Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future - Softcover

Ehrlich, Paul R.; Ehrlich, Anne H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559634847 ISBN 13: 9781559634847

Verlag: Island Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Despite widespread public support for environmental protection, a backlash against environmental policies is developing. Fueled by outright distortions of fact and disregard for the methodology of science, this backlash appears as an outpouring of seemingly authoritative opinions by so-called experts in books, articles, and appearances on television and radio that greatly distort what is or is not known by environmental scientists. Through relentless repetition, the flood of anti-environmental sentiment has acquired an unfortunate aura of credibility, and is now threatening to undermine thirty years of progress in defining, understanding, and seeking solutions to global environmental problems.

In this hard-hitting and timely book, world-renowned scientists and writers Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich speak out against what they call the "brownlash." Brownlash rhetoric, created by public relations spokespersons and a few dissident scientists, is a deliberate misstatement of scientific findings designed to support an anti-environmental world view and political agenda. As such, it is deeply disturbing to environmental scientists across the country. The agenda of brownlash proponents is rarely revealed, and the confusion and distraction its rhetoric creates among policymakers and the public prolong an already difficult search for realistic and equitable solutions to global environmental problems.

In Betrayal of Science and Reason, the Ehrlichs explain clearly and with scientific objectivity the empirical findings behind environmental issues including population growth, desertification, food production, global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, and biodiversity loss. They systematically debunk revisionist "truths" such as:

• population growth does not cause environmental damage, and may even be beneficial
• humanity is on the verge of abolishing hunger; food scarcity is a local or regional problem and is not indicative of overpopulation
• there is no extinction crisis
• natural resources are superabundant, if not infinite
• global warming and acid rain are not serious threats to humanity
• stratospheric ozone depletion is a hoax
• risks posed by toxic substances are vastly exaggerated

The Ehrlichs counter the erroneous information and misrepresentation put forth by the brownlash, presenting accurate scientific information about current environmental threats that can be used to evaluate critically and respond to the commentary of the brownlash. They include important background material on how science works and provide extensive references to pertinent scientific literature. In addition, they discuss how scientists can speak out on matters of societal urgency yet retain scientific integrity and the support of the scientific community.

Betrayal of Science and Reason

is an eye-opening look at current environmental problems and the fundamental importance of the scientific process in solving them. It presents unique insight into the sources and implications of anti-environmental rhetoric, and provides readers with a valuable means of understanding and refuting the feel-good fables that constitute the brownlash.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Paul R. Ehrlich is a co-founder with Peter H. Raven of the field of co-evolution, and has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics, and genetics of natural butterfly populations. He has also been a pioneer in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation, and in raising issues of population, resources, and the environment as matters of public policy. Ehrlich is the author of The Population Bomb, and many other books, as well as hundreds of papers.

Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ehrlich has received several honorary degrees, the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club, the Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (given in lieu of a Nobel Prize in areas where the Nobel is not given), in 1993 the Volvo Environmental Prize, in 1994 the United Nations' Sasakawa Environment Prize, in 1995 the Heinz Award for the Environment, in 1998 the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, in 1999 the Blue Planet Prize, in 2001 the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.In addition to The Population Bomb, Ehrlich is the author of Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (Island Press, 2000) and co-author of The Work of Nature: How The Diversity Of Life Sustains Us (Island Press, 1998).With his wife Anne, he is the author of Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future (Island Press, 1996) and One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Island Press, 2004). His latest book with Anne is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment (Island Press, 2008).Paul R. Ehrlich received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas.

Anne H. Erlich is affiliated with Stanford's Biology Department and Center for Conservation Biology. She has served on the board of the Sierra Club and other conservation organizations, has coauthored ten books with her husband, and is a recipient of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

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Betrayal of Science and Reason

How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens our Future

By Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1996 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55963-484-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
CHAPTER 1 - A Personal Odyssey, 
CHAPTER 2 - "Wise Use" and Environmental Anti-Science, 
CHAPTER 3 - In Defense of Science, 
CHAPTER 4 - The Good News ... in Perspective, 
CHAPTER 5 - Fables about Population and Food, 
CHAPTER 6 - Fables about Non-living Resources, 
CHAPTER 7 - Biological Diversity and the Endangered Species Act, 
CHAPTER 8 - Fables about the Atmosphere and Climate, 
CHAPTER 9 - Fables about Toxic Substances, 
CHAPTER 10 - Fables about Economics and the Environment, 
CHAPTER 11 - Faulty Transmissions, 
CHAPTER 12 - How Can Good Science Become Good Policy?, 
CHAPTER 13 - One Planet, One Experiment, 
APPENDIX A - Brownlash Literature, 
APPENDIX B - The Scientific Consensus, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Personal Odyssey

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.... An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."

—Aldo Leopold, 1953

THE TIME HAS COME to write a book about efforts being made to minimize the seriousness of environmental problems. We call these attempts the "brownlash" because they help to fuel a backlash against "green" policies. The brownlash has been generated by a diverse group of individuals and organizations, doubtless often with differing motives and backgrounds. We classify them as brownlashers by what they say, not by who they are. With strong and appealing messages, they have successfully sowed seeds of doubt among journalists, policy makers, and the public at large about the reality and importance of such phenomena as overpopulation, global climate change, ozone depletion, and losses of biodiversity. In writing this book, we try to set the record straight with respect to environmental science and its proper interpretation. By exposing and refuting the misinformation disseminated by the brownlash, we hope to return to higher ground the crucial dialogue on how to sustain society's essential environmental services.

In addressing the brownlash, we feel we have come about full circle. We started out in the 1960s, joining forces with others to warn about the environmental damage being caused by the overexpanding human enterprise. For a while, the world responded, and substantial gains were made both in slowing some aspects of the damage and in educating the public about its significance. Now we and other environmental scientists find ourselves once again struggling to preserve those gains and to keep global environmental deterioration from escalating beyond repair.

Yet there is a key difference between then and now. In the 1960s, people were largely unaware of environmental issues; indeed, environmental science as a distinct discipline did not even exist. All that has changed. Human beings know enormously more about how their world works now than they did a mere half-century ago. Our own area of interest—ecology and evolutionary biology—has exploded in that period, revealing (among many other things) that interactions between human beings and their physical and biological environments are far more complex than imagined earlier. What has been discovered is both fascinating and disturbing—ranging from ways people have altered the atmosphere to the evolutionary origins of toxic compounds in plants. This new knowledge could help open the doors to a sustainable future in which human satisfaction could become greater and more widespread than at any time since the invention of agriculture.

Yet at the same time that brownlash activities are intensifying, the conclusions and predictions of concerned environmental scientists are being increasingly substantiated as more data are gathered and computer and analytic models are refined. Indeed, scientists from disciplines as diverse as physics, chemistry, geology, and molecular biology, including many Nobel laureates, now support the conclusions of their colleagues in environmental science, as do most scientific academies around the world.

Despite the evidence and deepening consensus among scientists, humanity seems to be engaged in a remarkable episode of folly. Folly—pursuing policies injurious to self-interest while being advised against them—is nothing new; it has plagued governments since their inception. What has changed through the ages is not the lack of wisdom in politics but rather the price to be paid for that lack. Despite a vastly enhanced understanding of our planet's life-support systems, humanity is continually assaulting them—degrading and destroying within a few generations the ecosystems that provide the very basis of civilization. All the world's nations are pursuing this course despite knowledge of its consequences being available and despite the warnings of many of the world's most distinguished scientists. And that folly is being encouraged and promoted by the individuals and organizations whose efforts we refer to collectively as the brownlash. The opinions and doctrines of the brownlash on the state of the environment and related subjects form the focus of chapters 5 through 10 of this book.

Our interest in environmental matters goes back many decades, to even before we met as students at the University of Kansas. As a teenager in New Jersey with a love for nature, Paul had seen butterfly habitat being replaced by housing developments and often found it impossible to raise caterpillars on local plants because of overspraying with pesticides. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he read the now-classic books Our Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn and Road to Survival by William Vogt, which provided a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist. Paul's first job as a graduate student at Kansas was studying the evolution of DDT resistance in fruit flies, and the misuse of pesticides was a hot topic among his evolutionist friends. Anne was an art and French major who also was fascinated with nature and science. As a child, she was always more interested in geography, wildflowers, and airplanes than in dolls. She too had read and was influenced by Osborn's book as an undergraduate.

At the time we met, World War II was still the defining event of our lives and a great source of mutual interest. Both of us remember asking our parents whether the newspapers would still be published daily after the war was over; we couldn't imagine there would be enough other news to fill them. We first got together in the student union of the University of Kansas over a bridge game and a discussion of the battle of Dunkirk, which had taken place fourteen years earlier. Dunkirk is a seaport in northern France that in May 1940 was the site of a successful evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) after the collapse of the French army. Threatened with annihilation by encroaching German forces, the BEF evacuation was nothing short of a miracle, accomplished at the last minute by a mixed fleet of naval vessels and small boats.

Our conversation could have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1559634847
• ISBN 13: 9781559634847
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 348
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar