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To be sure, the book authors are correct with regard to certain of the specific issues they discuss. But three basic views advanced in Henderson’s article are misguided. First, after citing a series of isolated “comforting” facts which Henderson admits are “inconclusive,” Henderson uncritically relates the position of one of the reviewed books that environmentalists are manufacturing crises to scare policymakers into trying to solve problems which have not been proven to exist. But the book’s authors are in effect arguing that one should wait until it can be proven scientifically that one has lung cancer to stop smoking. In fact, it is wise to take reasonable steps to lessen the threat of an environmental disaster if there is a significant risk it will occur. There is at a minimum a broad scientific consensus with regard to the problems that have been the focus of environmental concern (e.g., global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, pesticides, dioxin) that a substantial danger exists.
Finally, Henderson sets forth Rubin’s view that we should stop worrying about the environment as a whole in favor of discussing specific problems such as sulfur dioxide pollution in urban areas. But this ignores the unfortunate history of efforts to address specific problems that did not take account of the fact that problems are interrelated. One starts out by controlling air emissions of sulfur dioxide but then finds that the polluters have moved to where they can pollute the air in the suburbs (or Mexico) or have changed their industrial processes so that sulfur in some other unpleasant form is poured in the river. One soon decides that we must consider all of the problems created by the production process and ask whether it is really necessary to make so much of a thing whose production causes pollution in various forms. Looking for alternative ways to live comfortably without being destructive is not utopianism, it is prudence.
Hey, guys, I make my living talking to people and (mostly) believing and quoting what they say. After 17 years of this, I noticed environmentalists had told me a number of things that turned out to be false–and they didn’t seem to notice, or care. We haven’t had the food riots in the U.S. or mass famines elsewhere that Paul Ehrlich foretold; we haven’t run out of oil, even though The Limits to Growth gave us only 20 more years in 1972; a ten-year, $500-million federal study found that acid rain affects few lakes and at most one species of tree; U.S. (and Illinois) forests are growing in area and size, not declining. (If Mr. Starrs et al imagine that Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin are barren cutovers or sterile tree plantations, they need to get out camping more.)
