Stop your sobbing

Doomsayers like Al Gore and Jared Diamond aren't doing the environment much good. To save the earth, we need to stop blaming and start celebrating ourselves.

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

Read more: Al Gore, Environment, Opinion

Oct. 9, 2007 | Rachel Carson opened "Silent Spring," her 1962 polemic against chemical pesticides in general and DDT in particular, with a terrible prophecy: "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."

"Silent Spring" set the template for nearly a half century of environment writing: wrap the latest scientific research about an ecological calamity in a tragic narrative that conjures nostalgia for Nature while prophesying ever worse disasters to come unless human societies repent for their sins against Nature and work for a return to a harmonious relationship with the natural world.

Eco-tragedies are premised on the notion that humankind's survival depends on understanding that ecological crises are a consequence of human intrusions on Nature, and that humans must let go of their consumer, religious, and ideological fantasies and recognize where their true self-interest lies.

Grounded in a tradition of eco-tragedy begun by Carson and motivated by the lack of progress on the ecological crisis, environmental writers have produced a flood of high-profile books that take the tragic narrative of humankind's fall from Nature to new heights: Sir Martin Rees's 2003 "Our Final Hour," Richard Posner's 2004 "Catastrophe," Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 2004 "One with Nineveh," James Kunstler's 2005 "The Long Emergency," James Lovelock's 2006 "The Revenge of Gaia," and Al Gore's 2006 "An Inconvenient Truth," to name just a few.

For the most part, these environmentalist cautionary tales have had the opposite of their intended effect, provoking fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among readers and the lay public, not the rational embrace of environmental policies. Constantly surprised and angered when people fail to behave as environmentalists would like them to, environment writers complain that the public is irrational, in denial, or just plain foolish. They presume that the failure of the public to heed their warnings says something meaningful about human nature itself, attributing humanity's disregard for Nature to desires like the lust for power and concluding that, in the end, we are all little more than reactive apes, insufficiently evolved to take the long view and understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural systems on which we depend.

Kunstler begins "The Long Emergency" by quoting Carl Jung as saying, "People cannot stand too much reality." In fact, it was T.S. Eliot, not Jung, who said "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." But the attitude of such doomsayers recalls something Jung actually did say: "If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool."

Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in a quasi-authoritarian politics. Eco-tragic narratives diagnose human desire, aspiration, and striving to overcome the constraints of our world as illnesses to be cured or sins to be punished. They aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature as it is understood and interpreted by scientists as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity's future is a zero-sum proposition -- that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort, and modernity to go around. The story told by these eco-tragedies is not that humankind cannot stand too much reality but rather that Nature cannot stand too much humanity.

Carson begins "Silent Spring" by narrating a "Fable for Tomorrow," describing a bucolic American town "where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings." She imagines Nature to be something essentially harmonious and in balance. But long before there were humans, volcanoes erupted, asteroids hit Earth, and great extinctions occurred. Throughout the animal kingdom there is murder and gang rape, even among the much beloved and anthropomorphized dolphin. Indigenous peoples, for their part, cleared forests, set massive fires, and overhunted, massively altering their environments. They engaged in agriculture, war, cannibalism, and torture.

To imagine Nature as essentially harmonious is to ignore the obvious and overwhelming evidence of Nature's disharmony. To posit that human societies should model themselves after living systems that are characterized as Nature, as environmentalists often do, begs the question: which living systems? Even if the Earth heats up to such an extent that every last vestige of humankind disappears, there may still exist living systems, just not ones that can sustain us.

In the Book of Genesis, the Fall from Eden occurs because Adam and Eve eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In the environmentalist's telling of our fall, humans are being punished by Nature with ecological crises like global warming for our original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge. Our fall from Nature was triggered by our control of fire, the rise of agriculture, the birth of modern civilization, or by modern science itself -- which is ironic, given the privileged role the so-called natural sciences played in inventing the idea of a Nature as separate from humans in the first place.

The eco-tragedy narrative imagines humans as living in a fallen world where wildness no longer exists and a profound sadness pervades a dying Earth. The unstated aspiration is to return to a time when humans lived in harmony with their surroundings. That tragic narrative is tied to an apocalyptic vision of the future -- an uncanny parallel to humankind's Fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis and the end of the world in the final Book of Revelation.

In 1969, the microbiologist René Dubos won the Pulitzer Prize for a book calling for a new eco-religion based on the principle of harmony with nonhuman nature. "Whatever form this religion takes, it will have to be based on harmony with nature as well as man, instead of the drive to mastery," he wrote.

It is this contrast between living in harmony with Nature and mastering it that unites Carson and Dubos with virtually every strain of contemporary environmentalism. Environmentalists imagine that their values are in opposition to the Western philosophical tradition, which sees humans as separate from and superior to Nature. But rather than dissolving the distinction between humans and Nature, environmentalists reverse the hierarchy, arguing that humans are still separate from but subordinate to Nature.

This reversal is motivated by the view that our perfectly healthy and natural desire to control our environment is a sinful desecration of Nature. But it must be asked: can human societies exist without, in one way or another, controlling Nature? Isn't that what agriculture is all about? Virtually any attempt to alter one's surroundings -- whether by gathering wood to build a fire, constructing shelter, raising livestock, growing crops, or hunting and gathering -- is an effort to control Nature. Nor is doing so uniquely human: beavers build dams, ants farm aphids, and more than a few other animals use tools.

There is nothing wrong with human and nonhuman desires for control over the environment. Indeed, we wouldn't exist were it not for our ancestors' will to control. Saving the redwoods and banning DDT were no less acts of controlling Nature than were logging ancient forests or spraying toxic pesticides. The issue is not whether humans should control Nature but rather how humans should control natures -- nonhuman and human.

From beginning to end, we humans are as terrestrial as the ground on which we walk. We are neither a cancer on, nor the stewards for, planet Earth. We are neither destined to go extinct nor destined to live in harmony. Rather, we are the first species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve.

Next page: Environmentalists' fealty to science is no different from Michael Crichton's