by Peter Huber
reviewed by Caroline Pufalt
Ozark Chapter Conservation Chair, ExCom
I became interested in reading this book due to a message I read about it on Sierra Club e–mail.The message was from Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, in which he alerted readers that they may see quotes or references to this book in anti–environmental editorials and gave some advice on how to respond. Mr. Pope’s advice on responding was that on just about any page one can find a quote so ridiculous as to cast well founded skepticism on the whole treatise. The quote he chose was:
“Cut down the last redwood for chopsticks, harpoon the last blue whale for sushi, and the additional mouths fed will nourish additional human brains which will soon invent ways to replace blubber with olestra and pine with plastic. Humanity can survive just fine in a planet–covering crypt of concrete and computers.”
An outrageous statement, but to be fair to Huber, taken a bit out of context. It is hard to worry about being fair to Huber, however, but more on that later. The plastic and concrete nightmare world described above is not one that Huber wants to live in, but is one that he believes is possible. What Huber does seem to want is a world similar to that described above but dotted with preserves of wilderness for human aesthetic enjoyment.
The book is subtitled Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, a Conservative Manifesto. I read it in hopes of understanding another perspective. I did not expect to agree with that perspective but it’s always good to be exposed to other viewpoints. However, I have rarely been so often tempted just to give up on a book as I was when reading this one. The book lacked coherency, made outrageous comparisons, is full of contradictions, gave very few references and poorly explained its few points. Huber, like most extremists, divides environmental viewpoints into two camps, hard and soft. He is so involved in his anti–soft ranting that he easily slips off topic and the reader is often left searching for some coherent point.
Huber places himself in the “hard green” camp, a tradition he claims back to Teddy Roosevelt.( Too bad T.R., cannot defend himself ) Huber claims that what is important for environmentalism today is simply to save land for wilderness, be it forests, mountains, seashores etc. He claims that this wildness has an aesthetic value and sometimes a practical value, such as watershed protection. OK so far, but Huber does not stop there. He argues for mining, using oil reserves, plane travel, against recycling and shows an amazing lack of appreciation for the services nature provides. He argues that these activities use less land surface and are therefore more “green” than soft alternatives.
Soft alternatives would be alternative energy such as solar or wind, which use land surface.
Recycling paper is counterproductive because we should be cutting and re–growing trees as way of using up carbon. Huber is also critical of “softgreen” for depending too much on computer models and micro–managing pollution. Pollution controls are best left to the markets and computer models are too uncertain and too likely to be interpreted pessimistically by “softies.”
But Huber has no difficulty making wildly optimistic projections based on what I’m not sure. He repeats some of the well worn predictions that with our brains and technology on our side, we humans can think, invent and with the aid of the free market, find our way out of any environmental problem. The current environmental “balance” is not the only one possible, nature is now “ at our feet,” we can do what we will. We can “invent” in the lab anything and more that is found in nature.
It is hard to over emphasize all the contradictions and highly selective examples used to support outlandish conclusions in this book. One of the worst is his claim that efficiency is not “green.” According to Huber when we make our refrigerators more efficient to save energy and fuel, we will just then be able to afford bigger refrigerators and will end up using more resources. Therefore, why make efficient appliances, cars etc.? On the other hand he claims that purchasing an SUV is efficient because it makes the purchaser feel wealthy and satisfied and that’s economic efficiency. He also points out more than once that it is more efficient to burn oil in a large central power plant than in a two–stroke lawn mower. This he uses as part of his argument for large power plants and not decentralized solutions such as solar or wind. At most it seems like an argument for electric mowers, or better yet, push mowers. But wait he also points out how inefficient “humanpower” is, we need to eat too much per unit of energy expended. Can anyone make sense of this?
Huber expects that most conservation can be accomplished through private efforts. Wealth brings the luxury of private preserves and easements etc. Where needed, the government can preserve larger wild spaces. He uses Yellowstone as an example of this. But nowhere does Huber show an appreciation of the principles of conservation biology. He refers to the hard green approach as Central Park on a large scale. From his point of view we do not have a responsibility to the evolution of the rest of the planet, only to ourselves.
He clearly states that his brand of conservation is not based on moral imperatives, just aesthetic and practical ones. He strongly rejects the concept that nonhuman life has “inherit value.” He claims that will only lead to placing nonhuman life at a par or above that of humans. It is in Huber’s discussion of “Ethics in a Green Lifeboat” that I really lost all respect for him. Suffice it to say that he compares “soft green” ethics with what he calls the two other major nonreligious movements of the 20th century, fascism and communism. When he goes on to criticize the public examination of Theodore Kacynski, the Unabomber’s writing, he concludes that “murder now can be green.” The whole chapter is a callous dismissal of many important issues.
Huber’s book seems like a confusing mess, or maybe I missed the point. But as I said earlier, it is hard to worry about being unfair to him. He spends so much time on being unfair to others. Early in Huber’s book he states his concern that we are spending too much effort trying to cleanup every superfund and extract every polluting particle from the air and not enough on saving wilderness. I’m sure many Sierrans also worry about how to balance and prioritize what we can do, but don’t expect Huber’s book to give you any advice on how to do it.