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THE FREEMAN   SEPTEMBER 1992

The Toxicity
of Environmentalism

by George Reisman

Dr. Reisman is Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University's School
of Business and Management in Los Angeles.  This essay is excerpted
from Dr. Reisman's forthcoming book, Capitalism: A Treatise on
Economics.

Recently a popular imported mineral water was removed from the market
because tests showed that samples of it contained 35 parts per billion
of benzene.  Although this was an amount so small that only 15 years
ago it would have been impossible even to detect, it was assumed that
considerations of public health required withdrawal of the product.

Such a case, of course, is not unusual nowadays.  The presence of parts
per billion of a toxic substance is routinely assumed to be a cause of
human deaths.  And whenever the number of projected deaths exceeds one
in a million, environmentalists demand that the government remove the
offending pesticide, preservative, or other alleged bearer of toxic
pollution from the market.  They do so, even though a level of risk of
one in a million is one-third as great as that of an airplane falling
from the sky on one's home.

The Toxicity of Environmentalism

While it is not necessary to question the good intentions and sincerity
of the overwhelming majority of the members of the environmental or
ecology movement, it is vital that the public realize that in this
seemingly lofty and noble movement itself can be found more than a
little evidence of the most profound toxicity.  Consider, for example,
the following quotation from David M. Graber, a research biologist with
the National Park Service, in his prominently featured Los Angeles
Times book review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature:

This [man's "remaking the earth by degrees"] makes what is happening no
less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not
for what value it confers upon mankind.  I, for one, cannot wish upon
either my children or the rest of Earth's biota a tame planet, be it
monstrous or-however unlikely--benign.  McKibben is a biocentrist, and
so am I.  We are not interested in the utility of a particular species,
or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind.  They have intrinsic
value, more value--to me--than another human body, or a billion of
them.

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as
a wild and healthy planet.  I know social scientists who remind me that
people are part of nature, but it isn't true.  Somewhere along the
line--at about a billion years ago, maybe half that--we quit the
contract and became a cancer.  We have become a plague upon ourselves
and upon the Earth.

It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end
its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal
consumption of landscape.  Until such time as Homo sapiens should
decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus
to come along.(1)

While Mr. Graber openly wishes for the death of a billion people, Mr.
McKibben, the author he reviewed, quotes with approval John Muir's
benediction to alligators, describing it as a "good epigram" for his
own, "humble approach": "'Honorable representatives of the great
saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes,
and be blessed now and then with a  mouthful of terror-stricken man by
way of a dainty.'"(2)

Such statements represent pure, unadulterated poison.  They express
ideas and wishes which, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for
enormous numbers of human beings.

These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members
of the environmental movement.  The significance of such statements
cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the
environmental movement.  Indeed, even if such views were indicative of
the thinking only of five or ten percent of the members of the
environmental movement--the "deep  ecology," Earth First! wing--they
would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not
at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the
level of parts per hundred which, of course, is an enormously higher
level of toxicity than is deemed to constitute a danger to human life
in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.

But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is
substantially greater than even parts per hundred.  It is certainly at
least at the level of several parts per ten.  This is obvious from the
fact that the mainstream of the environmental movement makes no
fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of Messrs.  Graber
and McKibben.  Indeed, John Muir, whose wish for alligators to "be
blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror--stricken man by way of
a dainty" McKibben approvingly quotes, was the founder of the Sierra
Club, which is proud to acknowledge that fact.  The Sierra Club, of
course, is the leading environmental organization and is supposedly the
most respectable of them.

The "Intrinsic" Value of Nature

There is something much more important than the Sierra Club's
genealogy, however-something that provides an explanation in terms of
basic principle as to why the mainstream of the ecology movement does
not attack what might be thought to be merely its fringe.  This is a
fundamental philosophical premise which the mainstream of the movement
shares with the alleged fringe and which logically implies hatred for
man and his achievements.  Namely, the premise that nature possesses
intrinsic value--i.e., that nature is valuable in and of itself, apart
from all contribution to human life and well-being.

The anti-human premise of nature's intrinsic value goes back, in the
Western world, as far as St. Francis of Assisi, who believed in the
equality of all living creatures: man, cattle, birds, fish, and
reptiles.  Indeed, precisely on the basis of this philosophical
affinity, and at the wish of the mainstream of the ecology movement,
St. Francis of Assisi has been officially declared the patron saint of
ecology by the Roman Catholic Church.

The premise of nature's intrinsic value extends to an alleged intrinsic
value of forests, rivers, canyons, and hillsides--to everything and
anything that is not man.  Its influence is present in the Congress of
the United States, in such statements as that recently made by
Representative Morris Udall of Arizona that a frozen, barren desert in
Northern Alaska, where substantial oil deposits appear to exist, is "a
sacred place" that should never be given over to oil rigs and
pipelines.  It is present in the supporting statement of a
representative of the Wilderness Society that "There is a need to
protect the land not just for wildlife and human recreation, but just
to have it there."  It has, of course, also been present in the
sacrifice of the interests of human beings for the sake of snail
darters and spotted owls.

The idea of nature's intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to
destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the
systematic destroyer of the good and thus as the systematic doer of
evil.  Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil
because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as
sources of food and clothing, so, on the premise of nature's intrinsic
value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit
of his well-being, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles,
and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically
valuable.  Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic
values of nature, the degree of man's alleged destructiveness and evil
is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature.  Man
is the rational being.  It is his application of his reason in the form
of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him
to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does.  Thus, it
is his possession and use of reason-manifested in his technology and
industry-for which he is hated.

The doctrine of intrinsic value is itself only a rationalization for a
pre-existing hatred of man.  It is invoked not because one attaches any
actual value to what is alleged to have intrinsic value, but simply to
serve as a pretext for denying values to man.  For example, caribou
feed upon vegetation, wolves eat caribou, and microbes attack wolves.
Each of these, the vegetation, the caribou, the wolves, and the
microbes, is alleged by the environmentalists to possess intrinsic
value.  Yet absolutely no course of action is indicated for man.
Should man act to protect the intrinsic value of the vegetation from
destruction by the caribou?  Should he act to protect the intrinsic
value of the caribou from destruction by the wolves?  Should he act to
protect the intrinsic value of the wolves from destruction by the
microbes?  Even though each of these alleged intrinsic values is at
stake, man is not called upon to do anything.  When does the doctrine
of intrinsic value serve as a guide to what man should do?  Only when
man comes to attach value to something.  Then it is invoked to deny him
the value he seeks.  For example, the intrinsic value of nature is
invoked as a guide to man's action only when there is something man
wants, such as oil, and then, as in the case of Northern Alaska, its
invocation serves to stop him from having it.  In other words, the
doctrine of the intrinsic value of nature is nothing but a doctrine of
the negation of human values.  It is pure nihilism.

It should be realized that it is logically implicit in what has just
been said that to establish a public office, such as that recently
proposed in California, of "environmental advocate," would be
tantamount to establishing an office of Negator of Human Value.  The
work of such an office would be to stop man from achieving his values
for no other reason than that he was man and wanted to achieve them.

Of course, the environmental movement is not pure poison.  Very few
people would listen to it if it were.  As I have said, it is poisonous
only at the level of several parts per ten.  Mixed in with the poison
and overlaying it as a kind of sugar coating is the advocacy of many
measures which have the avowed purpose of promoting human life and
well-being, and among these some that considered in isolation, might
actually achieve that purpose.  The problem is that the mixture is
poisonous.  And thus, when one swallows environmentalism, one
inescapably swallows poison.

Given the underlying nihilism of the movement, it is not possible to
accept at face value any of the claims it makes of seeking to improve
human life and well-being, especially when following its
recommendations would impose on people great deprivation or cost.
Indeed, nothing could be more absurd or dangerous than to take advice
on how to improve one's life and well-being from those who wish one
dead and whose satisfaction comes from human terror, which, of course,
as I have shown, is precisely what is wished in the environmental
movement--openly and on principle.  This conclusion, it must be
stressed, applies irrespective of the scientific or academic
credentials of an individual.  If an alleged scientific expert believes
in the intrinsic value of nature, then to seek his advice is
equivalent to seeking the advice of a medical doctor who was on the
side of the germs rather than of the patient.  Obviously, Congressional
committees taking testimony from alleged expert witnesses on the
subject of proposed environmental legislation need to be aware of this
fact and never to forget it.

Errors and Panics

Not surprisingly, in virtually every case, the claims made by the
environmentalists have turned out to be false or simply absurd.
Consider, for example, the recent case of Alar, a chemical spray used
for many years on apples in order to preserve their color and
freshness.  Here, it turned out that even if the environmentalists'
claims had actually been true, and the use of Alar would result in 42
deaths per million over a 70-year lifetime, all that would have been
signified was that eating apples sprayed with Alar would then have been
less dangerous than driving to the supermarket to buy the apples!
(Consider: 4.2 deaths per million over a seventy-year period means that
in any one year in the United States, with its population of roughly
two hundred and fifty million people, approximately fifteen deaths
would be attributable to Alar!  This is the result obtained by
multiplying 4.2 per million times 250 million and then dividing by 70.
In the same one-year period of time, approximately 50,000 deaths occur
in motor vehicle accidents in the United States, most of them within a
few miles of the victims' homes, and undoubtedly far more than fifteen
of them on trips to or from supermarkets.)  Nevertheless, a panic
ensued, followed by a plunge in the sale of apples, the financial ruin
of an untold number of apple growers, and the virtual disappearance of
Alar.

Before the panic over Alar, there was the panic over asbestos.
According to Forbes magazine, it turns out that in the forms in which
it is normally used in the United States, asbestos is one-third as
likely to be the cause of death as being struck by lightning.(3)

Then there is the alleged damage to lakes caused by acid rain.
According to Policy Review, it turns out that the acidification of the
lakes has not been the result of acid rain, but of the cessation of
logging operations in the affected areas and thus the absence of the
alkaline run-off produced by such operations.  This run-off had made
naturally acidic lakes non-acidic for a few generations.(4)

Besides these cases, there were the hysterias over dioxin in the ground
at Times Beach, Missouri, TCE in the drinking water of Woburn,
Massachusetts, the chemicals in Love Canal, and radiation at Three Mile
Island.  According to professor Bruce Ames, one of the world's leading
experts on cancer, it turned out that the amount of dioxin that anyone
would have absorbed in Times Beach was far less than the amount
required to do any harm and that, indeed, the actual harm to Times
Beach residents from dioxin was less than that of drinking a glass of
beer.(5) (The Environmental Protection Agency itself subsequently
reduced its estimate of the danger from dioxin by a factor of
fifteen-sixteenths.)  In the case of Woburn, according to Ames, it
turned out the cluster of leukemia cases which occurred there was
statistically random and that the drinking water there was actually
above the national average in safety, and not, as had been claimed, the
cause of the leukemia cases.  In the case of Love Canal, Ames reports,
it turned out upon investigation that the cancer rate among the former
residents has been no higher than average.  (It is necessary to use the
phrase "former  residents" because the town lost most of its population
in the panic and forced evacuation caused by the environmentalists'
claims.)  In the case of Three Mile Island, not a single resident has
died, nor even received an additional exposure to radiation, as the
result of the accident there.  In addition, according to studies
reported in The New York Times, the cancer rate among residents there
is no higher than normal and has not risen.(6)

Before these hysterias, there were claims alleging the death of Lake
Erie and mercury poisoning in tuna fish.  All along, Lake Erie has been
very much alive and was even producing near record quantities of fish
at the very time the claims of its death were being made.  The mercury
in the tuna fish was the result of the natural presence of mercury in
sea water; and evidence provided by museums showed that similar levels
of mercury had been present in tuna fish since prehistoric times.

And now, in yet another overthrow of the environmentalists' claims, a
noted climatologist, Professor Robert Pease, has shown that it is
impossible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to destroy large quantities
of ozone in the stratosphere because relatively few of them are even
capable of reaching the stratosphere in the first place.  He also shows
that the celebrated ozone "hole" over Antarctica every fall is a
phenomenon of nature, in existence since long before CFCs were
invented, and results largely from the fact that during the long
Antarctic night ultraviolet sunlight is not present to create fresh
ozone.(7)

Pseudo-Science

The reason that one after another of the environmentalists' claims turn
out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for
truth in the first place.  In making their claims, the
environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to
frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology,
and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the
environmentalists' tender mercies.  The claims rest on unsupported
conjectures and wild leaps of imagination, from scintillas of fact to
arbitrary conclusions, by means of evasion and the drawing of invalid
inferences.  It is absurd to leap from findings about the effects of
feeding rats or mice dosages the equivalent of a hundred or more times
what any human being would ever ingest, and then draw inferences about
the effects on people consuming normal quantities.  Fears of parts per
billion of this or that chemical causing single-digit deaths per
million do not rest on science, but on imagination.  Such claims have
nothing to do either with actual experimentation or with the concept of
casualty.

No one ever has, can, or will observe such a thing as two groups of a
million people identical in all respects except that over a 70-year
period the members of one of the groups consume apples sprayed with
Alar, while the members of the other group do not, and then 4.2 members
of the first group die.  The process by which such a conclusion is
reached, and its degree of actual scientific seriousness, is
essentially the same as that of a college students' bull session, which
consists of practically nothing but arbitrary assumptions,
manipulations, guesses, and plain hot air.  In such a session, one
might start with the known consequences of a quarter-ton safe falling
ten stories onto the head of an unfortunate passerby-below, and from
there go on to speculate about the conceivable effects in a million
cases of other passers-by happening to drop from their hand or mouth an
M&M or a peanut on their shoe, and come to the conclusion that 4.2 of
them will die.

Furthermore, as indicated, in contrast to the procedures of a bull
session, reason and actual science establish causes which, in their
nature, are universal.  When, for example, genuine causes of death,
such as arsenic, strychnine, or bullets, attack vital organs of the
human body, death is certain to result, in all but a handful of cases
per million.  When something is in fact the cause of some effect, it is
so in each and every case in which specified conditions prevail, and
fads to be so only in cases in which the specified conditions are not
present, such as a person's having built up a tolerance to poison or
wearing a bulletproof vest.  Such claims as a thousand different things
each causing cancer in a handful of cases are proof of nothing but that
the actual causes are not yet known -- and, beyond that, an indication
of the breakdown of the epistemology of contemporary science.  (This
epistemological breakdown, I might add, rapidly accelerated in the
1960s when the government took over most of the scientific research in
the United States and began the large-scale financing of statistical
studies as a substitute for the discovery of causes.)

In making their claims, the environmentalists willfully ignore such
facts as that carcinogens, poisons, and radiation exist in nature.
Fully half of the chemicals found in nature are carcinogenic when fed
to animals in massive quantities-the same proportion as applies to
man-made chemicals when fed in massive quantities.  (The cause of the
resulting cancers, according to Professor Ames, is actually not the
chemicals, either natural or manmade, but the repeated destruction of
tissue caused by the massively excessive doses in which the chemicals
are fed, such as saccharin being fed to rats in a quantity comparable
to humans drinking eight hundred cans of diet soda a day.)  Arsenic,
one of the deadliest poisons, is a naturally occurring chemical
element.  Oleander, one of the most beautiful plants, is also a deadly
poison, as are many other plants and herbs.  Radium and uranium, with
all their radioactivity, are found in nature.  Indeed, all of nature is
radioactive to some degree.  If the environmentalists did not dose
their eyes to what exists in nature, if they did not associate every
negative exclusively with man, if they applied to nature the standards
of safety they claim to be necessary in the case of man's activities,
they would have to run in terror from nature.  They would have to use
one-half of the world to construct protective containers or barriers
against all the allegedly deadly carcinogens, toxins, and radioactive
material that constitute the other half of the world.

It would be a profound mistake to dismiss the repeatedly false claims
of the environmentalists merely as a case of the little boy who cried
wolf.  They are a case of the wolf crying again and again about alleged
dangers to the little boy.  The only real danger is to listen to the
wolf.

Direct evidence of the willful dishonesty of the environmental movement
comes from one of its leading representatives, Stephen Schneider, who
is well-known for his predictions of global catastrophe.  In the
October 1989 issue of Discover magazine, he is quoted (with approval)
as follows:

"... To do this, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture
the public's imagination.  That, of course, entails getting loads of
media coverage.  So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts
we may have.  This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves
in cannot be solved by any formula.  Each of us has to decide what the
right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Thus, in the absence of verification by sources totally independent of
the environmental movement and free of its taint, all of its claims of
seeking to improve human life and well-being in this or that specific
way must be regarded simply as lies, having the actual purpose of
inflicting needless deprivation or suffering.  In the category of
malicious lies fall all of the environmental movement's claims about
our having to abandon industrial civilization or any significant part
of it in order to cope with the dangers of alleged global warming,
ozone depletion, or exhaustion of natural resources.  Indeed, all
claims constituting denunciations of science, technology, or industrial
civilization which are advanced in the name of service to human life
and well-being are tantamount to claiming that our survival and
well-being depend on our abandonment of reason.  (Science, technology,
and industry are leading products of reason and are inseparable from
it.)  All such claims should be taken as nothing but further proof of
the environmental movement's hatred of man's nature and man's life,
certainly not of any actual danger to human life and well-being.

Which Environment?

It is important to realize that when the environmentalists talk about
destruction of the "environment" as the result of economic activity,
their claims are permeated by the doctrine of intrinsic value.  Thus,
what they actually mean to a very great extent is merely the
destruction of alleged intrinsic values in nature such as jungles,
deserts, rock formations, and animal species which are either of no
value to man or hostile to man.  That is their concept of the
"environment."  If, in contrast to the environmentalists, one means by
"environment" the surroundings of man--the external material conditions
of human life--then it becomes clear that all of man's productive
activities have the inherent tendency to improve his environment -
-indeed, that that is their essential purpose.

This becomes obvious if one realizes that the entire world physically
consists of nothing but chemical elements.  These elements are never
destroyed.  They simply reappear in different combinations, in
different proportions, in different places.  Apart from what has been
lost in a few rockets, the quantity of every chemical element in the
world today is the same as it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The only difference is that, because of the Industrial Revolution,
instead of lying dormant, out of man's control, the chemical elements
have been moved about as never before, in such a way as to improve
human life and well-being.  For instance, some part of the world's iron
and copper has been moved from the interior of the earth, where it was
useless, to construct buildings, bridges, automobiles, and a million
and one other things of benefit to human life.  Some part of the
world's carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen has been separated from certain
compounds and recombined in others, in the process releasing energy to
heat and light homes, power industrial machinery, fuel automobiles,
airplanes, ships, and trains, and in countless other ways serve human
life.  It follows that insofar as man's environment consists of the
chemical elements iron, copper, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and his
productive activity makes them useful to himself in these ways, his
environment is correspondingly improved.

All that all of man's productive activities fundamentally consist of is
in the rearrangement of nature-given chemical elements for the purpose
of making them stand in a more useful relationship to himself--that is,
for the purpose of improving his environment.

Consider further examples.  To live, man needs to be able to move his
person and his goods from place to place.  If an untamed forest stands
in his way, such movement is difficult or impossible.  It represents an
improvement in his environment, therefore, when man moves the chemical
elements that constitute some of the trees of the forest somewhere else
and lays down the chemical elements brought from somewhere else to
constitute a road.  It is an improvement in his environment when man
builds bridges, digs canals, opens mines, clears land, constructs
factories and houses, or does anything else that represents an
improvement in the external, material conditions of his life.  All of
these things represent an improvement in man's material surroundings-
-his environment.  All of them represent the rearrangement of nature's
elements in a way that makes them stand in a more useful relationship
to human life and well-being.

Thus, all economic activity has as its sole purpose the improvement of
the environment--it aims exclusively at the improvement of the
external, material conditions of human life.  Production and economic
activity are precisely the means by which man adapts his environment to
himself and thereby improves it.

So much for the environmentalists' claims about man's destruction of
the environment.  Only from the perspective of the alleged intrinsic
value of nature and the nonvalue of man can man's improvement of his
environment be termed destruction of the environment.

The environmentalists' recent claims about the impending destruction of
the "planet" are entirely the result of the influence of the
intrinsic-value doctrine.  What the environmentalists are actually
afraid of is not that the planet or its ability to support human life
will be destroyed, but that the increase in its ability to support
human life will destroy its still extensively existing "Wildness."
They cannot bear the thought of the earth's becoming fully subject to
man's control, with its jungles and deserts replaced by farms,
pastures, and forests planted by man, as man wills.  They cannot bear
the thought of the earth's becoming man's garden.  In the words of
McKibben, "The problem is that nature, the independent force that has
surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers
and our habits.  We may well be able to create a world that can support
our numbers and our habits, but it will be an artificial world ..."
(italics supplied).(8)

The Virtue of Separation

The toxic character of the environmental movement implies the
observance of a vital principle in connection with any measures which
the movement advocates and which might actually promote human life and
well-being, such as those calling for the reduction of smog, the
cleaning up of rivers, lakes, and beaches, and so forth.  The principle
is that even here one must not make common cause with the environmental
movement in any way.  One must be scrupulously careful not to advocate
even anything that is genuinely good, under its auspices or banner.  To
do so is to promote its evil-to become contaminated with its poison and
to spread its poison.  In the hands of the environmentalists, concern
even with such genuine problems as smog and polluted rivers serves as a
weapon with which to attack industrial civilization.  The
environmentalists proceed as though problems of filth emanated from
industrial civilization, as though filth were not the all-pervasive
condition of human life in pre-industrial societies, and as though
industrial civilization represented a decline from more healthful
conditions of the past.

The principle of non-cooperation with the environmental movement, of
the most radical differentiation from it, must be followed in order to
avoid the kind of disastrous consequences brought about earlier in this
century by people in Russia and Germany who began as basically innocent
and with good intentions.  Even though the actual goals and programs of
the Communists and Nazis were no secret, many people did not realize
that such pronouncements and their underlying philosophy must be taken
seriously.  As a result, they joined with the Communists or Nazis in
efforts to achieve what they believed were worthy specific goals, above
all goals falling under the head of the alleviation of poverty.  But
working side by side with the likes of Lenin and Stalin or Hitler and
Himmler did not achieve the kind of life these people had hoped to
achieve.  It did, however, serve to achieve the bloody goals of those
monsters.  And along the way, those who may have started out innocently
enough very quickly lost their innocence and to varying degrees ended
up simply as accomplices of the monsters.

Evil needs the cooperation of the good to disguise its nature and to
gain numbers and influence it could never achieve on its own.  Thus,
the doctrine of intrinsic value needs to be mixed as much as possible
with alleged concern for man's life and well-being.  In allowing
themselves to participate in advancing the cause of the mixture,
otherwise good people serve to promote the doctrine of intrinsic value
and thus the destruction of human values.

Already large numbers of otherwise good people have been enlisted in
the environmentalists' campaign to throttle the production of energy.
This is a campaign which, to the degree that it succeeds, can only
cause human deprivation and the substitution of man's limited muscle
power for the power of motors and engines.  It is actually a campaign
which seeks nothing less than the undoing of the Industrial Revolution,
and the return to the poverty, filth, and misery of earlier centuries.

The Anti-Industrial Revolution

The essential feature of the Industrial Revolution is the use of
man-made power.  To the relatively feeble muscles of draft animals and
the still more feeble muscles of human beings, and to the relatively
small amounts of usable power available from nature in the form of wind
and falling water, the Industrial Revolution added man-made power.  It
did so first in the form of steam generated by the combustion of coal,
and later in the form of internal combustion based on petroleum, and
electric power based on the burning of any fossil fuel or on atomic
energy.

This man-made power is the essential basis of all of the economic
improvements achieved over the last two hundred years.  Its application
is what enables us human beings to accomplish with our arms and hands
the amazing productive results we do accomplish.  To the feeble powers
of our arms and hands is added the enormously greater power released by
these sources of energy.   Energy use, the productivity of labor, and
the standard of living are inseparably connected, with the two last
entirely dependent on the first.

Thus, it is not surprising, for example, that the United States enjoys
the world's highest standard of living.  This is a direct result of the
fact that the United States has the world's highest energy consumption
per capita.  The United States, more than any other country, is the
country where intelligent human beings have arranged for motor-driven
machinery to accomplish results for them.  All further substantial
increases in the productivity of labor and standard of living, both
here in the United States and across the world, will be equally
dependent on man-made power and the growing consumption of energy it
makes possible.  Our ability to accomplish more and more with the same
limited muscular powers of our limbs will depend entirely on our
ability to augment them further and further with the aid of still more
such energy.

In total opposition to the Industrial Revolution and all the marvelous
results it has accomplished, the essential goal of environmentalism is
to block the increase in one source of man-made power after another and
ultimately to roll back the production of man-made power to the point
of virtual nonexistence, thereby undoing the Industrial Revolution and
returning the world to the economic Dark Ages.  There is to be no
atomic power.  According to the environmentalists, it represents the
death ray.  There is also to be no power based on fossil fuels.
According to the environmentalists, it causes "pollution," and now
global warming, and must therefore be given up.  There is not even to
be significant hydro-power.  According to the environmentalists, the
building of the necessary dams destroys intrinsically valuable wildlife
habitat.

Only three things are to be permitted as sources of energy, according
to the environmentalists.  Two of them, "solar power" and power from
windmills, are, as far as can be seen, utterly impracticable as
significant sources of energy.  If, somehow they became practicable,
the environmentalists would undoubtedly find grounds for attacking
them.  The third allowable source of energy, "conservation," is a
contradiction in terms.  "Conservation" is not a source of energy.  Its
actual meaning is simply using less.  Conservation is a source of
energy for one use only at the price of deprivation of energy use
somewhere else.

The environmentalists' campaign against energy calls to mind the image
of a boa constrictor entwining itself about the body of its victim and
slowly squeezing the life out of him.  There can be no other result for
the economic system of the industrialized world but enfeeblement and
ultimately death if its supplies of energy are progressively choked
off.

Large numbers of people have been enlisted in the campaign against
energy out of fear that the average mean temperature of the world may
rise a few degrees in the next century, mainly as the result of the
burning of fossil fuels.  If this were really to be so, the only
appropriate response would be to be sure that more and better air
conditioners were available.  (Similarly, if there were in fact to be
some reduction in the ozone layer, the appropriate response, to avoid
the additional cases of skin cancer that would allegedly occur from
exposure to more intense sunlight, would be to be sure that there were
more sunglasses, hats, and sun-tan lotion available.)  It would not be
to seek to throttle and destroy industrial civilization.

If one did not understand its underlying motivation, the environmental
movement's resort to the fear of global warming might appear
astonishing in view of all the previous fears the movement has
professed.  These fears, in case anyone has forgotten, have concerned
the alleged onset of a new ice age as the result of the same industrial
development that is now supposed to result in global warming, and the
alleged creation of a "nuclear winter" as the result of man's use of
atomic explosives.

The words of Paul Ehrlich and his incredible claims in connection with
the "greenhouse effect" should be recalled.  In the first wave of
ecological hysteria, this "scientist" declared:

"At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will
be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump.  We do know that very
small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the
Earth could be very serious.  With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice
age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the
agricultural productivity of the temperate regions.  With a few degrees
of heating, the polar ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels
250 feet.  Gondola to the Empire State Building, anyone?"(9)

The 250-foot rise in the sea level projected by Ehrlich as the result
of global warming has been scaled back somewhat.  According to
McKibben, the "worst case scenario" is now supposed to be eleven feet,
by the year 2100, with something less than seven feet considered more
likely.  According to a United Nations panel of alleged scientists, it
is supposed to be 25.6 inches.  (Even this still more modest projection
did not stop the UN panel from calling for an immediate 60 percent
reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions to try to prevent it.)

Perhaps of even greater significance is the continuous and profound
distrust of science and technology that the environmental movement
displays.  The environmental movement maintains that science and
technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to
produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that
is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives.  When
it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one
area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking
confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in
which, until recently, no one-not even the staunchest supporters of
science and technology-had ever thought to assert very much confidence
at all.  The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science
and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited
confidence in them is forecast the weather--for the next one hundred
years!

It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we
are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution, or, as it is
euphemistically put, "to radically and profoundly change the way in
which we live" --to our enormous material detriment.

Very closely connected with this is something else that might appear
amazing.  This concerns" prudence and caution.  No matter what the
assurances of scientists and engineers, based in every detail on the
best established laws of physics --about backup systems, fail-safe
systems, containment buildings as strong as U-boat pens, defenses in
depth, and so on-when it comes to atomic power, the environmental
movement is unwilling to gamble on the unborn children of fifty
generations hence being exposed to harmful radiation.  But on the
strength of a weather forecast, it is willing to wreck the economic
system of the modern world-to literally throw away industrial
civilization.  (The 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions
urged by that United Nations panel would be utterly devastating in
itself, totally apart from all the further such measures that would
surely follow it.)

The meaning of this insanity is that industrial civilization is to be
abandoned because this is what must be done to avoid bad weather All
right, very bad weather.  If we destroy the energy base needed to
produce and operate the construction equipment required to build
strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of
people, we shall be safer from the wind and rain, the environmental
movement alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base.  If
we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air
conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we
retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement claims.
If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and
harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and
produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our
health better than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the
environmental movement asserts.

There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning
how man can cope with his environment.  Instead of our taking action
upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth
control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our
inaction Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of
nature will-arise!  The threatening forces of nature are not the
product of nature, but of us!  Thus speaks the environmental movement.

All of the insanities of the environmental movement become intelligible
when one grasps the nature of the destructive motivation behind them.
They are not uttered in the interest of man's life and well-being, but
for the purpose of leading him to self-destruction.

Free Market Solutions
to Environmental Problems

It must be stressed that even if global warming turned out to be a
fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization would have no
great difficulty in coping with it--that is, of course, if their
ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the
environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired.
The seeming difficulties of coping with global warming, or any other
large-scale change, arise only when the problem is viewed from the
perspective of government central planners.

It would be too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle
(as is the production even of an adequate supply of wheat or nails--as
the experience of the whole socialist world has so eloquently shown).
But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds
of millions of free-thinking individuals living under capitalism to
solve.  It would be solved by means of each individual being free to
decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming
that affected him.  Individuals would decide, on the basis of
profit-and-loss calculations, what changes they needed to make in their
businesses and in their personal lives, in order best to adjust to the
situation.  They would decide where it was now relatively more
desirable to own land, locate farms and businesses, and live and work,
and where it was relatively less desirable, and what new comparative
advantages each location had for the production of which goods.  The
essential thing they would require is the freedom to serve their self-
interests by buying land and moving their businesses to the areas
rendered relatively more attractive, and the freedom to seek employment
and buy or rent housing in those areas.

Given this freedom, the totality of the problem would be overcome.
This is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and
the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and
harmonized by the price system (as many former central planners of
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have come to learn).  As a result,
the problem would be solved in exactly the same way that tens and
hundreds of millions of free individuals have solved much greater
problems, such as redesigning the economic system to deal with the
replacement of the horse by the automobile, the settlement of the
American West, and the release of the far greater part of the labor of
the economic system from agriculture to industry.

Indeed, it would probably turn out that if the necessary adjustments
were allowed to be made, global warming, if it actually came, would
prove highly beneficial to mankind on net balance.  For example, there
is evidence suggesting that it would postpone the onset of the next ice
age by a thousand years or more and that the higher level of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, which is supposed to cause the warming
process, would be highly beneficial to agriculture.

Whether global warming comes or not, it is certain that nature itself
will sooner or later produce major changes in the climate.  To deal
with those changes and virtually all other changes arising from
whatever cause, man absolutely requires individual freedom, science,
and technology.  In a word, he requires the industrial civilization
constituted by capitalism.

This brings me back to the possibly truly good objectives that have
been mixed in with environmentalism, such as the desire for greater
cleanliness and health.  If one wants to advocate such objectives
without aiding the potential mass murderers in the environmental
movement in achieving their goals, one must first of all accept
unreservedly the values of human reason, science, technology, and
industrial civilization, and never attack those values.  They are the
indispensable foundation for achieving greater cleanliness and health
and longer life.

In the last two centuries, loyalty to these values has enabled man in
the Western world to put an end to famines and plagues, and to
eliminate the once dread diseases of cholera, diphtheria, smallpox,
tuberculosis, and typhoid fever, among others.  Famine has been ended,
because the industrial civilization so hated by the environmentalists
has produced the greatest abundance and variety of food in the history
of the world, and created the transportation system required to bring
it to  everyone.  This same hated civilization has produced the iron
and steel pipe, and the chemical purification and pumping systems that
enable everyone to have instant access to safe drinking water, hot or
cold, every minute of the day.  It has produced the sewage systems and
the automobiles that have removed the filth of human and animal waste
from the streets of cities and towns.

Such improvements, together with the enormous reduction in fatigue and
exhaustion made possible by the use of labor-saving machinery, have
resulted in a radical reduction in mortality and increase in life
expectancy, from less than thirty years before the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution to more than 75 years currently.  By the same
token, the average newborn American child today has a greater chance of
living to age 65 than the average newborn child of a nonindustrial
society has of living to age five.

In the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution, the process of
improvement was accompanied by the presence of coal dust in towns and
cities, which people willingly accepted as the by-product of not having
to freeze and of being able to have all the other advantages of an
industrial society.   Subsequent advances, in the form of electricity
and natural gas, have radically reduced this problem.  Those who seek
further advances along these lines should advocate the freedom of
development of atomic power, which emits no particulate matter of any
kind into the atmosphere.  Atomic power, however, is the form of power
most hated by the environmentalists.

Also essential for further improvements in cleanliness and health, and
or the long-term availability of natural resources, is the extension of
private ownership of the means of production, especially of land and
natural resources.  The incentive of private owners is to use their
property in ways that maximize its long-term value and, wherever
possible, to improve their property.  Consistent with this fact, one
should seek ways of extending the principle of private ownership to
lakes, rivers, beaches, and even to portions of the ocean.  Privately
owned lakes, rivers, and beaches would almost certainly be clean lakes,
rivers, and beaches.  Privately owned, electronically fenced ocean
ranches would guarantee abundant supplies of almost everything useful
that is found in or beneath the sea.  Certainly, the vast land holdings
of the United States government in the western states and in Alaska
should be privatized.

But what is most important in the present context, in which the
environmental movement is operating almost unopposed, is that anyone
who is afraid of becoming physically contaminated by exposure to one or
another alleged toxic chemical should take heed that he does not place
an indelible stain on his very existence through his exposure to the
deadly poison of the environmental movement.  This is what one is in
danger of doing by ingesting the propaganda of the environmental
movement and being guided by it.  I do not know of anything worse that
anyone can do, than having been born into the greatest material
civilization in the history of the world, now to take part in its
destruction by cooperation with the environmental movement, and thus be
a party to untold misery and death in the decades and generations to
come.

By the same token, there are few things better that one can do, than
having become aware of what is involved, take one's stand with the
values on which human life and well-being depend.  This is something
which, unfortunately, one must be prepared to do with few companions in
today's world.  The great majority of those who should be fighting for
human values--the professional intellectuals--either do not know enough
to do so, have become afraid to do so, or, still worse, have themselves
become the enemies of human values and are actively working on the side
of environmentalism.

The Treason of the Intellectuals

It is important to explain why there are so few intellectuals prepared
to fight environmentalism and why there are so many who are on its
side.

I believe that to an important extent the hatred of man and distrust of
reason displayed by the environmental movement is a psychological
projection of many contemporary intellectuals' self-hatred and distrust
of their own minds arising as the result of their having been
responsible for the destruction wrought by socialism.  As the parties
responsible for socialism, they have certainly been "a plague upon the
world," and if socialism had in fact represented reason and science, as
they continue to choose to believe, there would be grounds to distrust
reason and science.

In my judgment, the "green" movement of the environmentalists is merely
the old "red" movement of the communists and socialists shorn of its
veneer of science.  The only difference I see between the greens and
the reds is the superficial one of the specific reasons for which they
want to violate individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The
reds claimed that the individual could not be left free because the
result would be such things as "exploitation" and "monopoly."  The
greens claim that the individual cannot be left free because the result
will be such things as destruction of the ozone layer and global
warming.  Both claim that centralized government control over economic
activity is essential.  The reds wanted it for the alleged sake of
achieving human prosperity.  The greens want it for the alleged sake of
avoiding environmental damage.  In my view, environmentalism and
ecology are nothing but the intellectual death rattle of socialism in
the West, the final convulsion of a movement that only a few decades
ago eagerly looked forward to the results of paralyzing the actions of
individuals by means of "social engineering" and now seeks to paralyze
the actions of individuals by means of prohibiting engineering of any
kind.  The greens, I think, may be a cut below the reds, if that is
possible.

While the collapse of socialism is an important precipitating factor in
the rise of environmentalism, there are other, more fundamental causes
as well.

Environmentalism is the leading manifestation of the rising tide of
irrationalism that is engulfing our culture.  Over the last two
centuries, the reliability of reason as a means of knowledge has been
under a constant attack led by a series of philosophers from Immanuel
Kant to Bertrand Russell.  As a result, a growing loss of confidence in
reason has taken place.  As a further result, the philosophical status
of man as the being who is distinguished by the possession of reason
has been in decline.  In the last two generations, as the effects of
this process have more and more reached the general public, confidence
in the  reliability of reason, and the philosophical status of man,
have declined so far that now virtually no basis is any longer
recognized for a radical differentiation between man and animals.  This
is the explanation of the fact that the doctrine of St. Francis of
Assisi and the environmentalists concerning the equality between man
and animals is now accepted with virtually no opposition.

The readiness of people to accept the closely connected doctrine of
intrinsic value is also a consequence of the growing irrationalism.  An
"intrinsic value" is a value that one accepts without any reason,
without asking questions.  It is a "value" designed for people who do
what they are told and who do not think.  A rational value, in
contrast, is a value one accepts only on the basis of understanding how
it serves the self-evidently desirable ultimate end that is constituted
by one's own life and happiness.

The cultural decline of reason has created the growing hatred and
hostility on which environmentalism feeds, as well as the unreasoning
fears of its leaders and followers.  To the degree that people abandon
reason, they must feel terror before reality, because they have no way
of dealing with it other than reason.  By the same token, their
frustrations mount, since reason is their only means of solving
problems and achieving the results they want to achieve.  In addition,
the abandonment of reason leads to more and more suffering as the
result of others' irrationality, including their use of physical force.  Thus,
in the conditions of a collapse of rationality, frustrations and
feelings of hatred and hostility rapidly multiply, while cool judgment,
rational standards, and civilized behavior vanish.  In such a cultural
environment, monstrous ideologies appear and monsters in human form
emerge alongside them, ready to put them into practice.  The
environmental movement, of course, is just such a movement.

But if, because of these reasons, there are no longer many
intellectuals ready to take up the fight for human values--in essence,
for the value of the intellect, for man the rational being and for the
industrial civilization he has created and requires--then all the
greater is the credit for whoever is willing to stand up for these
values now and, in so doing, don the mantle of intellectual.

The Role of the New Intellectuals

There is certainly ample work for such "new intellectuals" to do.  At
one level, the work directly concerns the issue of environmentalism.

The American people must be made aware of what environmentalism.
actually stands for and of what they stand to lose, and have already
lost, as the result of its growing influence.  They must be made aware
of the environmental movement's

GRAPHIC: TE_01.TIF


responsibility for the energy crisis and the accompanying high price of
oil and oil products, which is the result of its systematic and highly
successful campaign against additional energy supplies.  They must be
made aware of its consequent responsibility for the enrichment of Arab
sheiks at the expense of the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of
people around the world, including many millions here in the United
States.  They must be made aware of its responsibility for the vastly
increased wealth, power, and influence of terrorist governments in the
Middle East, stemming from the high price of oil it has caused, and for
the resulting need to fight a war in the region.

The American people must be made aware of how the environmental
movement has steadily made life more difficult for them.  They must be
shown how, as the result of its existence, people have been prevented
from taking one necessary and relatively simple action after another,
such as building power plants and roads, extending airport runways, and
even establishing new garbage dumps.  They must be shown how the
history of the environmental movement is a history of destruction: the
destruction of the atomic power industry, of the Johns Manville
Company, of cranberry growers and apple growers, of sawmills and
logging companies, of paper mills, of metal smelters, of coal miners,
of steel mills, of tuna fishermen, of oil fields and oil refineries--to
name only those which come readily to mind.  They must be shown how the
environmental movement has been the cause of the wanton violation of
private property rights and thereby of untold thousands of acres of
land not being developed for the benefit of human beings, and thus of
countless homes and factories not being built.  They must be shown how
as the result of all the necessary actions it prohibits or makes more
expensive, the environmental movement has been a major cause of the
marked deterioration in the conditions in which many people now must
live their lives in the United States--that it is the cause of
families' earning less and having to pay more, and, as a result, being
deprived of the ability to own their own homes or even to get by at all
without having to work a good deal harder than used to be necessary.

In sum, the American people need to be shown how the actual nature of
the environmental movement is that of a virulent pest, consistently
coming between man and the work he must do to sustain and improve his
life.

If and when such understanding develops on the part of the American
people, it will be possible to accomplish the appropriate remedy.  This
would include the repeal of every law and regulation in any way tainted
by the doctrine of intrinsic value, such as the Endangered Species Act.  It
would also include the repeal of all legislation requiring the
banning of man-made chemicals merely because a statistical correlation
with cancer in laboratory animals can be established when the chemicals
are fed to the animals in massive, inherently destructive doses.  The
overriding purpose and nature of the remedy would be to break the
constricting grip of environmentalism and make it possible for man to
resume the increase in his productive powers in the United States in
the remaining years of this century and in the new century ahead.

The Philosophical Environment

In addition to all of this vital work, there is a second and even more
important level on which the new intellectuals must work.  This,
ironically enough, entails a form of cleaning up of the environment-
-the philosophical intellectual and cultural environment.  What the
cultural acceptance of a doctrine as irrational as environmentalism
makes clear is that the real problem of the industrialized world is not
"environmental pollution" but philosophical corruption.  The so-called
intellectual mainstream of the Western world has been fouled with a
whole array of intellectual toxins resulting from the undermining of
reason and the status of man, and which further contribute to this
deadly process.  Among them, besides environmentalism, are collectivism
in its various forms of Marxism, racism, nationalism, and feminism; and
cultural relativism, determinism, logical positivism, existentialism,
linguistic analysis, behaviorism, Freudianism, Keynesianism, and more.

These doctrines are intellectual toxins because they constitute a
systematic attack on one or more major aspects of the requirements of
human life and well-being.  Marxism results in the kind of disastrous
conditions now prevailing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  All
the varieties of collectivism deny the freedom and rationality of the
individual and attribute his ideas, character, and vital interests to
his membership in a collective; namely, his membership in an economic
class, racial group, nationality, or sex, as the case may be depending
on the specific variety of collectivism.  Because they view ideas as
determined by group membership, these doctrines deny the very
possibility of knowledge.  Their effect is the creation of conflict
between members of different groups: for example, between businessmen
and wage earners, blacks and whites, English speakers and French
speakers, men and women.

Determinism, the doctrine that man's actions are controlled by forces
beyond his power of choice, and existentialism, the philosophy that man
is trapped in a "human condition" of inescapable misery, lead people
not to make choices they could have made and which would have improved
their lives.  Cultural relativism denies the objective value of modern
civilization and thus undercuts both people's valuation of modern
civilization and their willingness to work hard to achieve personal
values in the context of it.  The doctrine blinds people to the
objective value of such marvelous advances as automobiles and electric
light, and thus prepares the ground for the sacrifice of modern
civilization to such nebulous and, by comparison, utterly trivial
values as "unpolluted air."

Logical positivism denies the possibility of knowing anything with
certainty about the real world.  Linguistic analysis regards the search
for truth as a trivial word game.  Behaviorism denies the existence of
consciousness.  Freudianism regards the conscious mind (the "Ego") as
surrounded by the warring forces of the unconscious mind in the form of
the "Id" and the "Superego," and thus as being incapable of exercising
substantial influence on the individual's behavior.   Keynesianism
regards wars, earthquakes, and pyramid building as sources of
prosperity.  It looks to peacetime government budget deficits and
inflation of the money supply as a good substitute for these allegedly
beneficial phenomena.  Its effects, as the present-day economy of the
United States bears witness, are the erosion of the buying power of
money, of saving and capital accumulation, and of credit.

These intellectual toxins can be seen bobbing up and down in the
"intellectual mainstream," just as raw sewage can be seen floating in a
dirty river.  Indeed, they fill the intellectual mainstream.
Virtually every college and university in the Western world is a
philosophical cesspool of these doctrines, in which intellectually
helpless students are immersed for several years and then turned loose
to contaminate the rest of society.  These irrationalist doctrines, and
others like them, are the philosophical substance of contemporary
liberal arts education.

Clearly, the most urgent task confronting the Western world, and the
new intellectuals who must lead it, is a philosophical and intellectual
cleanup.  Without it, Western civilization simply cannot survive.  It
will be killed by the poison of environmentalism.

To accomplish this cleanup, only the most powerful, industrial-
strength, philosophical and intellectual cleansing agents will do.
These cleansing agents are, above all, the writings of Ayn Rand and
Ludwig von Mises.  These two towering intellects are, respectively, the
leading advocates of reason and capitalism in the twentieth century.  A
philosophical-intellectual cleanup requires that all or most of their
writings be introduced into colleges and universities as an essential
part of the core curriculum, and that what is not included in the core
curriculum be included in the more advanced programs.  The
incorporation of the writings of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises into a
prominent place in the educational curriculum is the central goal that
everyone should work for who is concerned about his cultural
environment and the impact of that environment on his life and  well-
being.  Only after this goal is accomplished will there be any
possibility that colleges and universities will cease to be centers of
civilization-destroying intellectual disease.  Only after it is
accomplished on a large scale, at the leading colleges and
universities, can there be any possibility of the intellectual
mainstream someday being clean enough for rational people to drink from
its waters.

The Twenty-first Century should be the century when man begins the
colonization of the solar system, not a return to the Dark Ages.  Which
it will be will depend on the extent to which new intellectuals can
succeed in restoring to the cultural environment the values of reason
and capitalism.

These notes are furnished for the benefit of Freeman readers and do not
appear in the pamphlet.

1.  Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, p. 9.

2.  Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p.
176.

3.  Forbes, January 8, 1990, p. 303.

4.  Edward C. Krug, "Fish Story, " Policy Review, Number 59, Spring,     1990,
pp. 44-48.

5.  March 18,1989 broadcast of ABC's 20/20.  See also Bruce Ames, "What     Are
the Major Carcinogens in the Etiology of Human Cancer?" in
Important Advances in Oncology, 1989, V. T. DeVita, Jr., S. Helman,      and S.
A. Rosenberg, eds.  (New York: J. P. Lippincott, 1989), pp.       241-242.

6.  The New York Times, September 20, 1990, p. A15.

7.  Orange County Register, October 31, 1990, p. B15.

8.  McKibben, op. cit., p. 170.

9.  The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), p.  61.

This essay originally appeared and is still available as a pamphlet
published by The Jefferson School of Philosophy, Economics, and
Psychology, P.0. Box 2934, Laguna Hills, CA 92654.  Single copies
$4.25.  Quantity rates (sent to one address and for distribution, not
for resale): 2-49 copies $2.75 each; 50 or more copies, $1.00 each.

An earlier version of this essay was published under the title "Slaves
of Nature" in the Orange County Register on October 28 and November 4,
1990.  The essay also appears as the concluding essay in Rational
Reading on Environmental Concerns, edited by Jay Lehr (Van
Nostrand-Reinhold, 1992).