Eco-Freak U

Within hours of finishing John Berlau’s book Eco-Freaks, I was about to duck into the metro out of the single-digit temperature outside when a couple of Ralph Nader’s student canvassers tried to talk to me, or anyone who would listen, about the environment. “Hey, where is the global warming?” I asked them.

“It affects different areas in different ways,” the young man answered. I guess that’s why they use the words “global” and “warming.”

Actually, many enviros have started using the phrase “climate change” to describe what happens when temperatures go down instead of up while these activists are still trying to ban SUVs. In Eco-Freaks, Berlau devotes some space to this controversy but he mostly focuses on past environmental scares that have become textbook mainstays while bearing more than a passing resemblance to urban legends.

“Is the earth warming?” Berlau asks. “Some studies say yes, but remember we have only had precise satellite measurements of surface temperature since the 1960s.”

“The recorded observations before then are of limited accuracy.”

Full disclosure: I had the pleasure of working with John in a previous life, i. e., my last job. Since his internship at the National Journalism Center ended more than a decade ago, he has written for a number of publications and served as a reporter for both Insight magazine and Investor’s Business Daily.

Before global warming became an issue, environmentalists managed to ban asbestos and DDT. As Berlau, now at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), relates, these scares did not have much science behind them either.

“Fire testing organizations such as the National Fire Protection Association have consistently given asbestos materials a zero flame-spread rating which means it has no ability to spread flame under any circumstances,” Berlau states. “Before asbestos was widely used, it was not uncommon for a fire in a school or theater to kill dozens, and sometimes hundreds of people.”

“After asbestos, these types of fires disappeared overnight.” As for the dangers of the rock-based retardant, as of this writing a federal court-appointed administrator is still throwing out asbestos claims from plaintiffs at some remove from the production of the product.

As with asbestos, so also with the once-dreaded DDT insecticide: absence has made the heart grow fonder for some unlikely advocates. “A petition calling for its widespread application to fight malaria was signed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, longtime fighter of apartheid in South Africa, and Roy Innis, founder of the prestigious U. S. civil rights group the Congress of Racial Equality,” Berlau reports. “It was also signed by hundreds of notables, including many respected doctors and scientists.”

“As the letter stresses, the spraying would only be indoors, not on the outside, where it would affect wildlife (if, and a big if [italic in original], it does affect wildlife).”

Berlau points out that not one human death has been associated with DDT. The alleged threat to wildlife comes largely from the largely hypothetical treatise Silent Spring, a “fable for tomorrow.”

By way of contrast, Berlau shows the result of what happened recently without DDT. “The mosquitoes spread malaria that killed humans and the West Nile virus that killed birds and other creatures as well,” writes Berlau. “Beetles and gypsy moths clear-cut the trees.”

“But in a sense, humans did have a role, through their lack of action to stop the ravages of nature. And by starting the misinformation campaign that led to the ban of insect-killer DDT, Rachel Carson played a major role in killing these birds, horses, people, and trees too.”

And how does the educational establishment treat the pioneer environmental activist? Why, by naming schools and college departments after her, of course.

Berlau is the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at CEI. He also offers an interesting take on the hurricane—Katrina—that decimated New Orleans.

Although critical of presidents of both parties that have held the White House in the past two decades, he shows how the green approach that the Clinton Administration took to flood control proved to be counterproductive, even literally disastrous.

The official who articulated this world view most strikingly, and was in a position to do something about it, was former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. “Instead of simply replacing the ruptured and damaged levees, I suggested, why not remove the levees, allowing the rivers to move naturally in their floodplains,” Babbitt wrote in a book published just before Katrina slammed the Big Easy.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.