I became a sceptic in 1994-5 when, appalled at the damage humans were doing to the coral reef ecosystems, I went back to university to do an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science as a first step towards doing post-graduate research at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine Science (now of Atmospheric Science as well - can't guess why) located near Key Biscayne, where I lived at the time.
Once exposed to the full range of ecological set texts, it did not take long to see that most of the authors had an agenda that went a long way beyond ecology. The most significant vectors seemed to be Paul "Population Bomb" Ehrlich and David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, whose shared and deeply misanthropic world-view had infected environmentalism to a horrifying degree.
Perhaps more horrifying was that the counter-arguments of Julian Simon had failed to gain traction in the academic milieu, despite the fact that the doomsday predictions made in Population Bomb (1968) had proved false, and the optimistic predictions in Simon's The Ultimate Resource (1981) correct. Just before I began my studies the founder of the Wise Use movement, Ronald Bailey, published Eco-Scam (1993), which exposed the scientific shoddiness of Ehrlich et al, also without achieving academic resonance.*
The core of Ehrlich's argument was a revival of Malthus's 1798 argument that since population increased geometrically and food production only mathematically, human population must crash. Ehrlich confidently predicted (in the 60s - it was edited out of later editions) that:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.Because it was obvious that Ehrlich and Co. were really selling fear, I dubbed their followers eek!-o-freaks. It did not require a grounding in science to pick apart their texts. A basic knowledge of history and a minimal grasp of logic - with regard even to their internal arguments - was sufficient.
Despite this, I found that the Brower/Ehrlich agenda had taken over not only the Biology faculty, the parent of the Environmental Science degree, but also the soft sciences en masse. A bizarre add-on was that Geography faculties across the USA, which for some reason had become dominated by avowed Marxists, were among the most fanatical eek!-o-freaks of all. I was very slow to appreciate the significance of this.
My first explanation for the phenomenon - in accordance with the time-honoured protocol of following the money - was that at a time when state-funded US university budgets were under pressure following frantic over-expansion during the 50s, 60s and 70s, environmentalism's demonstrated ability to loosen the political purse-strings to the extent of funding whole new departments was manna from academic heaven.
I tried to aim off for my intellectual snobbery (a First at Cambridge will do that to you) and to cultivate humility as one forced to specialise in "Arts" by the British educational system, frustrating my youthful interest in biological science. But I could not indefinitely deny the fact that most of the faculty I got to know (I was older than many of them) had quite mediocre minds and seemed to have either drifted into academia or else to have lost whatever intellectual enthusiasm first drew them to it.
I did not at that time appreciate the significance of academic tenure, and the fact that promotion had slowed to a crawl because the boomer generation had scooped the pool during the years of expansion and was a long way from retiring. What I did observe was that untenured and miserably paid Teaching Assistants were doing most of the teaching, and that they were so frantic to gain good exam results and favourable student assessments that they frankly cheated by giving us pre-exam briefings which amounted to answer sheets.
It was very noticeable, also, that the environmental courses were much easier even than the introductory courses to Geology, Statistics and Economics, even though these were pitched rather lower than the old "A" level in Britain. My three-year degree, which I abandoned after one year requiring only one more credit, would have been, I estimated, something like a General Science "A" level, had such a qualification existed.
Finally, nobody in any branch of the university could fail to be influenced by a nation-wide student association seemingly inspired by Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, the book Al Gore had published in 1992 when he was seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidential election of that year. He lost to Clinton, who made him his vice-president. Call me cynical, but the appearance of an apparently well-funded "grass roots" organization devoted to Gore's frankly totalitarian agenda and his ability to influence the federal budget did not strike me as being a coincidence.
All told, my year back at "school" left me completely disillusioned with American environmentalism, but under the false impression that it was only a storm in the admittedly rather large tea-cup of American academia, which had already produced the absurdities of "political correctness", neither of which I expected to spread to the broader society. Like the Trotskyist and Maoist posers I had found so amusing at Cambridge, I expected the earnest young eek!-o-freaks to grow out of it once they came in contact with the real world.
God knows I have frequently erred on the side of assuming common sense will prevail; but never so greatly as I did when I dismissed the entire eek!-o-freak phenomenon as something that would collapse from the weight of its glaringly apparent contradictions.
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