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Title: Hard Green : Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (A Conservative Manifesto) by Peter W. Huber, Peter Huber ISBN: 0-465-03112-9 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.78 (46 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Unacceptable
Comment: Since everything is political, all books which are not sufficiently politically correct remain frivolous to the cause and, therefore, should and eventually will be suppressed. Why can't you Americans submit to the loving power of the community? Why can't you embrace the coming socialist order? You will obey!
Rating: 1
Summary: Not Very Good
Comment: This book is just cynical rambling. It reads like a very, very long editorial. There really is no value to this book. Huber may have some interesting ideas, but they are not truly explored in detail or with examples. In fact, most of the book is just attacking what he calls radical, ignorant environmentalists. His manifesto at the back of the book are simply summaries of conservative envionrmentalist ideals. If you are doing any kind of research, skip it. This will not help you. If you just want to read a representive of conservative, right wing environmentalism, this will introduce you to some ideas, but it really is just garbage. I suggest you pick up an older text called Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray. It presents a stronger, more in depth argument without the cynical attitude.
Rating: 3
Summary: as reviewed in Environmental History, Jan. 2002
Comment: Since the mid-1970s there has been a movement to second-guess modern environmentalism. A recent book that makes extensive use of history in its critique is by Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes regular columns for Forbes Magazine.
The title Hard Green comes from a basic distinction Huber makes between "hard green" and "soft green." Huber argues that environmentalism was invented by Teddy Roosevelt, who when
using the term "conservation" really meant "environmental policy." T.R. and his contemporaries had seen the loss of natural environments and the depletion of natural resources, and they experienced it as an aesthetic loss. This is hard green. Hard greens believe the only real scarcity results from loss of wilderness. Since humans live on the surface of the planet, conserving the surface is what counts, and human needs should be provided not by exploiting the surface but by mining materials from beneath the surface.
According to Huber, T.R.'s environmentalism was complete; nothing needed to be added. But then, according to Huber, there arose a new environmentalism in the late 1970s that is concerned
with invisible threats. This is soft green. Soft greens see threats in phenomena that are highly dispersed or distant in time, phenomena that can only be found by computer modeling. Soft greens follow the Precautionary Principle. They assume that if high doses of a substance are harmful, low doses must be harmful too.
However well intentioned it is, Huber argues, soft is not truly green, for it lacks a sense of proportion. Soft green programs are prescriptive and complex and must be administered by large bureaucracies. Soft green computer models over-predict harms. Soft green economic theories are unrealistic and conjectural. Soft green remedies, which spend resources to redress imaginary harms, do not in the end conserve wilderness; to the contrary, they reduce wealth, which is what truly produces green. Thus, ironically, soft green programs ultimately produce environmental degradation. Huber considers soft green morally corrupt, likening it to communism.
The hard green manifesto is to save the environment from the softs. In other words, the distinction Huber's makes is between 'right green' and 'wrong green.'
One of the pleasures in reading Hard Green is keeping up with Huber's hard-driving intellect. Huber offers very perceptive critiques of classic environmental theories, including Malthus'
population hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, and the theory of externalities. Huber argues that these doctrines err, first by not recognizing that nature repairs itself, and second by not considering human adaptation through market processes. For these reasons, Huber argues, the projected environmental disasters have not occurred and will not in the future.
But Hard Green also contains unsettling discrepancies. For example, Huber presents the hard/soft distinction as a clean differentiation between traditional conservation and modern environmentalism. But this creates difficulty in knowing how to address modern environmental problems such as air pollution. Modern air pollution problems are categorically distinct in character from those that were recognized before the mid-20th Century. How does the hard green philosophy deal with modern air pollution? Not very well, actually. While Huber asserts that hard greens are concerned about pollution, he notes that their concern runs only to the aesthetics of pollution. That is, the reason pollution is unacceptable is that it is ugly. It also follows, taking his premise out to its logical extension, that unseen substances must be harmless. Thus, a hard green would be concerned about a visible smoke nuisance but not the toxicological effects of smoke's chemical constituents. Nor would a hard green be concerned about lead exhausted from leaded gasoline, toxic industrial emissions, or exposure to radiation, all of which have toxic properties that are not visible. All of these implications contradict what we have learned over the last fifty years.
To rescue the hard green concept from the observation that it is inapplicable to modern environmental problems, Huber admits that unseen substances might be harmful. But his rescue effort only digs itself deeper by arguing in addition that since one cannot know which substances are the harmful ones nothing should be done about them as a class and that their harm will be mitigated by dilution.
The only consistent thread running through this set of arguments is Huber's denial that modern environmental problems should be addressed as such. Taken literally, Huber's argument defines
them into nonexistence. Indeed, one gets the sense that since he doesn't like the remedies for modern environmental problems he has to deny their existence so that the remedies won't be
necessary. Defining away modern environmental problems makes it unnecessary to address the practical questions associated with them: how to determine the extent of such hazards? how to assign responsibilities? who shall be liable for breach of a responsibility? With modern environmental problems defined into non-existence, early 20th Century conservation approaches are all that is required.
And so, when one plays out Huber's argument one finds it difficult to accept for two fundamental reasons: (1) that modern environmental problems are categorically different in nature from early 20th Century conservation, and (2) that in consequence T.R. couldn't have meant "environmental policy" when he said "conservation" because the kind of problems that gave rise to environmental policy as we know the term now had not occurred yet. Thus, it is an anachronism for Huber to call T.R. an "environmentalist," at least as we use the term now, and that mistake leads to unwarranted inferences.
In all, Hard Green is a provocative work that because of its persistent application of central ideas to all manner of policy questions could become, as touted, a conservative manifesto. But
the historian is challenged to examine the quality of the factual premises upon which the whole construct is based.
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Title: Hoodwinking the Nation by Julian Lincoln Simon ISBN: 1560004347 Publisher: Transaction Pub Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist by Gordon K. Durnil ISBN: 0253214998 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: 15 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Facts, Not Fear: Teaching Children About the Environment by Michael Sanera, Jane S. Shaw ISBN: 0895262932 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 046508138X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 26 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: Man and Nature (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classic) by George Perkins Marsh, David Lowenthal, William Cronon ISBN: 0295983167 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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