I was sent Crichton's piece some time ago, and wrote a fairly detailed 
response to it.  In my judgment it is fundamentally either incompetent 
or dishonest, perhaps both  You take your pick.

I stick to examples largely from the Pacific Northwest because I am 
pretty well-informed on them.  But I suspect people could find plenty 
of other examples illustrating the imbecility of many of Crichton's 
arguments.

Below is his piece and the comments I prepared, inserted at the 
appropriate places.  Feel free to pass them on to anyone who thinks 
Crichton wrote a powerful piece.

best,

Gus diZerega
Dept. of Politics
Whitman College
Walla Walla, WA 99362


On Thursday, February 26, 2004, at 01:21 PM, Jim Tantillo wrote:

Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003
 
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.
 
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.
 

Crichton says here that it is important for us to "conduct our lives . 
. . [to take] into account all the consequences of our actions."  This 
is impossible.  My point is not merely the picky one that we can never 
know the full impact of our actions, but rather that this outlook 
encourages a view of knowledge that weighs what we know - or think we 
know - more heavily than what we may not.  When dealing with complex 
emergent or self-organizing orders, such as markets and ecosystems, 
this attitude consistently leads to trouble.  I link markets and 
ecosystems because the kind of mistake is the same when made by 
socialists about markets and certain technophiles about ecosystems.

A good example with regard to ecology is salmon hatcheries where, among 
much else, we have recently discovered that hatcheries select for 
smaller and more numerous eggs than do natural processes, thereby 
reducing the capacity of hatchery salmon to repopulate streams once 
conditions there have been restored to greater health.  There are many 
such examples.  When dealing with complex interrelated processes 
caution and humility fare better over the long run than do confidence 
and pride.

Analogous issues arise when government interferes with market processes 
to try and improve on market outcomes.  This problem proved fatal to 
the socialist ideal of central planning replacing the market, but it 
also applies to corporate and bureaucratic ecological planning.  
Crichton appears unfamiliar with how complex orders work, be they 
social or ecological, even though he wrote Jurassic Park.

The answer is not to accept powerlessness, but to act differently than 
when we confront a simple technological or mechanical issue.  I have 
written extensively on this as have a few other enviromentalists.  
Among the best are Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Wiliam McDonough, and 
Michael Braungart.  My stuff is damn good as well.  Check out  and go 
to “ecology”

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's modesty is amusing, for it is clear he considers himself 
among the most enlightened, whereas mankind as a whole is caught in the 
throes of superstition.  His confidence that religion reduces to a 
simple psychological need is an example of philosophical and 
psychological hubris on a grand scale.  But these matters are 
tangential to the issue at hand, so I will let them pass, other than 
bringing them to the reader’s attention.

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.
 
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.
 
The previous paragraphs describe some un-named people concerned with 
environmental issues, who embrace some form of the Judeo-Christian 
mythic framework.  The question Crichton does not even attempt to 
answer is how representative they are either in absolute numbers or 
among the leading lights.  Yet, for a truly informed analysis of the 
issue, these should be among the most obvious and basic issues to cover.

There are a great many who do not resemble Crichton’s portrait. Here is 
a list of MAJOR environmental thinkers who certainly do not:
H. D. Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Holmes Rolston, J. Baird 
Callicott, Gary Snyder, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, David Brower, Arne 
Naess, Sigurd Olson, Jane Goodall, Murray Bookchin, Joanna Macy, Adolph 
Murie, Edward O. Wilson, and a host of others.

This is just off the top of my head.  The list could be enlarged upon 
immensely.  The ones now dead played a major role in the rise of the 
environmental movement.  The living ones still do.  I like the ideas of 
some of these thinkers, some I don't.  None resembles Crichton's 
imagined "environmentalist."

My point is not that his version of an environmentalist does not exist. 
  They do.  The key question is how influential are they and how 
representative are they of people concerned with the environment as a 
whole?

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.
 
Yes again, some environmentalists do sort of accept an 'eden' myth and 
see much that has happened since as a decline.  Probably the most 
sophisticated among these people is Paul Shepard, and his reasons are 
completely unconnected to Crichton's analysis.  Shepard argues we 
evolved in certain kinds of Pleistocene ecosystems, and are 
psychologically best suited for living as hunter/gatherers in them.  
Shepard’s argument relies plenty on biology, history, and psychology, 
and not at all on faith or mythology or Crichton's idea of hard wired 
structures in the brain.

Of course there are some folks who do closely resemble Crichton’s 
portrait.  Some Earth First! members would come pretty close to 
Crichton's model - but they are a tiny minority of those of us who 
consider ourselves environmentalists. Equating environmentalists with 
Earth First!, or rather, some in Earth First!, is absurd, ignorant, or 
dishonest.

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.
 
Crichton has now defined environmentalism so as to eliminate science 
and the great many who refer to themselves by this name but do not 
share the beliefs Crichton describes above.  There are 
environmentalists who are suspicious of science (Joanna Macy, maybe).  
There are some who think that science has its place, but cannot deal 
with all crucial issues.  I am one of these.  There are those who see 
science as the answer to everything (E. O. Wilson for example).  Among 
those who see limits to science, some do so for religious reasons, some 
for philosophical reasons, some for mixed reasons.  Most of my 
acquaintance do not distrust science for the reasons Crichton 
describes.  Crichton sees a false unity in what is in fact an enormous 
diversity of viewpoints united only by a concern that our society is 
treating the natural world and its processes unbearably badly.

I suspect Crichton hasn't looked very hard at what environmentalists 
actually say, and has, instead, picked and chosen from 
anti-environmental screeds the parts that support his thesis.  Let’s 
look at one hot issue: salmon.  Jim Lichatowich's Salmon Without Rivers 
is a very factual and deeply researched analysis of salmon on the West 
Coast by a leading fisheries biologist.  He is also an 
environmentalist, and the book carries a strong environmental message.  
It does not come close to resembling Crichton’s description.  Then, on 
the same issue, there is Freeman House’s Totem Salmon.  The book is far 
more “touchy feely” than Lichatowich’s, and describes local folks in 
far Northern California’s efforts to bring back salmon runs into the 
degraded Mattole River.   The book is optimistic in tone, and does not 
create a false dichotomy between the good and the bad, the saved and 
the damned, or whatever the image Crichton is selling.  In fact, on the 
issue of salmon, I know of no significant environmental book that meets 
Crichton’s description of what “environmentalists” believe.  Maybe no 
environmentalists are involved with salmon issues – but then, what do 
we call the people who are?

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.
 
the key word here is "certain" and it applies only to some 
beliefs/myths/whatever.

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?
 
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.
 
Crichton is a pretty selective anthropologist.  Some indigenous people 
did live in long run harmony with their environment.  One good example 
would be the tribes of the north Pacific coast from SF Bay and up.  
Pity the Commonwealth Club members didn't know this or they could have 
skewered him on this point, since the rebuttal was in their own back 
yard.  Others did not, such as the Anasazi or, most spectacularly, 
Easter Island.

The key is not being tribal but rather whether successful or 
unsuccessful cultural learning appropriate to the area took place.  
When we are aware that some peoples succeeded and others failed, we can 
ask what are the conditions for success and how might we learn from 
them?  These questions are utterly absent from Crichton's paper but are 
central to any serious discussion of the relationship of human 
societies, tribal or otherwise, to the natural world.

For a man who claims to speak with the authority of science - because 
he writes “hard” science fiction about nanotechnology and dinosaurs and 
such - Crichton seems uninterested in or ignorant of the tentativeness 
that accompanies a great deal of scientific investigation.  I guess it 
gets in the way of the plot.

While I agree that hunting probably did play a role in the Pleistocene 
extinctions, there is considerable evidence of other important causes.  
For example, the declining size of horses and such on the arctic 
steppe, indicated habitat was changing for the worse as grasslands 
turned into tundra.  In Australia many extinctions were apparently the 
unintended result of fire - that is, humans set fires there, as they 
did everywhere, thereby altering Australian vegetation and dooming 
animals which depended on a relatively fire free environment.  This is 
human caused - but as an indirect rather than direct result of their 
actions.  He is certainly correct that human hunting caused the 
extinction of many animal species on islands, but I suspect continents 
are a more complex matter.

Crichton conveniently ignores the fact that native peoples of America 
often had technologies to destroy far more species than they perhaps 
did 10,000 years ago - and lived in relative harmony for thousands of 
years since with the species we encounter today in North America.  
People who could bring down mammoths could bring down deer and elk. And 
they did.  But they never exterminated these animals.  North Pacific 
coast Indians had the technologies to extirpate salmon from most 
rivers.  They also traded widely in dried salmon, and so had an 
economic motive. That they did not destroy salmon populations, and may 
even have enhanced them, suggests successful cultural learning.

Let us grant the possibility that thousands of years ago these peoples 
did exterminate the Pleistocene megafauna.  What is particularly 
interesting is that the extinctions did not continue, and the peoples 
living here in many instances entered into long run relations with the 
natural world that led to no further extinctions and the impression on 
early European explorers that they had entered a veritable garden.

Crichton's one dimensional "we all failed" is bad history, bad 
anthropology, and bad science.  Of course he is giving a talk - but he 
is claiming the mantle of science as he does so.  He should do a better 
job of describing it.

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 indeed 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.
 
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.
 
All this stuff about war and violence is utterly irrelevant. It gives a 
specious exactitude to Crichton's analysis.   I doubt whether Crichton 
can name 3 major environmental thinkers who argue otherwise.  (I can't 
name one - but I'm leaving myself an out.)  The same tribes that 
sustained Pacific Northwest salmon populations over thousands of years 
also often waged fierce war with one another, kept slaves, and did 
other unsavory things.  That seems to me irrelevant to the point of 
whether a people can learn to live sustainably with their environment.

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.
 
This passage is utterly confused.  I have never met a person with the 
beliefs he attacks here - and I know a lot of environmentalists.  Maybe 
he is thinking of the animal rights crowd - which comes from a 
perspective quite different than any of the environmental thinkers I 
mentioned above.  Often they oppose environmental  restoration because 
restoring a degraded ecosystem might involve killing oiver abundant 
deer, goats, rabbits, or whathaveyou.  Consequently these people can 
only with some trepidation be called environmentalists at all, and canm 
in no wise be equated with environmentalists in general.  Possibly 
Crtichton’s knowledge if environmental thought comes from reading Gary 
Larson’s There’s a Hair in My Dirt.

The Deep Ecologists are probably the strongest in their beliefs about 
the intrinsic value of nature.  None are animal rights advocates.  Some 
even hunt.  The best defense of hunting I have ever read was by a 
confirmed environmentalist: Richard Nelson, The Island Within.  A truly 
beautiful book. I recommend it.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, 
you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a 
trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have 
festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, 
biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll 
have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows 
what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are 
that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so 
directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and 
you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
 
As a matter of fact rather than opinion, an enormous number of 
environmental leaders spent extensive time in the wild, often alone 
where a misstep would mean death.  Jane Goodall spent years alone in a 
tropical jungle hanging out with chimpanzees and reported that they 
fought wars with one another.  Goodall is a very fervent 
environmentalist.  From John Muir to David Brower to Dave Foreman 
leading environmental activists have often spent extensive time out in 
nature in potentially life threatening situations, and come back even 
more in ,love with the wild world than before.

The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What 
people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with 
screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, 
without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, 
with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature 
in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, 
and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed 
talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's 
all fantasy.
 
see above.  Crichton in the most literal sense, has no idea what he is 
talking about.

One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of 
people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of how nature 
really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture 
and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather 
without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on 
holiday because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithely 
call "the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven't 
been in it.
 
How many are environmentalists?  Any figures?  I have written about why 
city people tend to favor the environment and the article more than 
answers the simplistic twaddle Crichton confuses with analysis.  It's 
on my personal website under the title (gasp) "Nature Religion and the 
Modern World."  The title would appear to support Crichton's argument - 
but actually reading it would not.  Go to www.dizerega.com, click on 
spirituality, and scroll down to the article if you want an intelligent 
discussion of these issues.

The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to 
be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the 
natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your 
expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in 
an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily 
lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and 
decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can 
contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
 
More comments giving his talk a specious weightiness but having little 
to do with environmentalism.

But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will 
demand that you adapt to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, 
powerful, and unforgiving world that most urban westerners have never 
experienced.
 
And a disproportionate number who did experience wild nature as 
children are now environmentalists.  This suggests the falsity of 
Crichton’s analysis.

Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern 
Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a 
glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it 
wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for 
people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one 
at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal 
about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell 
and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the 
last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back 
double time to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he 
could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. 
And in three days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was 
why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little 
slip could be deadly.
 
So?  I've been in similar situations - without guides or access to 
helicopters even if they are late.  Sometimes I was utterly alone. One 
time in particular it was simple good fortune that I survived at all.  
The experience was scary, but did nothing to change my love of nature 
or commitment to environmental values.

I think twice about hiking alone in the Canadian Rockies.  I am not the 
top of the food chain there, and I know it.  I still have hiked there 
alone - but cautiously. Knowing that there can be serious danger from a 
misstep is hardly denied by leading environmental thinkers, and many of 
them have personal experience of such dangers.

Crichton may have had a bad time in the wild because he didn't know how 
to take care of himself.  He should keep his mud flinging to himself.  
Those of us who have hiked and climbed alone where a misstep was death 
are deeply unimpressed with his supposed expertise on the matter.  He 
evidences mostly ignorance and trying to give the appearance of being a 
risk taker without knowing what he is talking about.

It is time to notice, by the way, that while Crichton delights in 
bringing specific rebuttals in to attack "environmentalists" (like his 
adventures in pricey guided tours) he fails to mention even one such 
person by name, or to give any half-detailed account of an actual 
environmental argument.  This is an easy, and lazy, way to appear to 
know what you are talking about when you don't.  It is a rhetorical 
trick - it is also bad science and bad ethics.

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.
 
This is one of the most deeply dishonest or incompetent passages in the 
essay.  First, yes, many enviromentalists were wrong about population 
predictions.  So was everyone else, by the way.  I have known this fact 
- and even written about it - for many many years.

But here Crichton makes an incompetent or dishonest move.  A move that 
should lead any half informed person on these matters of any point of 
view to cease taking the man seriously.  The people who warn about a 
depopulation crisis are not environmentalists.

I am personally delighted by the prospect of a smaller population, even 
though it will create problems for us.  The doom and gloomers on this 
issue are generally conservative commentators who are, like Crichton, 
critical of environmental concerns.   Crichton makes it appear as if 
enviromentalists are simply switching gears to find something else to 
complain about.  This is simply not true.

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.
 
Environmental organizations tend to lie as much as many others - 
perhaps even as much as many corporations, though that would be a 
stretch.  It is reprehensible, and I teach about it explicitly in my 
environmental politics class.  Ehrlich has a powerful record of being 
wrong on his environmental predictions.  To say that these 
exaggerations have taken place - and are continuing to take place - is 
not to say that there is not a problem, or that the business and 
political world will address the problem in the absence of 
environmental pressures.

Big organizations are notoriously dishonest, be they political, 
religious, economic, governmental or what have you.  I have also 
written on that and it is also on my web site, under Politics scroll 
down to "Why Organizations Lie."

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.
 
As a matter of fact there have also been successes.  Radically reducing 
ozone depletion is one.  Maybe Crichton believes that lying gas bag 
Rush Limbaugh, but the treaty that reduced ozone production, while a 
response to environmental pressures, was accomplished under that 
irrational green activist, Ronald Reagan.  Ol' Rush never mentions that 
now, does he?  Neither does Crichton.

The Endangered Species Act, with all its faults, and they are legion, 
has kept some species from dying out that otherwise would have.  
Sometimes a flawed law is better than none at all.

Crichton is so one sided that I see no reason to deal with some of the 
cases that follow, about which I am not deeply informed.  Based on what 
he has claimed that is in my realm of expertise, Crichton’s accounts 
are almost certainly unreliable, mixing truths, half-truths, 
distortions, and falsehoods together in a goulash it would take several 
articles and a lot of research  to do justice to.  If the Commonwealth 
Club will pay me half of what it paid Crichton, I’d be happy to.

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.
 
To repeat, given the abject dishonesty or incompetence of what I have 
read and demonstrated above, this paragraph makes me doubtful whether 
the same selective examples and distortions are not in use yet again.

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.
 
Ditto.

But here I know a little bit.  For example, as Amory Lovins and others 
have shown, an enormous amount of energy can be saved simply by 
increasing building and machine efficiency.  Hawken's and the Lovins' 
Natural Capitalism is excellent.  Any person who likes both markets and 
nature would profit immensely from reading it.  So would those who do 
not fall in that group.

I do not know the percentage of our land taken up by cities and roads.  
I do know that any percentage of the sort Crichton describes is 
meaningless unless all land is of the same quality, which it is not.  
For example, a tiny percentage of desert supports the vast majority of 
its mammal life there because that tiny percentage consists of seeps 
and water holes, and occasional streams.  One could wipe out most 
desert mammalian life by influencing a good deal less than 5% of its 
area.  Maybe less than 1%.  Deserts make up a big chunk of the U.S.

Nutrients spread by predators eating salmon used to fertilize enormous 
areas of forest lands in the Northwest and northern California.  Lack 
of such nutrients is now markedly slowing forest growth.  But the 
streams in which the salmon once swam make up a tiny percentage of the 
lands affected by the presence or lack of salmon derived nutrients.  
Probably under 1%.  Numbers can appear impressive when used 
incompetently, but they are still incompetently used and they still 
mislead.

The number of scientists convinced that global warming is man made at 
least in part, and on balance not good for us, is growing.  The number 
denying it is shrinking.  Since I am not an atmospheric scientist, I 
take trends like this seriously.  I am not qualified to read and 
evaluate the various studies, but I am qualified to keep an eye on the 
direction the debate is going, and on the reactions of those who are 
competent to evaluate the studies.  That does not in itself prove one 
side or the others is right, but it suggests that lay people such as 
Crichton (and me) should be damn careful about making the complex seem 
simple.

But again, Crichton seems uninterested in anything specific except 
vague references to his own authority as a reader of scientific 
articles (or popularizations of such articles, most likely) in fields 
where he is not an expert.  We all do this, but when we do we should be 
somewhat more humble about the matter.

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 prestigious 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 dependant 
on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
 
A few cites would be useful since he is publishing his talk.  But he 
prefers ad hominem arguments that we wouldn’t pay attention to taking 
the time to list a few sources, where we can evaluate them for 
ourselves.  It’s easier and avoids the risk of being proven incompetent.

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.
 
True enough.  Now, perhaps Crichton can actually name some 
enviromentalist fundies, please.  I notice he never does.  If he did we 
would quickly see how unrepresentative they are of environmentalists as 
a whole.

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.
 
As a religious person who is also an environmentalist, I can say 
without any doubt that Crichton does not know what the hell he is 
talking about.  First, the reason a person values the wild world – 
let’s call it religious – says nothing about how that person will study 
and learn about the wild world.  In physics many leading physicists had 
a belief in God or some similar concept, but that did not prevent 
Einstein and others from doing first rate work.

Religion need not be opposed to hard science.  It does with 
fundamentalists, but fundamentalists hardly have a lock on religion 
either today or historically.

Environmentalism mixes people’s ethics with their understanding of 
science and their religious beliefs, if any.  It is extraordinarily 
complex and multifaceted because of the extraordinarily complex and 
multifaceted ways in which people come to environmental concerns.  Hard 
science by itself is inadequate to address our environmental issues, 
for reasons I will outline at the end when Crichton brings it up in 
more detail.

There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the 
religion of environmentalism.
 
Environmentalism is NOT a religion and no matter how often Crichton and 
the wise use crowd says it is so doesn't make it so.  Yes - there are 
cranks and fanatics.  They exist in every field of thought and action, 
without exception.  But they do not exemplify any of them.  Again - 
names, please.

Crichton claims the mantle of science – as a scientist he must give us 
some objective evidence that the "religion" he claims to exist does in 
fact exist, and is held by enough people concerned with environmental 
issues to make it worthwhile to call environmentalism itself a 
religion. Names, core beliefs, core writings demonstrating such 
beliefs, and a demonstration that those holding these beliefs are 
representative of environmentalism seems a fair request, one that 
Crichton cannot fulfill because the claim is specious.  That he does 
not try suggests he knows this.

Yes, I have been approached in Berkeley by a young man demanding I sign 
a petition against logging the rain forest because the rain forest is 
the earth's lungs, and when the trees are cut down we'll all die from 
lack of oxygen.  Uninformed silliness.  But this is not a 
representative view.

What is more representative is that rain in the Amazon basin comes in 
substantial part from respiration from trees.  The rain forest there in 
a sense maintains itself, and in its absence the rains would not fall.  
That is rooted in science, by the way.  And it's pretty important 
information on many fronts.  It's a very good reason to not log hell 
out of such forests.

Another argument is that in some areas the soil quickly degrades - the 
lush growth feeds off itself.  Take away the growth and you end up with 
pretty infertile soils.  Does this mean we can do nothing there?  No - 
but we need to be smart and wise about it, virtues lacking in 
Crichton’s piece and in those who would log it based primarily by 
standards of how much money they can make in the short run.

There is more as well, the rights of indigenous peoples, the importance 
of biological diversity for scientific as well as ethical and spiritual 
reasons, and so on.  But these issues are easily discovered by any who 
would take the time to look.

First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not 
very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history 
that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already 
killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not 
a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in 
objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs 
to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental 
concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one 
political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is 
very little difference between the parties, except a difference in 
pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the 
environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us 
and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than 
that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And 
never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil 
drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your 
thinking about the environment.
 
The dishonesty of this argument is second only to the dishonesty of the 
one about population.  Religious wars deliberately killed millions as a 
matter of policy.  "Kill them all, God knows His own" is a genuine 
quotation by a Catholic Bishop during the Albigensian Crusade in 
France.  Deaths, whatever the actual number, from the non-use of DDT 
were never intended outcomes - and this is the only example he gives.  
I would like to see the evidence that these disturbing numbers are 
accurate - and that they are due to environmental policies imposed on 
the third world.  That Crichton has such a bad record of accuracy makes 
me veru skeptical of his claims without his telling us how he found out.

His stuff on political parties is true, and today is largely 
irrelevant.  It helps some people without much historical knowledge 
abandon the falsehood that the Republican Party has always been the 
enemy of the environment.  But as a matter of fact, today the 
Republican Party is opposed to most environmental values, and those in 
power manipulate the science as well.  For example, just recently the 
government finally admitted its water policies were responsible for the 
massive salmon kills on California’s Klamath River.  It denied this for 
months and months.  The Bushies also busily destroyed agreements 
between loggers and environmentalists about reintroducing grizzly bears 
in Idaho Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, putting the lie to Gale Norton's 
supposed belief in local initiatives.

Does the Republican Right sometimes do some good things environmentally 
while in power?  Yes – it is difficult to be wrong all the time.  If it 
keeps its word, the recent forest policy changes may help, and there 
are some good ideas in recent policy changes concerning the Klamath 
area.  But the examples are all too few and far between.

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. 
Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the 
environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving 
systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who 
are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief 
system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for 
example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort 
at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which 
our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in 
the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying 
various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded 
about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible 
about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.

Finally!  A good paragraph - except for the overstatement "never 
recover."  Maybe he wrote this in order to appear environmentally 
friendly.  Alas, he only appears environmentally ignorant.  By the way, 
environmentalists were THE major critics of USFS fire suppression 
policies, a fact Crichton can't bring himself to mention.  Or maybe he 
doesn't know it.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of 
religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: 
we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes 
knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of 
politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that 
these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that 
certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the 
strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is 
putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be 
false.
 
True - on both sides, by the way.

This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At 
this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol 
Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we 
need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an 
organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, 
that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and 
that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
 
The last part is a very good idea.

Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And 
if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will 
enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears 
and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. 
That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's 
time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the 
science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions 
firmly on that.
 
LOTS of confusion here.  We definitely should seek to insulate science 
from politics as much as possible - and also from corporate agendas as 
well.  Crichton is amazingly and disturbingly one sided.

But in the end science cannot solve the most important of these 
problems because they are also questions of values.  How much of a 
certain sort of pollution is acceptable cannot be answered 
"objectively."  It is a value call.  Science can help us take better 
care of Yellowstone - but it is we who need to decide what counts as 
"better care."  Nor can science tell us whether we should have a 
national park system, whether it is too large, too small, or just 
right.  It cannot tell us whether or not to drill at the Alaska 
National Wildlife Refuge.  It cannot tell us whether to preserve 
endangered species.  It cannot tell us if it is ever justifiable to 
frustrate certain human desires in order to protect the well being of 
non-humans.  These are questions of ethics and morality, and when a 
society has to confront them it must do so at least partially 
politically because individual behavior alone cannot resolve the issue..

Crichton is a naive technocrat in the final analysis, with as romantic 
a view of science as the intellectuals he rightly criticizes for a 
romantic view of native peoples.  He has an idealization of science as 
a source of unchanging objective knowledge about which there is no 
doubt, with issues clearly defined and objectively solvable, and if 
scientists are simply given enough authority, either directly or 
through attentive leaders, all will be well.  This is an attitude of a 
venerable tradition in science fiction – we are reminded of Isaac 
Asimov – but it has proven woefully misleading in the world of complex 
phenomena, such as ecosystems.

To sum up - here are Crichton's major rhetorical tricks to give the 
illusion of a thoughtful piece when it is ultimately little more than a 
rant.  Interestingly, they are similar to the bag of tricks most right 
wing critics of environmentalists employ.  So understanding his methods 
is of greater value than simply learning why Michael Crichton often 
does not know what he is talking about.  We are safeguarded against the 
wiles of a well paid and very devious school of professional sophists.

1) Create a simplified model of your opponent, collapsing many 
different positions into one that is easy to attack, and says everyone 
using the term adheres to it.
(Today this is done for "Democrats," "Republicans," "Liberals," 
"Conservatives," and "Christians" among many others.)  Because we must 
simplify to some extent, it is easy to abuse this necessity to create 
straw men.
(example: Crichton’s “environmentalist.”)

2) Make very general arguments about the views of people allegedly 
belonging to this simplified model.  Never name names or places because 
that allows us to evaluate the model empirically.
(examples: nature as nice, tribal harmony)

3) Use specific common sense examples to rebut these abstract grand 
generalizations.  Psychologically, the concrete prevails over the 
abstract in this kind of argument.
(examples: nature can drown you and break your bones, tribal people 
sometimes destroyed their environment, life spans were on average often 
short)

4) Bring in additional facts to supposedly bolster your argument, even 
if they not really related to the issues at hand.  Creates the illusion 
of even more concreteness in the rebuttal.
(example: tribal people fought)

5) Discuss complex and ongoing scientific disputes as if one side is 
obviously right or their opponents deliberately misleading.
(example: global warming.)