The Religion of Environmentalism - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

hiredgun · 12-18-2003, 12:54 AM

This is up at www.wanniski.com, I have no idea how long it will be on the front page and I can't figure out any other direct way to link it. I copied the text just in case.

Quote:

Michael Crichton on `The Disinformation Age`

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you very much.

There are two separate ideas here. The first, I think, is more important; that we should try to separate what we "think" regardless of facts from what we really "know". The more specific issue, of course, is environmentalism, which he uses as an example to illustrate his point.

I agree with him absolutely. That is NOT to say that I think environmentalism in itself is a crock; no one can deny that we sometimes do damage to ourselves and our earth through ignorance or greed. However, we must always look at the facts, and they indicate that some of our previous beliefs about environmental pollution were entirely unfounded. If so, we should move past them, to concerns borne out by facts and hard science.

What say ye? Is Crichton wrong?

seretogis · 12-18-2003, 03:22 AM

Oh man, this is incredibly well written, and I agree completely.

Superbelt · 12-18-2003, 04:57 AM

Let me reach the whoooooole way over here and try and grasp that argument....
Anyway, I won't try to go fully point for point against this guy as his article is fairly long. Suffice to say:
Facts are necessary to me. I use them for every position I hold, environmentally. And the environmentalists I know, and the ones I read are the same way. They do not hold onto beliefs religiously without proof.
Instead of a point to point rebuttal I will tell you what environmentalism is to US, the environmentalists.
The world was never an eden, none of us believe that. Life is vicious and cruel, we all know that. What an environmentalist is, is a humanist. We are not so full of ourselves that we believe we can destroy the planet or destroy all or most life on this planet. Environmentalists know that whatever we can do will be insignificant in the long term. The world will survive us. What an environmentalist tries to do, is keep this world habitable to humans as long as possible. By protecting the earth, in its human stable way, we are protecting humanity. And THAT, is really what environmentalism is all about. I love the bengal tigers, I feel compassion for all animals. I want to see lush forests too. But above all, its to protect the food web, the natural order, so humans continue to thrive.

I will get to a little bit of what he said though.

Quote:

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.

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.

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.

DDT, he's right we have no conclusive proof that DDT is a carcinogen. But he then misdirects us by saying that DDT "does not cause birds to die." Of course not, no environmentalist ever said that. DDT concentrations in a bird deplete the calcium they can put into their egg shells. The shells are passed thin and brittle. The eggs usually break long before the embryo can mature and hatch. So, as you can see, from what he said he is right. But he does a damned good job of misdirecting the actual problem with DDT. It doesn't cause them to die, it causes them to hardly ever/never have any offspring.

There is strong evidence for second hand smoke being a health hazard. Not proven, but there are known carcinogens in the smoke.
It's a good thing for him he doesn't have the space to attack global warming. I suppose his reasoning for the vast majority of scientific bodies and related-field scientists in general who are supportive of global warming... is that they all belong to the "church of the environment."

Percentage of urban land area.. 5%... Ok, first that is true for the nation as a whole. But much of the midwest is farmland, necessarially, and alot of the rest is uninhabitable like mountains and rough and desert terrain. Now let him aggregate the northeast only and see how much different the problem is, in a region. There is also a problem with 'sprawl' which breaks up the natural areas. This becomes a problem when it splits up populations of animals or reduces range.

The sahara is shrinking, but deserts as a whole, planet wide are increasing in range.
I'd like to see his evidence for the antarctic ice increasing.
There is no known tech that can stop green house gas emissions right now. That is why we have to keep researching it.
Solar cells are promising as we are about only 20 years away, at current funding levels from being able to print them on paper using nanotechnology. After we hit this milestone it is only a matter of application to embed solar cells into our roof shingles so that each home creates almost all the power it needs.

Sure he can quote out of Nature and Science, and find things that support him. But anything he can find in those publications is heavily outweighed by the opposite side.

onetime2 · 12-18-2003, 05:09 AM

Damn. Objective scientific studies? Trying multiple plans to gauge how each works? Depoliticizing environmental issues? Admitting that "we" don't already know everything? Acknowledging that we are a part of nature and that it is far stronger than it's portrayed? Sounds right to me. The question is how to convince the "followers". If he's right and the followers have a personality that requires this type of rigid, unquestioning belief in a cause, then a new cause will have to be created.

Sparhawk · 12-18-2003, 08:03 AM

The only valid points I got out of this were that science should remain apolitical (it largely does, when it is left to the scientists), and that extremism in any form is 'bad for business'. He paints an unfair potrait of the typical environmentalist however, a portrait that I have never encountered. He also criticizes some of the 'sky-is-falling' problems that never materialized. Here's one reason why they didn't: Because people did something about them. The reason we don't have Americans starving today? Food stamps- 20 million Americans use them, and don't go hungry. I'd go on, but since he didn't feel the need to back up his assertions with facts, why should I be bothered to refute them...

Ustwo · 12-18-2003, 08:08 AM

Wow.

Best thing I have read in a long long time. Its sadly true, but most people like most environmentalists are not scientists. They don't understand the limits of science and think that all it takes is a little more time and a lot of money to solve all problems.

Its a great piece of writing, but I'm afraid it will fall on deaf ears.

Conclamo Ludus · 12-18-2003, 10:48 AM

I've longed for this type of criticism. I couldn't agree more with him. From what I see, I can agree that environmentalism has been far too ideolized and turned into a replacement religion to the detriment of their cause. Great post. Very well written.

longbough · 11-22-2005, 04:11 PM

It's funny that usually, whenever I talk to self-proclaimed environmentalists, anything short of 100% agreement on my part is met with hostility and insults. And I'm not even trying to be confrontational - only to enter into constructive discourse. I'm glad Mr. Crichton wrote that.

Here's another perspective from Dr. Patrick Moore - one of the founders of Greenpeace who quit when the organization abandoned it's scientific interests in favor of perpetuating it's need to promote civil disobedience. Below are excerpted quotes from an interview with Dr. Moore in New Scientist.

" The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment. To stay in an adversarial role, those people had to adopt ever more extreme positions because all the reasonable ones were being accepted...

Environmentalism was always anti-establishment, but in the early days of Greenpeace we did not characterise ourselves as left wing. That happened after the fall of the Berlin wall when a whole bunch of left wing activists, who no longer had any role in the peace, women's or labour movements, joined us. I would go to the Greenpeace Toronto office and there would be an awful lot of young people wearing army fatigues and red berets in there...

I believe we are entering an era now where pagan beliefs and junk science are influencing public policy. GM foods and forestry are both good examples where policy is being influenced by arguments that have no basis in fact or logic. Certainly, biotechnology needs to be done very carefully. But GM crops are in the same category as estrogen-mimicking compounds and pesticide residues. They are seen as an invisible force that will kill us all in our sleep or turn us all into mutants. It is preying on people's fear of the unknown....

We need to get out of the adversarial approach. People who base their opinion on science and reason and who are politically centrist need to take the movement back from the extremists who have hijacked it, often to further agendas that have nothing to do with ecology. It is important to remember that the environmental movement is only 30 years old. All movements go through some mucky periods. But environmentalism has become codified to such an extent that if you disagree with a single word, then you are apparently not an environmentalist. Rational discord is being discouraged. It has too many of the hallmarks of the Hitler youth..."

kutulu · 11-22-2005, 04:30 PM

Strawman much? I'll finish the article later but the first half was a steaming pile of crap.

Ustwo · 11-22-2005, 04:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Its a great piece of writing, but I'm afraid it will fall on deaf ears.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kutulu

Strawman much? I'll finish the article later but the first half was a steaming pile of crap.

Better late than never

Elphaba · 11-22-2005, 06:45 PM

Crichton is a novelist of some fame, but his opinions have as much influence on me as "Babs" or any other celebrity.

The Environmental Protection Agency was a Reagan initiative and I will always hold him in high regard for that alone. For those that don't remember the bad old days, the Detroit river could be easily set on fire, and eagles became an endangered species because they were at the top of the PCB/DDT food chain. It is still unsafe for pregnant women to eat fish, particularly salmon, but important protections have been put in place that I hope will lead to uncontaminated food sources.

I am old enough to remember that we dumped our raw sewage into Puget Sound; I am old enough to remember the pulp mills that left you gasping for breath; I am old enough to remember that people died when there was an inversion layer when rain didn't wash the air clean of our pollution. We have an inversion layer warning today.

My brother-in-law was born in Austria and has visited several time in the last decade. The rivers are filthy with human waste and clean/treated water is at a premium. Water is not wasted with hot showers every day, like we do. Austrian's fill a small tub, large enough for their feet, and wash themselves with that water. Or, so I am told.

Eco-terrorists belong in jail. Anyone claiming an ecological expertise, but are not a scientist, like Crichton, better have something better than rhetoric to back up their statements. The current administration dismisses scientific opinion for the corporate agenda and this will have a long-term cost if it is not stopped. Bush has done most of the derailing of Reagan's EPA through executive decisions (not subject to legislative vote), and legislative work via corporate donations (bribery).

Ayup, I'm angry about many things. But a celebrity opinion? Please excuse me while I drink a beautifully clean glass of water from my tap.

maximusveritas · 11-22-2005, 07:53 PM

I didn't read the whole thing and I realize this was written 2 years ago, but this line made me laugh :
"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."

While you could make a case that incidental second hand smoke is not harmful enough to justify the increased public regulations we've seen in recent years, to say it's not a health hazard to anyone makes you a crackpot in my book.

I think Crichton's problem is that he has become fanatical in his opposition to the fanaticism of the environmentalists. He talks alot about being rational and looking at things from an objective point of view, but I don't think he's been following his own advice.

jorgelito · 11-22-2005, 08:38 PM

Elph, I think the EPA was created by Nixon?

Lebell · 11-22-2005, 08:41 PM

Excellent article.

flstf · 11-22-2005, 09:08 PM

I don't have enough scientific knowledge to have a very informed opinion on most of these environmental issues but I suspect that Crichton is more knowledgable than the average celebrity. I also suspect that the truth is closer to his analysis than that of the religion of environmentalism.

Ustwo · 11-22-2005, 09:15 PM

What he writes about is a BIG reason why I left post grad enviromental studies and went to dental school.

raveneye · 11-23-2005, 06:23 AM

Quote:

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.

This is very true. However, Crichton himself appears to be projecting here, since his novel "State of Fear" is one of the worst offenders in the arena of politicization of science. He either does not understand the science, or he does understand it and deliberately distorts it. Either way, he himself seems to be one of the best examples of what he is criticizing in that speech before the Commonwealth Club.

Quote:

HEADLINE: Temperatures rising: Scientists fire back at Michael Crichton

BYLINE: Citizen News Services

BODY:

In recent days we noted the publication of Michael Crichton's latest book, State of Fear, a novel that challenges commonly held views on climate change. We then noted an interview in which Crichton dismissed his critics. "The attacks are predictable," he said. "Ad hominem attack is the only way to go when you don't have the facts on your side."

Here, then, some facts plus just some of what scientists have to say about the studies cited by Crichton in State of Fear.

CLIMATE CHANGE

State of Fear: Crichton's heroine notes that from 1940 to 1970 carbon dioxide emissions increased as world temperatures decreased. "If rising carbon dioxide is the cause of rising temperatures, why didn't it cause temperatures to rise from 1940 to 1970?" she asks.

Scientistic reason: New York University physics professor Martin Hoffert says the answer is simple. "Climate change is caused by several factors: changes in solar radiation, aerosols that scatter sunlight and the buildup of human-emitted greenhouse gases. By the early 1970s, the growing CO2 in the atmosphere (and the human greenhouse gases) overwhelmed the other effects and will continue to do so in this century.

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

State of Fear: Crichton's heroine says much of the warming can be attributed to increased heat in growing cities because of reflection by buildings and asphalt. "At least one study suggests half of the observed temperature change comes from land use alone. If that's true, then global warming in the past century is less than three-tenths of a degree. Not exactly a crisis."

Scientific reason: Oceans and rural areas are also warming, said Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "The ocean data says it all. Ground temperatures confirm this."

SATELLITE DATA

State of Fear: Crichton's heroine cites satellite data showing that the atmosphere eight kilometres above the ground isn't warming, although global warming says it should be. "Trust me," says the heroine. "The satellite data have been re-analysed dozens of time. They're probably the most intensely scrutinized data in the world. But the data from the weather balloons agree with the satellites. They show much less warming than expected by the theory."

Scientific reason: At least three groups of scientists have looked at the satellite data Crichton refers to and concluded that it understated temperatures. Longer-term weather balloon data also confirm warming trends, climate researchers say.

SHORT TERM vs. LONG TERM

State of Fear: Crichton cites numerous locales where warming is not occurring. His protagonist says: "As you can see, many places in the United States do not seem to have become warmer since 1930."

Scientific reason: Scientists say the global picture over a longer time period is more important. What Crichton does, says Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, "would be like trying to figure out the lifetime batting average of Barry Bonds by seeing what he did for three weeks in the year 2000."

Quote:

The San Diego Union-Tribune

February 17, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A-1

LENGTH: 1077 words

HEADLINE: More scientists motivated to speak out;
Many fight what they view as politicization

BYLINE: Bruce Lieberman, STAFF WRITER

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:

WASHINGTON -- In 1967, Jeremy Jackson wrote his master's thesis on the ecology of Chesapeake Bay, a vast treasure that provides the nation's capital with an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean.

The bay's decline became a motivation for "Shifting Baselines," a Hollywood-supported national campaign that he started in 2003 to raise awareness about global environmental degradation.

"Society has ignored the problems of the environment for a long time, and scientists have ignored the problems of the environment for a long time. But we're waking up," said Jackson, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

"It becomes a moral and ethical issue to speak out on what one knows."

Jackson's campaign is one example of how more scientists in San Diego County and elsewhere are reaching out to the public, often risking criticism from their colleagues and interest groups.

Yesterday in Washington, D.C., researchers, lawmakers and federal bureaucrats discussed the bumpy relationship linking science, politics and legislative policies. They met on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the nation's largest gatherings of scientists.

More than 10,000 scientists, policy analysts and educators from 60 nations are expected at the meeting, which runs through Monday. At least seven sessions will touch on the relationship between science and public policy.

A scientist's motivations for speaking out are many.

Some, like Jackson, said they are driven by a desire to educate the public on environmental changes that garner little attention. Others said an explosion of information, chiefly through the Internet but also on television and in films, has compelled them to clear up misconceptions and oversimplifications of science. Many researchers say they are speaking up to fight what they view as the politicization of science -- efforts by industry, legislators and others to distort science to advance their agendas.

One discussion yesterday began with a look at the Bush administration, which some people have criticized for disregarding or manipulating science to serve its views on global warming, stem cell research, abortion and consumer safety.

"We are witnessing an assault on the basic principle that science should inform policy, not echo a political agenda," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles.

Waxman cited several instances in which the White House has tried to shape scientific discussions to favor its viewpoints:

o Last year's dismissal of University of California San Francisco cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn from the President's Council on Bioethics. Blackburn often expressed dissenting opinions on the 17-member council, which has frequently championed conservative views on biotechnology issues such as cloning and stem cell research. Leon Kass, chair of the Bush-appointed group, has said Blackburn's dismissal was not politically motivated.

o In a 2003 report, the Environmental Protection Agency omitted data linking human activity to global warming.

o In May, the Food and Drug Administration rejected an application to sell an over-the-counter version of a "morning after" pill called Plan B for women who want to avoid pregnancy. The FDA had set aside the advice of an independent review board that said the drug was safe.

John H. Marburger III, science adviser for President Bush, said the White House has the authority to choose who serves on the scientific committees that advise federal policymakers.

"The role of the (committees) is to make sure the official knows what the science is, and the official makes the decision," he said.

Among scientists, many say they have an obligation to promote their work -- as long as they are careful to separate their political views from their discussion of the facts.

"I do not believe a scientist hangs up his citizenship at the door. . . . We are all steeped in unconscious bias," said Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University climate scientist who has testified before Congress and spoken around the world about global warming.

Jane Lubchenco, a researcher at the University of Oregon and a member of the Pew Ocean Commission, said scientists have an obligation to share what they've learned.

"New information that exists only in the peer-reviewed scientific literature does society little good," she said.

The more scientists speak out in public, however, the more difficult it can be for people to distinguish advocacy from a presentation of the facts, said Marburger.

"What I don't agree with is the ease of distinguishing between advocacy and the actual substance of what scientists say," he said.

Last fall, stem cell scientists in California participated in forums on Proposition 71, the successful initiative to spend $3 billion over a decade to jump-start the field.

Scientists worked hard to present the science of stem cells, said La Jolla cell biologist Evan Snyder. He maintains that they didn't allow their enthusiasm for the ballot measure to cloud the reality that it could take years before stem cells might be used to treat disease.

Yet campaigners on both sides of the measure distorted the truth -- one side overstating the prospects for success and the other claiming that money-hungry scientists were trying to mislead the public, Snyder said.

"I'm afraid the worst came out," he said. "Politics doesn't engage in shades of gray."

The intersection of science and ideology also applies to the global warming debate.

Some climate scientists said they are increasingly frustrated about distortions by people on all sides. That includes scientists supported by the fossil fuel industry and Hollywood writers exaggerating the dangers of a warming climate.

One particular misrepresentation comes from Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," said Jeff Severinghaus, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies the atmospheric conditions that drove drastic climate changes thousands of years ago.

Crichton created a fictional plot but added footnotes that cite studies on climate change. By selectively choosing data, Crichton distorted scientific facts and misled his readers, Severinghaus said.

"I thought, here we go again," Severinghaus said of Crichton's book. "It's like stamping out forest fires. Misinformation has an amazing ability to propagate, and you have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to set the record straight."

Quote:

The Boston Globe

February 6, 2005, Sunday THIRD EDITION

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. E5

LENGTH: 1051 words

HEADLINE: CHECKING CRICHTON'S FOOTNOTES

BYLINE: By Chris Mooney

BODY:
MICHAEL CRICHTON'S latest novel, "State of Fear" (HarperCollins), arrived with near-perfect timing. Even as real-world tsunamis slammed coasts across the Indian Ocean, here was a book in which radical eco-terrorists plot to douse California with fake onesall to convince the public to worry about global warming and the disasters it can cause.

But if Crichton's story-line of a vast environmentalist conspiracy didn't impress literary reviewers, the novel came festooned with footnotes aimed at convincing readers of his scientific bona fides. Seeking to debunk the notion that human-caused global warming should worry us, Crichton allows his hero, Richard John Kenneran MIT professor of geoenvironmental engineering who battles the eco-terrorists across the globeto instruct various less-informed personages in the basics of climate science. During these conversations, Crichton provides actual scientific citations to back up Kenner's contrarian arguments. As he intones in his epigraph, "Footnotes are real."

But are they? Certainly Crichton's numerous citations refer to actual scientific publications. But in many cases, they also reference the work of scientists who accept the mainstream scientific view that human greenhouse gas emissions fuel global climate change.

"It's such a transparent literary device that Crichton uses," says Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who's cited in the book. "He makes the enviros out to be dummies." And Wigley isn't the only one surprised by the nature of his cameo.

The Kyoto Protocol. Toward the end of the novel, Kenner lectures another character on the futility of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires participating nations to adopt binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. "The effect of Kyoto would be to reduce warming by .04 degrees Celsius in the year 2100," he says. "Four hundredths of a degree." When another character disputes this claim, Kenner promises, "I can give you the references."

Tom Wigley, author of a 1998 article Crichton cites to back up this point, has complained previously that others have misused his research to undermine Kyoto. While that paper did indeed find that the treaty would have a relatively small long-term effect, Wigley has subsequently warned that his analysis "assumed that Kyoto was followed to 2010, and that there were no subsequent climate mitigation policies." The point of the paper was not to bash Kyoto (which goes into effect internationally on February 16) but rather to demonstrate that it represents only a first step toward climate stabilization. "Once we've done Kyoto we're obviously going to do other things," says Wigley.

The Glaciers of Kilimanjaro. Similarly, Kenner highlights the case of this famed African peaka favorite of climate-change skepticsin the process of debunking concerns that global warming is causing glaciers to retreat. Kilimanjaro has melted "because of deforestation," Kenner says, not global warming: "The rain forest at the base of the mountain has been cut down, so the air blowing upward is no longer moist. Experts think that if the forest is replanted the glacier will grow again."

Again, Crichton supplies references. But UMass-Amherst climatologist Douglas Hardy, a coauthor of the 2004 paper on Kilimanjaro cited, says Crichton is distorting his work. Crichton is doing "what I perceive the denialists always to do," says Hardy. "And that is to take things out of context, or take elements of reality and twist them a little bit, or combine them with other elements of reality to support their desired outcome."

For example, while the case of Kilimanjaro does seem more complicated (with factors like drier conditions and less cloud cover also implicated in its glacial retreat), Hardy notes that for other glaciers, especially in tropical latitudes, "the link is very clear between changes in tropospheric temperature and [glacial retreats]." And even in the case of Kilimanjaro, Hardy adds, climate change may be playing a role.

As for the notion that replanting the forest at Kilimanjaro's base will help the glacier to grow again, Hardy says: "The forests need replanting for many reasons, but I think that [Crichton's] idea is preposterous, without some larger-scale changes."

Atmospheric CO2 Levels. Here, at least, Crichton seems aware that he's building his case on the backs of scientists who don't agree with him. In a cross-examination scene early in the novel, one character who has been raising doubts about human-caused climate change observes that the data she's citing have all been "generated by researchers who believe firmly in global warming." Crichton then cites a paper by David Etheridge and his colleagues at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, which concerns changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the last 1,000 years.

But Etheridge says he objects to this characterization of his so-called beliefs. "There is little indication for Crichton of what beliefs I may or may not have," he said via email. "My work as a professional scientist allows me only to produce and deal with evidence, not beliefs."

The Big Picture. In Crichton's defense, those seeking to counter consensus scientific conclusions on climate changeand to use published evidence to support their own viewsface an uphill battle. Naomi Oreskes, a science studies scholar at the University of California, San Diego, recently analyzed more than 900 scientific articles listed with the keywords "global climate change," and failed to find a single study that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to global warming. While such literature may exist, it appears minimal.

That hasn't stopped Crichton from expounding his views in recent speeches, including a talk on "Science Policy in the 21st Century" held late last month at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution's Joint Center for Regulatory Studies in Washington, D.C. In an appendix to "State of Fear," Crichton frets about "Why Politicized Science is Dangerous." But he may himself have provided a case study.

NOTES:
The Fine Print Chris Mooney, a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., is writing a book about the politicization of science.

LOAD-DATE: February 8, 2005

roachboy · 11-23-2005, 06:36 AM

a profile of crichton's dabblings in conservative-land....

http://magazine.audubon.org/profile/profile0505.html

i dont see much of anything compelling in crichton's argument, but i am curious about the basis for such appeal as it seems to have here.

i would be interested in seeing something approaching a coherent critique of the present state of eco-politics from the right---i know the general outlines of the very general attacks that you hear directed at "environmentalists" from the right pundit set---and it is the usual thing, a series of arbitrary general claims about environmentalists as some kind of fifth column, fronted by groups like the sierra club (which often gets painted as if they were some variant of trotskyism)---tactically, the focus is usually on groups like earth first---discursively the target is often peta--etc etc etc---in its generality, this narrative seems par for the course in the curious world of right politics--the usual caricatures of the opposition, the usual disregard for empirical information.

but the narrative is never explained--rather it is activated and deployed more or less readymade.

how does the notion of scientific expertise get formulated for the right?
where does the assumption about the neutrality of science come from? how is it defended?
why should anyone assume neutrality for scientists as a community, alone amongst almost all communities?

how did the opposition scientist/environmentalist get set up?
what prompts folk who oppose the movement in general to assume that all scientists oppose ecologically oriented action?
if this assumption does not hold, where does its correlate come from--that environmentalists are dilletantes who encorach upon the purview of neutral scientists?

what is the basic objection to politics that are informed by ecological considerations?

do you really have to assume that there are no significant environmental problems in the world right now to be a conservative (no global warming, no desertification, no problems with industrial waste, no problem with centralized agriculture from the enviromental viewpoint)?
on what basis do conservatives oppose sustainable agriculture, sustainable communities?
what is the alternative? "market forces"?

in a context where for 20 years it has been fairly common practice for corporations to purchase friendly researchers who are willing to build particular types of premises into their work, how did it come about that corporate sources are seen as neutral and environmentalist sources as political?

stevo · 11-23-2005, 06:43 AM

Good article. I read it several months ago. I think drudge posted it. For some reason I thought it had been posted here. oh well...

I think his depiction of environmentalism and environmentalists, esp. is quite accurate. Superbelt, you may not be what crichton describes, but you cannot deny that such people exist. I have known several hard-core environmentalists over the years and crichton is dead-on.

roach, I will be the first to admit that there are some very serious environmental problems we face today. I'm an avid fisherman and I would have to say a conservationist when it comes to our oceans. I notice the depletion of wetlands and the effects on fisheries. I also notice what a papermill does to a fishery in the river it is on. I also notice what longlines and gillnets do to our fisheries. I also think there are other ways to solve these problems without resorting to misinformation and being overcome by fear. I believe in using the market to help control pollution and depletion of our resources. exchangeable pollution permits, long-term planning, among other things. A lot of the programs we implement now are done after the fact. And a lot of the regulations we have now are relaxed for some (international paper comes to mind). I'm the farthest I can get from being anti-corporate, but I can admit it when I see it that some corperations do get around environmental protection laws. And its hardly an right-v-left problem. I don't see the dems doing any more to advance the protections of our fisheries than the right. I only see pandering.

We'll discuss this later, as I've got a lot of work to do today so I can hit the road early for the holiday. Have a nice one.

raveneye · 11-23-2005, 07:02 AM

Of course Crichton fails to mention that there are crazies everywhere, on both sides of the political spectrum. You could have given the same speech on any conservative movement you care to mention, because every movement has its lunatic fringe. But that doesn't invalidate the movement as a whole.

The movement as a whole should be judged on the basis of the best arguments in its favor, not the worst. That's the fundamental fallacy of Crichton's speech.

"Anti-environmentalism" is just as much a religion as "environmentalism" is.

cyrnel · 11-23-2005, 07:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raveneye

Of course Crichton fails to mention that there are crazies everywhere, on both sides of the political spectrum. You could have given the same speech on any conservative movement you care to mention, because every movement has its lunatic fringe. But that doesn't invalidate the movement as a whole.

The movement as a whole should be judged on the basis of the best arguments in its favor, not the worst. That's the fundamental fallacy of Crichton's speech.

Perfect. I read the article, and was working through the thread trying to put words together that expressed how he's treating a minority fringe with his own fundamentalism. You did it for me.

I agree with the first bit regarding the challenges of truth vs. manipulation in this information age, and with evaluating causes and effects using as much data as possible, but the rest seemed like groundwork for another of his novels. Darken the greys to black so blanket generalizations and reactions seem justified. Good for the choir, but I thought that's what he was arguing against?

kutulu · 11-23-2005, 08:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Better late than never

Once again, this article is a steaming pile of crap. He rambles on an on in a pretentious tone for over 3700 words and the only place where he brings up ‘facts’ that even remotely relate to environmental science are the three paragraphs that Superbelt quoted and refuted. My favorite paragraph was:

Quote:

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.

You had over 3700 words in this article. Maybe if you cut some of your BS from it you could have fit some of it in. It reminds me of Tom Cruise's infamous interview with Matt Lauer (I've read the research Matt!).

It’s just disingenuous to attack an idea by focusing on the extremes. By doing so, you never get to the heart of the arguement. If that is all you can do you really don’t have much of an argument. The fact is that environmental science has allowed us to repair lands that at the time were completely unusable. It’s also brought about huge changes in pollution prevention, fuel efficiency, and has greatly improved our health. These are facts that cannot be dismissed, notice he didn’t mention any of this.

Basically, this article was porn for the people that would prefer we let the Earth rot in favor of profits.

Locobot · 11-23-2005, 08:23 AM

Most of the claims Crichton makes here are disputable at best, dead wrong in many cases. He's obviously cherrypicked his findings to suit his own goals here, something he claims to be against. Somehow he expects people to follow a rule that he himself is incapable of following.

For instance on DDT: it is still manufactured and used in many third-world nations around the world. It was banned in the U.S. not only as a suspected carcinogen, but for causing a whole slew of environmental and health problems.

Redlemon · 11-23-2005, 08:40 AM

After reading that, I expect his next novel to be a defense of Intelligent Design. As discussed above, his definition of "proof" seems to be extreme, and he would also say that evolution is not "proven" either. It is nearly impossible to prove with 100% certainty any causality; that doesn't mean that there isn't sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion and act accordingly.

(I am an environmental engineer, but I am not a "green".)

longbough · 11-23-2005, 09:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maximusveritas

I didn't read the whole thing and I realize this was written 2 years ago, but this line made me laugh :
"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."

That was a reference to the famous 1993 EPA report on environmental tobbacco smoke which claimed that ETS was responsible for 3,000 deaths per year and considered it a Class A carcinogen. In 1995 that report was subject to review by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) which noted, among other things, that "the EPA ignored nearly two-thirds of the data. The EPA then doubled their margin of error to come up with their desired results. Even with all this manipulation, the numbers are still far too low to be considered statistically significant." In light of that and a whole list of examples of statistical manipulation in the report the CRS rejected the findings of the EPA report.

For some odd reason, this fact was given little or no publicity. In fact the EPA report is still cited as a reference to influence public policy.

In 1998 federal district court judge William Osteen made a ruling that invalidated the EPA report. "Judge Osteen determined that the EPA had "cherry picked" its data and had grossly manipulated "scientific procedure and scientific norms" in order to rationalize the agency's own preconceived conclusion that passive smoking caused 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. In addition, Osteen ruled that the EPA had violated the Radon Act, which was the agency's authority for disseminating its "de facto regulatory scheme" that intended to prohibit passive smoking."

To this day, the EPA report remains at the foundation of public opinion and public policy.

To let you know where I'm coming from. - I'm a practicing internal medicine physician I'm not a smoker, nor have I ever been. I believe tobbacco smoke is certainly a serious health hazard, but the risks of second hand smoke is debatable (but it's certainly a nuisance). Smokers are unquestionably at increased risk for coronary artery disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. The EPA report about environmental tobbacco smoke was cited as gospel to me in medical school and I believed it - until I looked at the EPA's own data. You only need a basic familarity with statistics to see that the report was a sham.

In the end I'd certainly prefer to live my life without second hand smoke, but I'd rather base all my beliefs on objective, substantiated facts rather than personal opinion.

Elphaba · 11-23-2005, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jorgelito

Elph, I think the EPA was created by Nixon?

I think you're right on that. Thank's for the correction.

Lebell · 11-23-2005, 10:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by longbough

*snip*

Prepare to be crucified.

longbough · 11-23-2005, 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

Prepare to be crucified.

that's why I got my running shoes on!

kutulu · 11-23-2005, 11:54 AM

Another funny thing. You often hear Conservatives trashing celebrities whenever they try to rally for political causes. Why no such outrage from the right here? Oh, I see, that only applies to liberal celebrities.

cyrnel · 11-23-2005, 12:10 PM

Celebrities? Crichton isn't Tim Robbins.

(Waitaminit, aren't they both 6'6"?....)

Locobot · 11-23-2005, 12:15 PM

Longbough, like I've pointed out with Crichton above you yourself have cherry picked evidence and seek to limit the discussion of secondhand smoke to only being a problem as a carcinogen or a smelly nuisance. What about all the other negative health impacts? Are they all the results of faulty studies?

Quote:

Breathing secondhand smoke can be harmful to children's health including asthma, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), bronchitis and pneumonia and ear infections. Children's exposure to secondhand smoke is responsible for: (1) increases in the number of asthma attacks and severity of symptoms in 200,000 to 1 million children with asthma; (2) between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections (for children under 18 months of age); and, (3) respiratory tract infections resulting in 7,500 to 15,000 hospitalizations each year.

http://www.epa.gov/smokefree/

Did you forget to disclose your position at a cigarette manufacturer or something? There isn't even mention of secondhand smoke as a cancer causing agent on the EPA page above.

longbough · 11-23-2005, 12:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kutulu

Another funny thing. You often hear Conservatives trashing celebrities whenever they try to rally for political causes. Why no such outrage from the right here? Oh, I see, that only applies to liberal celebrities.

regardless of your political affiliations it's not trashing if you're just contering their slogans with facts. It just so happens that most outspoken celebrities are liberal - that's a fact. If you want to "trash" a conservative celebrity - go right ahead - ... how many can you name?

Besides, there's no shortage of conservative bashing nowadays to begin with. So your statement makes absolutely no sense.

longbough · 11-23-2005, 12:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Locobot

Longbough, like I've pointed out with Crichton above you yourself have cherry picked evidence and seek to limit the discussion of secondhand smoke to only being a problem as a carcinogen or a smelly nuisance. What about all the other negative health impacts? Are they all the results of faulty studies?

http://www.epa.gov/smokefree/

Did you forget to disclose your position at a cigarette manufacturer or something? There isn't even mention of secondhand smoke as a cancer causing agent on the EPA page above.

I didn't claim that ETS has NO health consequences whatsoever (If I gave that impression it was unintentional). FYI - Reactive Airways Disease (e.g. asthma exacerbation and bronchitis) are acute conditions - not chronic ones. Where the EPA was taken to task was their central claim that ETS was responsible for 3,000 deaths per year - that's the "conclusion" that people cite like gospel. Nobody is banning smoking in public because of asthma exacerbation or the possiblity of SIDS - the argument is about increasing chances for COPD and CAD.

You are absolutely right, however, in that the EPA report did not relate ETS as a cause of lung cancer - If I gave that impression I apologize. The second quote which says "3,000 cancer deaths", was taken from an article from the CATO institute - clearly an erroneous statement on the part of the writer. I just cut and pasted the quote - I should have checked it. However, that same misstatement isn't a part of Judge Osteen's statements.

Let me repeat - the only thing I said was that the central conclusion of the 1993 EPA report, that second hand smoke, is responsible for 3,000 deaths per year is a faulty conclusion based on manipulated data. If you're going to counter that statement please address the issue.

Not all beliefs grow from political agendas, buddy. So don't presume you know a thing about my politics. Show me some facts that substantiate the figues in question and I'll be happy to become more enlightened.

Locobot · 11-23-2005, 01:38 PM

The obvious answer here is to ban children from public spaces, not cigarettes.

longbough · 11-23-2005, 01:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Locobot

The obvious answer here is to ban children from public spaces, not cigarettes.

lol - I won't argue with that.

filtherton · 11-23-2005, 03:47 PM

I prefer vonnegut.

Willravel · 11-23-2005, 04:13 PM

What a big article of wrong.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael 'Jurassic Park' Crichton

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did.

Did someone sleep through anthropology? There are indigenous people alive right at this very moment who have maintained harmony with their environment for hunderds, perhaps thousands of years. The Sanema, a group of indigenous people who live in the Upper Caura region of Venezuela, have lived in relative harmony with the wildlife and plantlife of their various homes for hundreds of years. It was only when corporations moved in large farming comunities that the balance is being lost (as the population explodes, wildlife can no longer sustain the human population.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael 'Congo' Crichton

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.

Strawman. No real environmentalist (or ecologist, as I like to call myself) has any illusions about the realities of nature. In fact, we propose using our current knowledge to protect humans from infectious diseases, parisitic insects, and starvation. We, at least I, do not want us to go completly back to a hunter-gatherer state without bringing back some of our great accumulation of knowledge. As someone who went on a survivalist safari of Brazil and Peru, I know what's out there. The fact is that if you're trained and instructed well enough, you can actually survive in those environments. I had a blast. My wife didnt want to come for some reason.

Just because Michael Crithon decided it was a good idea to sleep on the ground in a forest (which no one but complete amatures does), doesn't mean we'll all make that mistake.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael 'Sphere' Crichton

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.

What Michael Crichton doesn't realize is that he is actually arguing against himself. When most see that the population predictions are falling, that must mean that everything'll be allright. Actually, that speaks to the fact that it is worse than we estimated. If the population increase is slowing, it must be doing so for a reason. Enter environmentalists. No one can argue with the fact thawt the Earth can only support so many people. Eventually, after so many billion, the various ecosystems will shut down and a lot of people will die. It's similar, in fact, to the peak oil theories. Once there are a given number of people on the planet, production of food will not be able to sustain us. Once people start dying, econemies will colapse, disease will run rampant, Carrot Top will have a sitcom; basically the threat of partial extinction. One of the warning signs of this approaching is when poorer countries start to see zero population growth, and then negative population growth. Like it is right now. As the negative population growth makes it's way up from the poorere countries to the more wealthy countries, then we start to lose the cheap labor from the poor countries and we start to see the econemies fluxuate. I can go on, but I think this is starting to paint a picture.

roachboy · 11-23-2005, 05:03 PM

about post 26 et al....

the second hand smoke story was interesting enough--just out of curiousity, when a conservative person thinks of "the environmental movement" where exactly does the epa fit into the picture?

while the information was presented in response to a critique of crichton's thing, was it presented to make a more general claim as well?
the presentation read as though it was--but there seems no basis for claiming that it is anything but anecdotal--and anecdotes while are often nice (dont you think?), that's all they are....usually, folk like to present their stories as "telling anecdotes", kinds of allegories or as something that indicates or points to matters of broader importance. but that is often little more than an aesthetic matter (your politics might lead you to prefer to think that story is indicative of something systematic so that you dont have to demonstrate anything of the sort--this sort of preference is alot like the question of which kind of coffee you prefer or what colors socks you like)
or vanity (it is your story after all---i of course am not exempt from either of these)....but these are not arguments, they are simply preferences.

the reason i wondered about whether this story was to have some bigger meaning lay in the interpretation given of it---that the epa "cherrypicked" information--which i assume meant little more than the study in question was shaped by an argument, which was no doubt made explicit, both in the overview and in the methodology. any argument entails ways of attributing hierarchy to information, bringing some points forward and pushing others back, yes? that would mean that any argument is necessarily about a selective interpretation of factors, yes? so the fact that there was a selection in the reports that the epa relied upon is no surprise, is it? and if there were problems with the argument that justified those selections, or the methodologies used to translate that argument into a sorting mechanism for data, surely that problem does not lay with the fact of selection/limitation of information per se, but with how that selection was done, yes?

which could be countered with other studies, based on other arguments and procedures that would engender a different limitation/selection of data and would presumably include a demonstration of the claim that this alternate argument was important, more capacious, etc.

so the problem is not the selective interpretation/hierarchization of data, is it?

but you present your argument as though it is--as if there is some alternative of "objectivity" that would--well what?--not have arguments, not be beholden to methodological choices, not involve any hierarchization of data, no inclusions or exclusions? well, if that is true, then even if this objectivity existed, it would be meaningless, little more than a polaroid--not even that.

so what are you saying, really, through the second hand smoke?

raveneye · 11-24-2005, 10:07 AM

I think Crichton's next book should be Chicken Soup for the Neocon Soul.

And if he doesn't write it I will, as a parody. The first chapter will be about a logging company whose owner logs the last stand of old growth redwoods, in defiance of environmentalists. He has horrible pangs of guilt, but recovers finally when he realizes he has made enough money to send his cute blonde daughter to the best finishing school in the country, in a new Ferrari. The moral of the story: God helps those who help themselves. Heartwarming, isn't it?

I think it could be a best seller.

longbough · 11-24-2005, 12:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

the second hand smoke story was interesting enough--just out of curiousity, when a conservative person thinks of "the environmental movement" where exactly does the epa fit into the picture?

I wouldn't know.
My post about the EPA was made in response to a statement someone made earlier about the EPA. I thought the context was obvious since I quoted the person in my post. For the record, I never claimed that ETS had NO health consequences; I was only describing the origin of Crichton’s statement about the EPA.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

while the information was presented in response to a critique of crichton's thing, was it presented to make a more general claim as well?

You're free to infer whatever you wish from my post - that doesn't make it true. If one were to extrapolate an image of my personal politics from the nature of these posts that person would probably be wrong.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

the presentation read as though it was--but there seems no basis for claiming that it is anything but anecdotal--and anecdotes while are often nice (dont you think?), that's all they are....usually, folk like to present their stories as "telling anecdotes", kinds of allegories or as something that indicates or points to matters of broader importance. but that is often little more than an aesthetic matter (your politics might lead you to prefer to think that story is indicative of something systematic so that you dont have to demonstrate anything of the sort--this sort of preference is alot like the question of which kind of coffee you prefer or what colors socks you like)
or vanity (it is your story after all---i of course am not exempt from either of these)....but these are not arguments, they are simply preferences.

The Congressional Research Service DID conduct this review in 1995 and DID dismiss the findings of the 1993 EPA report as stated. In 1998 the statements of Judge Osteen regarding the quality of the EPA report were made as stated.

Perhaps you ought to challenge me on either the veracity of my facts or by providing an independent review that actually substantiates the EPA’s findings. Only then might your claim have merit. To say that I’m just being selective about my data without providing references of your own only suggests that you resist an honest consideration of views that contradict your personal beliefs.

Of course I could be wrong. In which case I would welcome the opportunity for enlightenment. But the quality of your response leaves nothing for me to consider.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

the reason i wondered about whether this story was to have some bigger meaning lay in the interpretation given of it---that the epa "cherrypicked" information--which i assume meant little more than the study in question was shaped by an argument, which was no doubt made explicit, both in the overview and in the methodology. any argument entails ways of attributing hierarchy to information, bringing some points forward and pushing others back, yes? that would mean that any argument is necessarily about a selective interpretation of factors, yes? so the fact that there was a selection in the reports that the epa relied upon is no surprise, is it? and if there were problems with the argument that justified those selections, or the methodologies used to translate that argument into a sorting mechanism for data, surely that problem does not lay with the fact of selection/limitation of information per se, but with how that selection was done, yes?

In the realm of rhetorical exchange this common practice, but it is, at the same time, unusual and inappropriate in the field of scientific research. The quality of each scientific publication is tested on the merits of its collective data through scientific peer review. In every form of scientific research it is a fundamental principle to regard ALL data – even ones that contradict your working hypothesis. Every single important scientific publication to date is reviewed systematically by independent parties to substantiate its findings. In time the veracity of all research is established through its endurance under repeated review and under repeat of the study by other parties. As a as a piece of scientific research, the 1993 EPA report is not exempt from this process. It just so happens that this was one report that did not bear the scrutiny of peer review.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

which could be countered with other studies, based on other arguments and procedures that would engender a different limitation/selection of data and would presumably include a demonstration of the claim that this alternate argument was important, more capacious, etc.

then I invite you to enlighten me. Please don’t make such claims in a vacuum. If you bring forth examples of “other studies” I promise to examine them with an objective eye. I’ve been wrong about many things before – It is not beneath me to withdraw my statements in light of stronger contrary evidence.

To reiterate a point I made earlier, I'm not a smoker nor have I ever been a smoker. I don't like to breathe second hand smoke if I don't have to. I'm a practicing internal medicine physician and see the chronic disease provoked by primary cigarette smoke every day in my patients who suffer from Coronary Artery Disease, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease as well as those I've treated with Lung Cancer. I don't like second hand smoke - but, if I'm to advocate a restriction on public smoking on the grounds of health impact I'd rather do so with objective data at hand.

12-18-2003, 03:22 AM	#2 (permalink)
seretogis Huggles, sir? Location: Seattle	Oh man, this is incredibly well written, and I agree completely. __________________ seretogis - sieg heil perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

12-18-2003, 05:09 AM	#4 (permalink)
onetime2 Junkie Location: NJ	Damn. Objective scientific studies? Trying multiple plans to gauge how each works? Depoliticizing environmental issues? Admitting that "we" don't already know everything? Acknowledging that we are a part of nature and that it is far stronger than it's portrayed? Sounds right to me. The question is how to convince the "followers". If he's right and the followers have a personality that requires this type of rigid, unquestioning belief in a cause, then a new cause will have to be created. __________________ Strive to be more curious than ignorant. Last edited by onetime2; 12-18-2003 at 05:28 AM..

12-18-2003, 08:03 AM	#5 (permalink)
Sparhawk Dubya Location: VA	The only valid points I got out of this were that science should remain apolitical (it largely does, when it is left to the scientists), and that extremism in any form is 'bad for business'. He paints an unfair potrait of the typical environmentalist however, a portrait that I have never encountered. He also criticizes some of the 'sky-is-falling' problems that never materialized. Here's one reason why they didn't: Because people did something about them. The reason we don't have Americans starving today? Food stamps- 20 million Americans use them, and don't go hungry. I'd go on, but since he didn't feel the need to back up his assertions with facts, why should I be bothered to refute them... __________________ "In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

12-18-2003, 08:08 AM	#6 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	Wow. Best thing I have read in a long long time. Its sadly true, but most people like most environmentalists are not scientists. They don't understand the limits of science and think that all it takes is a little more time and a lot of money to solve all problems. Its a great piece of writing, but I'm afraid it will fall on deaf ears. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. Last edited by Ustwo; 12-18-2003 at 10:56 AM..

12-18-2003, 10:48 AM	#7 (permalink)
Conclamo Ludus Modern Man Location: West Michigan	I've longed for this type of criticism. I couldn't agree more with him. From what I see, I can agree that environmentalism has been far too ideolized and turned into a replacement religion to the detriment of their cause. Great post. Very well written. __________________ Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold. -Son House, Death Letter Blues

11-22-2005, 04:11 PM	#8 (permalink)
longbough Soylent Green is people. Location: Northern California	It's funny that usually, whenever I talk to self-proclaimed environmentalists, anything short of 100% agreement on my part is met with hostility and insults. And I'm not even trying to be confrontational - only to enter into constructive discourse. I'm glad Mr. Crichton wrote that. Here's another perspective from Dr. Patrick Moore - one of the founders of Greenpeace who quit when the organization abandoned it's scientific interests in favor of perpetuating it's need to promote civil disobedience. Below are excerpted quotes from an interview with Dr. Moore in New Scientist. " The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment. To stay in an adversarial role, those people had to adopt ever more extreme positions because all the reasonable ones were being accepted... Environmentalism was always anti-establishment, but in the early days of Greenpeace we did not characterise ourselves as left wing. That happened after the fall of the Berlin wall when a whole bunch of left wing activists, who no longer had any role in the peace, women's or labour movements, joined us. I would go to the Greenpeace Toronto office and there would be an awful lot of young people wearing army fatigues and red berets in there... I believe we are entering an era now where pagan beliefs and junk science are influencing public policy. GM foods and forestry are both good examples where policy is being influenced by arguments that have no basis in fact or logic. Certainly, biotechnology needs to be done very carefully. But GM crops are in the same category as estrogen-mimicking compounds and pesticide residues. They are seen as an invisible force that will kill us all in our sleep or turn us all into mutants. It is preying on people's fear of the unknown.... We need to get out of the adversarial approach. People who base their opinion on science and reason and who are politically centrist need to take the movement back from the extremists who have hijacked it, often to further agendas that have nothing to do with ecology. It is important to remember that the environmental movement is only 30 years old. All movements go through some mucky periods. But environmentalism has become codified to such an extent that if you disagree with a single word, then you are apparently not an environmentalist. Rational discord is being discouraged. It has too many of the hallmarks of the Hitler youth..."

11-22-2005, 04:30 PM	#9 (permalink)
kutulu Junkie	Strawman much? I'll finish the article later but the first half was a steaming pile of crap.

11-22-2005, 06:45 PM	#11 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	Crichton is a novelist of some fame, but his opinions have as much influence on me as "Babs" or any other celebrity. The Environmental Protection Agency was a Reagan initiative and I will always hold him in high regard for that alone. For those that don't remember the bad old days, the Detroit river could be easily set on fire, and eagles became an endangered species because they were at the top of the PCB/DDT food chain. It is still unsafe for pregnant women to eat fish, particularly salmon, but important protections have been put in place that I hope will lead to uncontaminated food sources. I am old enough to remember that we dumped our raw sewage into Puget Sound; I am old enough to remember the pulp mills that left you gasping for breath; I am old enough to remember that people died when there was an inversion layer when rain didn't wash the air clean of our pollution. We have an inversion layer warning today. My brother-in-law was born in Austria and has visited several time in the last decade. The rivers are filthy with human waste and clean/treated water is at a premium. Water is not wasted with hot showers every day, like we do. Austrian's fill a small tub, large enough for their feet, and wash themselves with that water. Or, so I am told. Eco-terrorists belong in jail. Anyone claiming an ecological expertise, but are not a scientist, like Crichton, better have something better than rhetoric to back up their statements. The current administration dismisses scientific opinion for the corporate agenda and this will have a long-term cost if it is not stopped. Bush has done most of the derailing of Reagan's EPA through executive decisions (not subject to legislative vote), and legislative work via corporate donations (bribery). Ayup, I'm angry about many things. But a celebrity opinion? Please excuse me while I drink a beautifully clean glass of water from my tap.

11-22-2005, 07:53 PM	#12 (permalink)
maximusveritas Winner	I didn't read the whole thing and I realize this was written 2 years ago, but this line made me laugh : "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." While you could make a case that incidental second hand smoke is not harmful enough to justify the increased public regulations we've seen in recent years, to say it's not a health hazard to anyone makes you a crackpot in my book. I think Crichton's problem is that he has become fanatical in his opposition to the fanaticism of the environmentalists. He talks alot about being rational and looking at things from an objective point of view, but I don't think he's been following his own advice.

11-22-2005, 08:38 PM	#13 (permalink)
jorgelito All important elusive independent swing voter... Location: People's Republic of KKKalifornia	Elph, I think the EPA was created by Nixon?

11-22-2005, 08:41 PM	#14 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	Excellent article. __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

11-22-2005, 09:08 PM	#15 (permalink)
flstf Easy Rider Location: Moscow on the Ohio	I don't have enough scientific knowledge to have a very informed opinion on most of these environmental issues but I suspect that Crichton is more knowledgable than the average celebrity. I also suspect that the truth is closer to his analysis than that of the religion of environmentalism.

11-22-2005, 09:15 PM	#16 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	What he writes about is a BIG reason why I left post grad enviromental studies and went to dental school. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

11-23-2005, 06:36 AM	#18 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	a profile of crichton's dabblings in conservative-land.... http://magazine.audubon.org/profile/profile0505.html i dont see much of anything compelling in crichton's argument, but i am curious about the basis for such appeal as it seems to have here. i would be interested in seeing something approaching a coherent critique of the present state of eco-politics from the right---i know the general outlines of the very general attacks that you hear directed at "environmentalists" from the right pundit set---and it is the usual thing, a series of arbitrary general claims about environmentalists as some kind of fifth column, fronted by groups like the sierra club (which often gets painted as if they were some variant of trotskyism)---tactically, the focus is usually on groups like earth first---discursively the target is often peta--etc etc etc---in its generality, this narrative seems par for the course in the curious world of right politics--the usual caricatures of the opposition, the usual disregard for empirical information. but the narrative is never explained--rather it is activated and deployed more or less readymade. how does the notion of scientific expertise get formulated for the right? where does the assumption about the neutrality of science come from? how is it defended? why should anyone assume neutrality for scientists as a community, alone amongst almost all communities? how did the opposition scientist/environmentalist get set up? what prompts folk who oppose the movement in general to assume that all scientists oppose ecologically oriented action? if this assumption does not hold, where does its correlate come from--that environmentalists are dilletantes who encorach upon the purview of neutral scientists? what is the basic objection to politics that are informed by ecological considerations? do you really have to assume that there are no significant environmental problems in the world right now to be a conservative (no global warming, no desertification, no problems with industrial waste, no problem with centralized agriculture from the enviromental viewpoint)? on what basis do conservatives oppose sustainable agriculture, sustainable communities? what is the alternative? "market forces"? in a context where for 20 years it has been fairly common practice for corporations to purchase friendly researchers who are willing to build particular types of premises into their work, how did it come about that corporate sources are seen as neutral and environmentalist sources as political? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

11-23-2005, 06:43 AM	#19 (permalink)
stevo Rail Baron Location: Tallyfla	Good article. I read it several months ago. I think drudge posted it. For some reason I thought it had been posted here. oh well... I think his depiction of environmentalism and environmentalists, esp. is quite accurate. Superbelt, you may not be what crichton describes, but you cannot deny that such people exist. I have known several hard-core environmentalists over the years and crichton is dead-on. roach, I will be the first to admit that there are some very serious environmental problems we face today. I'm an avid fisherman and I would have to say a conservationist when it comes to our oceans. I notice the depletion of wetlands and the effects on fisheries. I also notice what a papermill does to a fishery in the river it is on. I also notice what longlines and gillnets do to our fisheries. I also think there are other ways to solve these problems without resorting to misinformation and being overcome by fear. I believe in using the market to help control pollution and depletion of our resources. exchangeable pollution permits, long-term planning, among other things. A lot of the programs we implement now are done after the fact. And a lot of the regulations we have now are relaxed for some (international paper comes to mind). I'm the farthest I can get from being anti-corporate, but I can admit it when I see it that some corperations do get around environmental protection laws. And its hardly an right-v-left problem. I don't see the dems doing any more to advance the protections of our fisheries than the right. I only see pandering. We'll discuss this later, as I've got a lot of work to do today so I can hit the road early for the holiday. Have a nice one. __________________ "If I am such a genius why am I drunk, lost in the desert, with a bullet in my ass?" -Otto Mannkusser Last edited by stevo; 11-23-2005 at 06:55 AM..

11-23-2005, 07:02 AM	#20 (permalink)
raveneye Born Against	Of course Crichton fails to mention that there are crazies everywhere, on both sides of the political spectrum. You could have given the same speech on any conservative movement you care to mention, because every movement has its lunatic fringe. But that doesn't invalidate the movement as a whole. The movement as a whole should be judged on the basis of the best arguments in its favor, not the worst. That's the fundamental fallacy of Crichton's speech. "Anti-environmentalism" is just as much a religion as "environmentalism" is. Last edited by raveneye; 11-23-2005 at 07:56 AM..

11-23-2005, 08:23 AM	#23 (permalink)
Locobot is awesome!	Most of the claims Crichton makes here are disputable at best, dead wrong in many cases. He's obviously cherrypicked his findings to suit his own goals here, something he claims to be against. Somehow he expects people to follow a rule that he himself is incapable of following. For instance on DDT: it is still manufactured and used in many third-world nations around the world. It was banned in the U.S. not only as a suspected carcinogen, but for causing a whole slew of environmental and health problems.

11-23-2005, 08:40 AM	#24 (permalink)
Redlemon Devoted Donor Location: New England	After reading that, I expect his next novel to be a defense of Intelligent Design. As discussed above, his definition of "proof" seems to be extreme, and he would also say that evolution is not "proven" either. It is nearly impossible to prove with 100% certainty any causality; that doesn't mean that there isn't sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion and act accordingly. (I am an environmental engineer, but I am not a "green".) __________________ I can't read your signature. Sorry.

11-23-2005, 11:54 AM	#29 (permalink)
kutulu Junkie	Another funny thing. You often hear Conservatives trashing celebrities whenever they try to rally for political causes. Why no such outrage from the right here? Oh, I see, that only applies to liberal celebrities.

11-23-2005, 12:10 PM	#30 (permalink)
cyrnel Adequate Location: In my angry-dome.	Celebrities? Crichton isn't Tim Robbins. (Waitaminit, aren't they both 6'6"?....) __________________ There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

11-23-2005, 01:38 PM	#34 (permalink)
Locobot is awesome!	The obvious answer here is to ban children from public spaces, not cigarettes.

11-23-2005, 03:47 PM	#36 (permalink)
filtherton Junkie Location: In the land of ice and snow.	I prefer vonnegut.

11-23-2005, 05:03 PM	#38 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	about post 26 et al.... the second hand smoke story was interesting enough--just out of curiousity, when a conservative person thinks of "the environmental movement" where exactly does the epa fit into the picture? while the information was presented in response to a critique of crichton's thing, was it presented to make a more general claim as well? the presentation read as though it was--but there seems no basis for claiming that it is anything but anecdotal--and anecdotes while are often nice (dont you think?), that's all they are....usually, folk like to present their stories as "telling anecdotes", kinds of allegories or as something that indicates or points to matters of broader importance. but that is often little more than an aesthetic matter (your politics might lead you to prefer to think that story is indicative of something systematic so that you dont have to demonstrate anything of the sort--this sort of preference is alot like the question of which kind of coffee you prefer or what colors socks you like) or vanity (it is your story after all---i of course am not exempt from either of these)....but these are not arguments, they are simply preferences. the reason i wondered about whether this story was to have some bigger meaning lay in the interpretation given of it---that the epa "cherrypicked" information--which i assume meant little more than the study in question was shaped by an argument, which was no doubt made explicit, both in the overview and in the methodology. any argument entails ways of attributing hierarchy to information, bringing some points forward and pushing others back, yes? that would mean that any argument is necessarily about a selective interpretation of factors, yes? so the fact that there was a selection in the reports that the epa relied upon is no surprise, is it? and if there were problems with the argument that justified those selections, or the methodologies used to translate that argument into a sorting mechanism for data, surely that problem does not lay with the fact of selection/limitation of information per se, but with how that selection was done, yes? which could be countered with other studies, based on other arguments and procedures that would engender a different limitation/selection of data and would presumably include a demonstration of the claim that this alternate argument was important, more capacious, etc. so the problem is not the selective interpretation/hierarchization of data, is it? but you present your argument as though it is--as if there is some alternative of "objectivity" that would--well what?--not have arguments, not be beholden to methodological choices, not involve any hierarchization of data, no inclusions or exclusions? well, if that is true, then even if this objectivity existed, it would be meaningless, little more than a polaroid--not even that. so what are you saying, really, through the second hand smoke? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 11-23-2005 at 05:08 PM..

11-24-2005, 10:07 AM	#39 (permalink)
raveneye Born Against	I think Crichton's next book should be Chicken Soup for the Neocon Soul. And if he doesn't write it I will, as a parody. The first chapter will be about a logging company whose owner logs the last stand of old growth redwoods, in defiance of environmentalists. He has horrible pangs of guilt, but recovers finally when he realizes he has made enough money to send his cute blonde daughter to the best finishing school in the country, in a new Ferrari. The moral of the story: God helps those who help themselves. Heartwarming, isn't it? I think it could be a best seller.