The Unadmirable Crichton
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And throughout the country, schools of irate fish-worshipers descended on city halls and state houses to demand the immediate abolition of products that made clothes clean, that made household chores less arduous, that were perfectly safe for human beings, but had one, and only one, flaw: they posed a possible threat to a few fish. [The products in question, detergents containing high amounts of phosphates, posed a risk to far more than a few fish.]
Grayson and Shepard, The Disaster Lobby, Follett Publishing Company, 1973, pages 69-70
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MYTH No. 9: Environmentalists essentially practice pagan tree worship. Environmentalists are disconnected from what's important to people. They're anti-God and anti-American.
FACT: This argument is based in as little truth as the absurd McCarthy-era witch hunts of the 1950s with suspected "communists" lurking behind every door. Today, more than 80 percent of Americans consider themselves "environmentalists," and conservation is as patriotic as motherhood and apple pie.
The conservation ethic has its foundation in Judeo-Christian faiths. The Book of Genesis tells of God giving humankind dominion over his creation. Those who suggest destroying natural resources destroy not only God's gift, but the resources essential to the survival of humankind
RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY September 8,1994:
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That the environmental movement is a religion is one of those myths that rears its ugly head every few months, typically with the author making it sound like he has uncovered something that no-one has ever considered before. Usually these claims are soon forgotten, but occasionally one will have a certain amount of staying power. This is the case of a recent speech by Michael Crichton, most famous as the author of a number of science fiction novels, which has been widely reposted on the web.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
Crichton starts setting up the audience, we have to learn to separate truth (his position) from propaganda (the environmentalist's position). But he is comparing apples and oranges, propaganda is an attempt to persuade people, it is not the opposite of truth.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
Here Crichton claims to support protecting the environment, but oppose the environmental movement, a common "brownlash" claim.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Crichton tries to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of elitists "the best people, the most enlightened people." This ties into the anti-elitism often found in the anti-environmental movement.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
By talking about "urban atheists" Crichton further paints environmentalists as elites and not like "ordinary Americans". But poll after poll has shown that the majority of Americans are environmentalists, while only a tiny minority are atheists. It should be obvious that the majority of environmentalists are religious believers. One also has to wonder about all the non-western beliefs, which don't follow the "traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths"? Are they not religions?
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Here Crichton makes an argument by analogy. Environmentalism is like Christianity in some ways, so it must be like Christianity in another way, namely being a religion. But he leaves out many attributes of Christianity, especially the main one of a belief in a supernatural God. And his examples are just plain nutty. What is a "state of pollution"? And how many environmentalists believe that sustainability is salvation, or that eating organic food has anything to do with communion? None that I know of. Also note that he continues to try to paint environmentalists as elitists; "the right people with the right beliefs."
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
I'm not a religious scholar, but I don't think that there is anything like the Eden myth outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And Crichton fails to note that beliefs are based on facts, or at least what are believed to be facts. Contrary to his claims, people do change their beliefs.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Hun?
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
Many people, not just environmentalists, think that things were better in the past. This is just a variation of the belief that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. But I don't know of anyone who thinks that there was any kind of Eden (except as a religious belief), and it certainly is not one of the foundations of the environmental movement. And the claim that infant mortality was once 80% seems to be greatly exaggerated. This would require that couples have an average of 10 children per family just to maintain the population. This article puts the rate before 1900 at 20-30%, this was certainly a tragedy but considerably less than what Crichton claims.
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
The idea of the "nobel savage" started long before the modern environmental movement. Some people believe that the Native Americans lived in harmony with nature, but this is nowhere near a universal belief. (Note that Crichton repeatedly assumes that all environmentalists think alike, something that is absolutely not true.) Why the North American mega-fana disappeared is the subject of some debate. While the newly arrived people may have contributed to this, other factors, such as climate change, also appears to have played a part. Contrary to Crichton's claims, some tribes were peaceful. And why the cliff dwellers lived in cliff houses is not clear.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
Actually the South Fore ate the bodies of their dead relatives, not their enemies. It was this transmission that led to the identification of prions. Prions have been identified as the cause of several other diseases, such as mad cow disease.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.
Here Crichton tries to imply that environmentalists are urbanites who are out of touch with real nature. He continues this argument for several paragraphs, which I will skip over. But many environmentalists do "live in nature." They have often seem some of the worst effects of environmental destruction.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
If I understand this, Crichton is claiming that environmentalists changing their beliefs (removing population growth from the "doomsday list") proves that environmentalists never change their beliefs. Amazing.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
First, note that these were official predictions from the United Nations. Were the environmentalists wrong to believe the best available information? Apparently so. Yes, some warnings (not predictions) were wrong. But nobody waits till they are absolutely sure before issuing a warning. And Crichton, like many before him, fails to note that in many cases the warnings prevented the very things that were warned against
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
Here environmentalism is not just a religion, but a nutty religion. And beliefs are not affected by facts, which is just plain nutty.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
This is rather confused. Note that Crichton does not say that DDT does not cause health problems, only that it does not cause cancer. And there is good evidence that DDT caused egg shells to thin and prevented the hatching of birds. The US ban on DDT only effected the US. It did not even prevent the export to other countries. How did stopping the use of DDT cause millions of deaths on the other side of the globe?
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
Even more nuttyness. Second hand some is a major health hazard. The evidence for human caused global warming continues to grow stronger. I can't find anything to suggest that "the total ice of Antarctica is increasing." I have never heard of this blue ribbon panel, which Crichton uses to set up a false dichotomy, either we enact plan A that will totally fix the problem or we do nothing. Because there is no plan A, we can be smug in doing nothing.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
I, for one, would like to see these references. Does anyone know his e-mail address?
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I think Crichton needs to get some perspective on himself.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
The scientific journals are already full of science about the environment. What we need is for people to stop bashing the science, and start applying it. The rest of the speech has been snipped.
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Written by Jim Norton
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