental awareness fits in well with the Obama-Pelosi-Reid worldview that the right to private property is subsidiary to undertakings that others think are worthwhile – the redistributive theory of society. And how interesting that the resources made “available” for the students’ thought-experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of one of the nation’s most successful, innovative entrepreneurs.
Another Earth Day assignment for those same students was to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable 2012 analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts.”
Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides in spite of the fact that “Silent Spring” was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct. Carson’s observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, Professor of Entomology at San Jose State University, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. In his stunning 1992 essay, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and called attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
Consider this quote from Edwards: “This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that ‘in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.’ The World Health Organization stated that DDT had ‘killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.’”
Meiners and Morriss conclude correctly that the influence of “Silent Spring” on modern environmentalism “encourages some of the most destructive strains within environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to consider the costs and benefits of alternatives, and the discounting of human well-being around the world.” Sounds like a description of the mindset of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The first Earth Day celebration was conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grass roots level. In recent years, Earth Day has provided an opportunity for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt and proselytize. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.
One of the U.K.’s great thinkers, Dick Taverne, aka Lord Taverne of Pimlico, discusses many of the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his excellent book, “The March of Unreason.” Taverne deplores the “new kind of fundamentalism” that has infiltrated many environmentalist campaigns — an undiscriminating Back-To-Nature movement that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious and reductionist attitude toward nature. It is no coincidence, he believes, that eco-fundamentalists are strongly represented in anti-globalization and anti-capitalism demonstrations around the world.
In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his much-acclaimed novel “State of Fear” that eco-fundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and made a religion of environmentalism, a religion with its own Eden and paradise where mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until mankind’s fall — which came not from eating an apple, but after eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge (that is, science). This religion also has a judgment day to come for us all in this polluted world — all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by achieving sustainability. One of Crichton’s characters argues that since the end of the Cold War, environmental alarmism in Western nations has filled the void left by the disappearance of the terror of communism and nuclear holocaust, and that social control is now maintained by highly exaggerated fears about pollution, global warming, chemicals, genetic engineering and the like. With the military-industrial complex no longer the primary driver of society, the politico-legal-media complex has replaced it.
This politico-legal-media complex peddles fear in the guise of promoting safety. French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner captured its tone nicely: “You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy.”
The tiny-minded misanthropes have enjoyed some dubious “successes.” They have effectively banished agricultural biotechnology from Europe, have the chemical industry on the run and the pharmaceutical industry in their crosshairs.
Lord Taverne believes these are ominous trends that are contrary to the principles of the Enlightenment, returning us to an era in which inherited dogma and superstition took precedence over experimental data. Not only do the practices of eco-fundamentalism retard technologies and the availability of products which, used responsibly, could dramatically improve and extend many lives and protect the environment, but they strangle scientific creativity and technological innovation.
By limiting citizens’ and businesses’ ability to engage in voluntary transactions, irrational practices born of eco-fundamentalism undermine the health of civilized society and of democracy. Defend science and reason, argues Taverne, and you defend democracy itself. Well said, Milord, and Happy Earth Day to you.
Note: This article is a revised version of a 2012 Forbes column.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
