Playing God With the Cosmos : A MOMENT ON EARTH: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, <i> By Gregg Easterbrook (Viking: $27.95; 698 pp.)</i>
In the heart of rush hour on the Los Angeles freeway, carefree commuters race well above the speed limit. For the 200th straight day, the San Gabriel Mountains and Hollywood Hills glisten in the crystal-clear air for all to see. Picnickers wash down their food with fresh water from city park ponds and streams, careful not to disturb the throng of mountain lions and spotted owls.
If you buy this fool’s paradise, then “A Moment on Earth” makes the perfect gift for that someone special on your Earth Day list.
Few environmental problems are too big or small for Gregg Easterbrook, a contributor to Newsweek and the New Republic, to brush aside. From global warming to overpopulation, he sets out to substitute “fashionable doomsaying” about “emergencies that do not exist” with his own brand of “ecorealism,” based on the dubious proposition that “the Western world today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has ever known; perhaps the greatest that Earth has known.” Seven hundred long pages later, and supplemented by heavily debated articles in the New Yorker and elsewhere, this optimism sinks beneath a landfill of falsehoods and sophistries.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” Too often, Easterbrook focuses on only the shades of truth that reinforce his predetermined conclusions. A boosterism tour by a nuclear plant manager persuades him to give that form of energy a clean bill of health. On choreographed walks through Northwestern tree plantations, the logging industry’s hired guns earn his respect as tree-growing people, while he overlooks such horrors as the 48-square-mile desert Weyerhaeuser created in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Easterbrook never even bothers to venture into old growth forests to contrast Big Timber’s young telephone poles with nature’s centuries-old giants.
He’s clearly evidence-challenged. A typical passage, for instance, on the improvement of air quality is titled “Daddy, What Was Smog?” If father lives in one of the nation’s dirtiest cities, it may be what will kill him, judging from a raft of studies, the latest and largest of which shows that airborne particles from automobiles and smokestacks can boost the risk of premature death by more than 15%. Time and again, Easterbrook expects readers to take his word for it that the leading experts are all wet.
Even in one case in which he leans on expert opinion, he does so dishonestly. Over a year ago, in a New Republic cover story on the spotted owl, Easterbrook quoted “biodiversity expert” David Wilcove of the Environmental Defense Fund to the effect that, because more spotted owls had been found than expected, the species was in better shape than once imagined. “He omitted the second part of my comment,” Wilcove told me. “All indications are that the owl is not surviving. I know of no competent scientist who would claim otherwise.” Wilcove and other authorities fired off letters to the New Republic to set the record straight, a number of which were published. The magazine--as a matter of course--forwarded all the letters to the writer. Evidently, he chose not to let the facts interfere with an argument whose novelty derives from its inaccuracy. The article, including Wilcove’s erroneous quote, is printed virtually verbatim in his book.
The book’s inherent contradiction undermines its central thesis. Easterbrook lists the multitude of birds that have survived since the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” 35 years ago to prove how off-base she was. But her predictions didn’t come true precisely because society heeded her warning to ban DDT, the deadly pesticide. If so many environmental initiatives look wise in retrospect, as Easterbrook concedes, then it’s disingenuous for him to be ranting about current “alarmism.” He fails to explain why most of today’s environmental proposals won’t strike future generations as equally prescient. Moreover, by roundly dismissing Carson, whose exhaustive and impartial scientific research Easterbrook would do well to emulate (particularly since his book’s only blurb compares it to her classic), the author demonstrates that he is more impressed by the sound of his own honking in polemical traffic than by the sincerity of objective reasoning.
The moment he opens his book proclaiming that “there is no fundamental conflict between the artificial and natural,” Easterbrook confirms that he can’t tell the forest from the trees. Virtually anything growing outdoors, including the lawns of the Washington suburb where he lives, constitutes nature to him. Missing through most of the book is the concept of ecosystem, or the intricate web of indigenous organisms constituting an environment. Spouting misleading statistics on the high percentage of “forested” acres on earth, he confuses woods, a bunch of trees, with the native vegetation and wildlife that man has wiped out in a few short centuries. How else can Easterbrook lump together this nation’s prototypal pristine wilderness and Europe’s sterile pastoral landscapes?
The book’s original subtitle, “Why Nature Needs Us,” says it all. The earth’s despoilers, according to his tortured moral equivalence, have nothing on nature. Since petroleum is a “naturally occurring product” seeping through the earth, Easterbrook exonerates Exxon for dumping 11 million gallons of concentrated crude into the pure Prince William Sound. The great dam builders who’ve helped wipe out wild fish runs “are no different in principle from the beaver that floods a meadow habitat when it dams a stream.” U.S. industry contributed merely 40% to acid rain in 1991, the rest came from a volcano.
This man celebrates the population explosion as a sign of nature’s renewal. In fact, it represents the tragic loss of predators’ habitat. The odd coyote or cougar is in your back yard because you’re in his. Regardless, Easterbrook evinces scant concern about the fate of species “that for whatever reasons lacked evolutionary preparation to defend themselves against the sort of environmental pressures caused by intellect.” By the same token, if humans possess the intelligence to drive defenseless creatures into oblivion, they ought to have the necessary smarts and compassion to act as their custodians as well. To define extinction as “an entirely human judgment” springing from the “natural condition” gives people license to act, as Easterbrook might put it, like animals.
The author’s need for a villain to propel his narrative clouds his political judgments. If conservationists wielded half the diabolical power he confers on them, North America would pretty much look as it did the day Columbus arrived. Lawmakers oppose any part of the green agenda at their own peril, Easterbrook insists, because environmentalists enjoy the sort of access to local and federal government “of which some business leaders dream.” Easterbrook must have been out of the country since conservatives in Congress, in lock step with industry, began rolling back decades of environmental laws.
The book’s best chapters, on energy, present the latest scientific breakthroughs in solar and other renewables. His technocratic utopia, however, soon goes awry. A massive network of space mirrors would “banish darkness from the face of the earth,” fostering biological growth and lowering energy use for artificial lighting. Further ecological meddling would alter DNA codes to stop animals from preying and people from fighting. Above all, Easterbrook dangles the promise of eternal life by hooking up a person’s “patterns of consciousness” to an “electronic support apparatus.” The prospect of “full spiritual awareness (with) new emotions and new friendships . . . only as mental rather than physical beings” is creepy enough to drive me to the nearest church.
Perhaps to allay fear of his science fiction universe, Easterbrook drumbeats for the “Indian revival and the antimaterialist life.” But his knowledge of Native American concepts appears to come from “Dances With Wolves.” Native Americans would surely dock their paleface brother PC merit points for referring to them as the “red people.” Deeper down, they would recoil from his invitation to join him in playing god with the cosmos, while robbing it of its ineffable beauty and wonder.