From a former environmentalist teacher, now a conservationist steward

books:


	• The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know ... Iain Murray Regnery Publishing, 2008 - 354 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

the really inconvenient truths

The Author makes very sound arguments as to the underlying reasons liberals have such an intense disdain for anything that is contrary to their position. When real truth is held up and given a fair stage onto which to expound its arguments, honest logic prevails. After all real truth is meant to set us free, and any censorship of that or intentional manipulation of such should sour any reader association to that element. The author has done us all a great service by letting us have a peek at what really motivates the liberal mentality

Jeanne

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From a former environmentalist teacher, now a conservationist steward

I once proudly called myself an environmentalist. Now I am a conservationist and a steward.

I believe some wild spaces should be saved. I recycle (A lot!). I coordinate my school's paper recycling program. I own several of those little flourescent bulbs and I use them every day. I don't spray chemicals all over my yard. I don't dump motor oil down the drain. I pick up garbage when I walk the dog. I go camping. I go to the Earth Day celebration in downtown Indianapolis because it's a great place to get information on clean-up events and they give away free trees! I also love it when they assume that I must be an ultra-liberal just to be there!

Now that I've said all of this, let me say that I am not an environmentalist. I used to be. Way back when, when I first started teaching, I showed movies to my kids in world geography that said the world as we know it is going to end by the year 2000. Mass flooding, all of the fish dead, mass starvation, etc. They were older versions of the "Inconvenient Truth" that featured Hollywood stars and quoted heavily from Gore's "Earth in the Balance".

I am now embarrassed by all of that.

Why? Because I fell for the hype and did not do simple things like check sources and see if what I was being told was backed up by other testimony. Sometimes, simple facts get in the way (like Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" book predictions never quite came true, like those predictions in the videos I showed to my class) and make it hard to follow that line of reasoning any longer.

So, what are the 7 environmental catastrophes:

1. DDT & Malaria in Africa
2. Ethanol as fuel
3. The "Pill" and its effect on fish downstream from water treatment plants.
4. The burning of Yellowstone and other National lands
5. The Cuyahoga River burning
6. The Endangered Species Act "Shoot, Shovel and Shut up!"
7. The Aral Sea

Positives:

This book is extremely well-written and approachable. It is also well-documented with more than 300 footnotes.

His commentary on DDT & Malaria is not only well thought out, but correctly placed as the first disaster since it causes around 1 Million deaths per year. He does not deny that DDT can have an affect on large birds, but he points out that it was not the use of DDT that caused it, but rather the mis-use of it. DDT is effective in small doses and does not need multiple applications to control bug populations. The multiple applications is a mis-use that makes it dangerous for birds (although it begs the question: Is any bird species worth 1 million lives every year - we are now up to nearly 40 million dead due to malaria carried by mosquitos). It does not cause human birth defects as Rachel "Silent Spring" Carson suggested. He skewers her research. Why it is still held up with pride as the start of the modern environmental movement is a mystery to me.

His commentary on Al Gore (do as I say, not as I do) and what he characterizes as the Church of Eco-Paganism are brilliant. He builds on Michael Crichton's commentary along the same lines and calls it a form of eco-Lutheranism (not to insult Lutherans - I am one and thought it was brilliant) since it is based on "Not one works, but on Faith alone," which is why the high priest of the movement, Al Gore, can use more than 20 times the electricity of the average Tennessean, own 2 more homes and jet around the world while telling us to cut back - he has the Faith!

The commentary on the Endangered Species Act was strong and largely built on an essay by the author of Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt. It studies the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act in which some people kill endangered species or destroy their habitats so they don't lose their property rights to a series of federal mandates.

Negatives:

His commentary on ethanol is strong, but goes overboard. His math sometimes does not make sense. He claims (correctly, I'm pretty sure) that all of the gasoline must be 10% ethanol. A few pages later he notes that if this were to happen an extra 55 million acres of corn would have to be planted. Well, we're already doing it. He also cites sources that claim we'd have to clear cut forests to plant all of this corn. I live in the cornbelt (Indiana) and I grew up on the farm. Every farmer has fields that are devoted to hay, straw or pastureland that will be converted to fields before we start clearing forests. Plus, increased yields (an achievement Murray points out in this chapter) will make up some of the difference as well.

The Aral Sea disaster (it was drained to provide water to meet Soviet cotton crop targets) is awful, but can only loosely be placed at the feet of environmentalists. He cites it as an example of poor choices of central planning and a cautionary tale to central planning schemes like Kyoto or carbon credits, but this is a loose association at best.

So, in sum, this is a pleasure to read. Well-cited, but not a perfect book.

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Skewers the paradigms of the liberal environmental fascist movement

Iain Murray well-written book skewers the fundamental principles of the radical left environmental movement, and does it very artfully. Clearly, this is a compelling book which mastefully states the case of the failures of the environmental movement, and their `liberal fascistic" approach to society.

Murray shows at the very beginning that the environmental movement focuses on (1) identifying a cause and laws requiring immediate passage, (2) creating an apocalyptic scenario, (3) claiming a threat to children, (4) donning the mantle of science while dismissing any (and all) scientific evidence that contradicts their position (and cause), (5) creating a clamor that rules the debate, and (6) defending ruthlessly all measures. Basically the movement is no different than leninism, communism, and nazi-ism for openers. It is the blue print for totalitarianism and I concur with Murray that totalitarian control is the goal of the environmental movement.

The following quote caught my eye as a scientist (geology) and as a former state Sea Grant director. "In a world of increasingly devoid of moral authority, the supposed impartiality of science provides a seemingly objective source of authority" (P. 51-52). That authority is a major threat to the environmental movement.

In my experience, the principles and methodology of science have been under attack from several quarters during the past 25 years. In Europe, university scientists who attain the rank of "professor" are asked, now-a-days, to spend their time serving on government panels so "science has a seat at the table". It means time away from teaching and research. Classes are taught by junior faculty with the "professor" making what are tantamount to guest appearances in classes in his/her area of expertise. More and more of their research is handled by graduate students with minimal supervision. Meanwhile, others at "the table" in these government panels also have demands and thus place science in the untenable position of moving from its impartiality (It's called conflict of interest).

I saw this first hand as a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at the Vrije University of Amsterdam in 1989. Since then, it has only gotten worse.

As a state Sea Grant director, I observed some of this first hand also. Scientific FACTS were denigrated by environmental activists because they were inconvenient and stood in the way of achieving environmental goals. Those goals normally did not consider the consequences of their actions including economic consequences for the working class and the working poor. Hence the affluence, elitism, and racism of this movement. One rarely saw minorities or working class people at meetings called or promoted by environmental activists, for instance.

Murray's book is replete with examples of environmentalism gone wrong that illustrate this point persuasively. The banning of DDT has caused a devastating INCREASE of malaria in Africa (a form of environmental racism?). The current mandates to manufacture ethanol has had severe consequences for the global food supply. The development of certain pharmaceuticals, including birth control pills, has lead to deformities in fish as these pharmaceuticals are excreted from the human body into waste water discharge points where fish habitats occur. The misplaced protection of some "endangered species" has hurt economic development and progress when studies show many of these species were hardly threatened (but some were; however, no retraction of the endangered species from the list of protected animals was implemented after their populations were restored to well above acceptable levels).

So what's in store if the environmental movement takes over? Just visit the Aral Sea in the Former Soviet Union. This is a classic case of central environmental planning going from worse to disastrous. This chapter should be required reading for all citizens.

The bottom line of consequences was well stated by Murray. He stated "Liberal environmentalism, with its focus on box-checking rules, preference for words over substance, and its obsession with punishment of the guilty, has on too many occasions failed to prevent environmental damage, and in the meantime has harmed the economy and the humans whose well-being the economy represents" (p. 296). That, in a nutshell, is what the environmental movement has wrought. We should be grateful to Murray for stating it so eloquently.

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The really inconvenient truths

points out that are unintended consequences as a result of acts done by the elitist

Tree Farmer Perspective

I bought the book after seeing a C-Span discussion by Iain Murray. I am a tree farmer and retired engineer trying to make practical sense of all the attention being given human influence on global warming and offers to pay me for carbon being sequestered in my growing trees. Murray provides both a framework for understanding the extremes of the public debate and examples of unintended consequences of prior policies. I recommend the book to anyone attempting to understand the scope and ramifications of the activist environmentalism movement. I gave four rather than five stars because there are a few subjective observations (that I tend to agree with) that are also extreme and tend to make it more difficult to have a rational discussion of the issues.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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