Book Review

Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists, a Conservative Manifesto, by Peter Huber. Basic Books. 224 pages. $25 Hardcover

Reviewed by Jim Kunstler

In this remarkably snotty book, Forbes Magazine columnist Peter Huber argues against all public environmental action except conserving patches of wilderness a la Teddy Roosevelt (and for much the same reason: big animals are fun to shoot). If there are any credible points buried in this heap of sarcasm and facetiousness, it’s hard to tell because the author can’t resist saying the opposite of what he means, in the crude attempt to suffocate his adversaries in scorn. He comes off as something worse than an extremist: a kind of political mad-dog who has been chained up out in the sun too long.

Huber argues that virtually all modern ecological activism and policy have been not just a waste of time but have produced only negative results. DDT may have been tough on ospreys and robins, he says, but hey, we never really found out for sure if it hurt humans, so it was a mistake to stop using this humdinger of an insecticide. He maintains that all efforts at energy conservation have been a stupid fraud. Railroad trains "eat up real estate," he says, so we’re much better off with everybody driving an SUV solo down the freeway -- hello. . . ! Been to Atlanta lately? The arguments are so transparently mendacious and the logic so specious that it is shocking to learn from his dust-jacket bio that Huber was an MIT engineering prof and Harvard Law grad who clerked at the US Supreme Court.

Huber holds the environmental science of our time in unrelieved contempt, especially the statistical models used to forecast trends and outcomes in every ecological issue from global warming to species extinction. They’re all frauds, he says. Going back a few centuries to sneer at the foolishness of Malthus (who predicted that population would inevitably outstrip food supplies), Huber makes one of many astounding statements in his usual sarcastic tone: "Malthus didn’t believe government policies were needed to maintain poverty; human fecundity would suffice. But human ingenuity has proved him wrong." Oh, really? Does he follow the nightly news? Is he informed about the current conditions in sub-Saharan Africa: chaos, starvation, AIDs, genocide.

While Huber sneers at the squishy science of the "soft greens," he routinely presents his own unsupported assertions as facts -- no references, just his bumptious self-certainty. "Natural gas contains traces of radon, so a gas turbine releases more radiation in the atmosphere than a nuke," he writes. No citations. About food adulteration he says, ". . . the risks of cancer are finite, comparatively small, wholly ascertainable, and in significant degree controllable." Say what? Bovine growth hormone is great, he argues, because "[t]he benefits of eating less fat far outweigh any imaginable risks that hormone residues in meat might cause, especially since the best scientific opinion holds these minuscule residues are harmless." [Italics mine.] He doesn’t tell us who exactly "the best scientific opinion" is. This is just plain sloppy science writing, and inexcusable in someone attacking the rectitude of other science writers.

Huber also contradicts himself shamelessly when convenient. Having declared earlier that human technical ingenuity is boundless, he asserts later that employing solar cells to generate electricity is stupid because the current technology is so lame. Even within the limits of his own solipsistic reasoning, how can he not grant the possibility that solar cells might improve?

Huber characterizes his political position as "hard green" in opposition to his enemies who are "soft green." In the hard green world the only "tragedy of the commons" is that somebody (Garrett Hardin) thought up such a dumb idea in the first place, prompting government busybodies to blunder around trying to regulate the over-killing of codfish, redwood trees, and songbirds, while they trample everybody’s private property rights. In the hard green world the public interest barely exists -- tellingly and ironically it exists only in the set-aside wilderness areas where the public does not dwell. Elsewhere, the Godlike wisdom of the marketplace should be allowed to reign, and we can be confident that its beneficent invisible hands will unerringly look after the many problems arising out of industrial civilization.

Well, markets are indeed wonderful, dynamic agencies, but even their most revered cheerleaders, Ludwig Von Meises and Friedrich Hayek did not consider them infallible. Among the many concerns they present is the tendency for short term interest to persistently trump the needs of the future, and for individual greed to cancel out the interests of a community. These problems have been responsible for a great deal of the ideological mischief the past hundred years, and the humiliating defeat of one camp, the socialists, has left the other camp in a triumphal delirium that in Huber’s book resembles a classic case of the so-called victory disease. I suggest it is an illusion that these issues are settled for all time. But Huber’s philosophical position can be construed as little more than blind faith that the long term will take care of itself (and indeed, that scenario was laid out by one gadfly of the defeated left, economist John Maynard Keynes, who observed pithily and famously that "in the long run we are all dead"). Here’s Huber’s take on the long run in hard green style:

Can Huber possibly be serious or is this just more of his trademark sarcasm? It’s hard to tell because this burst of cynicism concludes a sub-chapter, and in my understanding of the writing craft it is a tactical error to wind up an argument by saying the opposite of what you really mean. People are apt to take it at face value. About the most one can bring to this is the observation that Huber apparently doesn’t know that blue whale is not a common ingredient in sushi. It certainly leads one to wonder what else he doesn’t know.

What amazes me most about Huber’s hard green world-view is that it seems to utterly lack any serious sense of consequence. Even within the arid terms of cost-benefit analysis, his conclusions are just plain weird. For instance, he’s vehemently against the organic farming movement because industrial-scale farming based on petroleum-derived inputs uses less land. Chemical pesticides are preferable, he says, to the natural biocides present in traditional crop species, because the man-made chemicals "can be washed off before the food is consumed." He gives no consideration at all to the well-documented, widespread destruction of soils by industrial-scale farming, to the loss of regional economic integrity in our total reliance on food grown far away, or on the loss of economic and cultural diversity that results when factory farming in a few corners of the nation puts small operators out of business everywhere else. In other words, he fails to acknowledge that agriculture is a culture -- and a culture in peril.

Huber seems unaware that other great civilizations have made fatal ecological blunders -- which can be described as over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns -- and vanished from the face of the earth. Who were the hard greens among the Mayans and what was their riff on technological miracles saving the day for them? The hard green point-of-view, with its sour jokiness disguising its spiritual cluelessness, allows no room for a tragic view of life. In hard green doctrine the distinction between the sacred and the profane is just another gag, at the expense of the saps who apprehend (as Wittgenstein put it) the astonishing fact that anything exists, and who think that we owe at least some gratitude to this world. Hard green is devoid of grace.

I have my own beefs with the mainstream environmental community (Huber’s "soft greens"). I fault their lack of attention to the design of the human habitat, namely the town and city, which has unfortunately aggravated the problems of suburban sprawl. Though I am a registered Democrat, I can imagine a conservative case for approaching ecologic problems differently than the Sierra Club crowd and their chums inside the Beltway are used to doing -- but this book ain’t it. In its relentlessly snide tone and disrespect for the basic rules of argument, it undermines the idea that conservatism is capable of being fair and intelligent. Sarcasm is a legitimate rhetorical tool, but it is hardly the only one, and Huber’s profligate use of it proves inordinately tiresome. From start to finish, Hard Green is unconvincing, to put it mildly.

The End

____________________________

James Howard Kunstler, the author of Home From Nowhere, is completing a book about cities.