NOVATOWNHALL

I first met John Berlau at Dulles Airport in January, 2007 - I think I got his interest with my swastika armband … or it could have been my Townhall.com ball cap - and he told me about his then-new book, Eco-Freaks.

[Note to the world: If you want Joe to comment on your book, you need to allow some serious lead time.]

I was preoccupied with other extra-curricular stuff, along with a very consuming day job, so it has taken this long for me to begin to post on the topic of environmental alarmism, about which Eco-Freaks should be required reading. The footnotes alone are worth the cost of the book. If not for the issue which crowded our consciousness here in Loudoun County the past couple years, this is the one I would have been most passionately involved in all along.

Eco-Freaks is an essential primer on the most damning moral and intellectual failure of the modern age. “Science” has been so throughly corrupted by the grant process that political correctness has trumped objective research and analysis. Tracing back to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an anti-human ideology has become normalized and institutionalized in popular culture, resulting in an outrageously negative - and wholly unnecessary - impact on mankind.

The topic is going to span over numerous posts at NVTH of which this is only the preamble.

Through a series of tragic vignettes, Berlau shows how radical environmentalism has undermined human safety on a massive scale. The results have been horrific. Let’s just look at the example of Hurricane Katrina and why a Category 3 storm caused such a catastrophe in New Orleans:

Because of environmental restrictions, state and local officials in charge of flood control were thwarted from building the structures that would have best protected New Orleans from storm surges and hurricanes…

…The philosophy that Obama and everyone else should be holding accountable for the destruction of Katrina is modern environmentalism, the tenets of which are enshrined in a series of federal laws that put “ecosystems” and every species of bug or rate above essential economic activity and even human life.

pp. 178, 181

Environmentalist lawsuits prevented the US Army Corps of Engineers from constructing “sea gates,” like those used in the Netherlands, in the channels connecting the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain, regardless of the fact that fish populations prosper around Netherlands’ gates.

Think for a second about what would happen if you were forced to allow your house and property to “go natural” for an extended length of time. Desirable foliage would be displaced by the less desirable, growth against your house would increase the moisture level to the point that rot would set in leading to encroachment by vermin which would thrive in this environment. Over time, all sorts of problems would appear such that you would not be able to walk on your property without the likelihood of insect bites or poison ivy. If you could not maintain your storm gutters and siding, water and wind would break down the external seal and you would be increasingly exposed to the elements of nature. Eventually, you would be living in a shack in the woods.

Writ large, this is where the environmental extremist movement wants to take us.

Why? Well, first we must acknowledge what Melanie Phillips noted as “the truly lamentable decline of science into ideological propaganda.” This, I believe, is largely driven by the fact that you can’t get grant money for new research unless the research is going to further the alarmist hysteria.

From the other side of the political spectrum is Alexander Cockburn:

Here in the West, the so-called ‘war on global warming’ is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy Indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; BA hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch. This kind of behaviour is demented…

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation - do you really want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.

One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.

But as is spelled out in Eco-Freaks, there is more to the story than career-threatening, money-grubbing political correctness:

Al Gore said in April 2006, “We have been blind to the fact that the human species is now having a crushing impact on the ecological system of the planet.”

p. 214

In other words, your property maintenance is unfair to the flora and fauna that also wish to exist there.

This blog post has only scratched the surface of the immense quilt of lies comprising environmental extremist ideology. The basic assumption of this ideology - that “nature” is good and humans are evil - is so patently ridiculous it’s a marvel that anyone buys into it. But the fact is almost EVERYONE buys into it to some extent, and this fact is frightening. It is an easy issue to fudge and obfuscate because “environmentalism” is such a broad concept. We should all oppose littering, for example. But there is a huge leap of logic required to go from saying “you should not pour oil down the storm drain” to saying “you should never cut down a tree.”

Needless to say, I will have much more to say on this topic. In the meantime, I strongly recommend everyone get a copy of Eco-Freaks. It is a quick read, and an excellent introduction to a topic that cuts to the heart of the insanity that passes for public policy in the modern world.

Be skeptical about what the mainstream media and “conventional wisdom” are telling us about how we should be tending our property - be very, very skeptical. Get a copy of Eco-Freaks, and pass it along.