Green Crusade - Hardcover

Charles T. Rubin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029275253 ISBN 13: 9780029275252

Publisher: Free Press, 1994

Synopsis

Traces the evolution of environmentalism and demonstrates how the popular writings of a small group of influential writers and thinkers gave birth to the environmental movement

About this title

About the Author

Charles T. Rubin is associate professor of political science at Duquesne University.

Reviews

Since the publication more than 30 years ago of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring , most people have accepted the need to protect the environment. Yet, claims Rubin, a political science professor at Duquesne University, there is an alarming aspect to the environmental movement. Analyzing the major literature on the subject, he suggests a disquieting political agenda. He finds that an environmental utopia as envisioned by such leading writers in the field as Paul Ehrlich ( The Population Bomb ), Barry Commoner ( The Closing Circle ) and others would lead to a totalitarian state. He charges that Carson deliberately misrepresented some of her findings and that the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth was part of a PR campaign. He also examines the writings of those who have challenged environmental popularizers, including Julian Simon ( The Ultimate Resource ), James Lovelock ( Healing Gaia ) and Richard John Neuhaus ( In Defense of People ) . Rubin's argument that many environmentalists have failed to recognize the utopian and totalitarian character of their principles is engrossing and provocative.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Rubin (Political Science/Duquesne), a stinging, often overblown reevaluation of the environmental movement's seminal thinkers. Over the last 30 years, a sea change has taken place in the public's ``common sense'' about the environment, which Rubin attributes to a small group of influential writers and thinkers. But it seems not to have occurred to the author that people may have reacted equally to threats they could see (oil spills, smog) as to the theories of ``popularizers.'' His account is problematic, too, in its way of pairing authors who may not have explored the full implications of their work with others who have. While it may be appropriate to discuss together population-control advocates Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin or limited growth exponents the Club of Rome and E.F. Schumacher (of Small Is Beautiful fame), it is a disservice to the apolitical Rachel Carson to group her with socialist Barry Commoner. Rubin paints these advocates with a broad brush for their alleged ``careless use of science'' and for ``failing to recognize the utopian and totalitarian character of the principles they have relied on.'' Although Ehrlich and especially Hardin and the so-called ``deep ecology'' movement offer sometimes Orwellian prescriptions for problems, it seems absurd for Rubin to liken the rest of the internally fractious environmental movement to the lock-step ideologies of fascism and communism. His comparing of environmentalists to Prohibitionists is similarly misplaced: the utopian moralism of both groups has been a strain in American thinking since Puritan jeremiads and has marked such other movements as populism, progressivism, and feminism. Rubin is most convincing when showing that the environmentalists sound often less like Cassandras than like Chicken Littles (as in Ehrlich's prediction, for example, that the oceans would die by 1979). Overall, as injudicious in its use of evidence and as extreme in its rhetoric as were the thinkers it pummels. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rubin (political science, Duquesne Univ.) presents a history of environmental ideas written, he says, for a nonspecialized audience. Tracing a shift in social values from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to the contemporary deep ecology writers, Rubin explains how the environmental authors became popularizers and how they used or ignored science to present their causes. Rubin argues that each of these writers had or has a political agenda to transform human society, and he offers detailed, analytical criticism of their programs and arguments. His extensive notes will be of interest to the serious reader. Recommended for academic libraries and for public libraries with large environmental collections.
- Patricia Owens, Wabash Valley Coll., Mt. Carmel, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Critics jaundiced by green prophecies of doom and destruction--and they are proliferating (e.g., Ronald Bailey's Eco-Scam! )--usually attack along empirical lines. They argue the scientific merits of problem A, the costs of solution B. But to Rubin's mind, that approach omits the utopian outlook that tends to permeate definitions of problems requiring solutions. For example, before publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), DDT was a miracle pesticide, not an insidious poison. Nowadays, "interconnectedness" is so universally popularized that few doubt the concept any more; rather, debates rage over what palliatives will heal the tears in Gaia's fabric. Wondering how simple ecology turned into environmentalism, Rubin examines a half-dozen writers who became the catalysts of the change. Best-selling Carson was emulated by Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and E. F. Schumacher, and Rubin outlines their anticapitalist ethics as he critiques their logic. Rubin may strike readers as a scholar provocateur, but his analysis strikes some balance in the canon of environmental classics. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029275253
• ISBN 13: 9780029275252
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312