EcoScam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. - book reviews

National Review, April 12, 1993 by Angelo M. Codevilla

EcoScam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, by Ronald Bailey (St. Martin's, 256 pp., $19.95)

Michael Fumento's book shows in detail how the environmental movement has used a caricature of science to frighten people into believing that modern life is carcinogenic. Ronald Bailey demonstrates that the specters of world catastrophe--population outstripping food, depletion of natural resources, ozone holes, global cooling or warming, etc.--are outright scams perpetrated by quacks who laugh all the way to the bank. Philip Shabecoff, who covers the environmentalist beat for the New York Times, writes a history of the movement that uncritically accepts its every pseudo-scientific claim. Read together, these books offer a pretty thorough primer on the environmental movement.

Environmentalism is to clean air and water as Marxism is to economics. Both pretend to act out of concern for human welfare, and to be mere spokesmen for objective science. But both are movements of professional activists out to maximize their own wealth and power while reducing their opponents to helotry by way of re-education. The environmental movement is the biggest impetus for the growth of government in our time. Having largely abandoned the claim that government power makes for prosperity, efficiency, and progress, a whole class of would-be rulers now claim power as stewards of Mother Earth. The very same people who so recently marched under the banner of socialism now pursue precisely the same ends under the green banner.

Is it really possible that the great cancer scares of the past generation-- the murderous toxic wastes of the Love Canal, the thousands of lives wrecked by the defoliant Agent Orange, the ultratoxic Dioxin that depopulated Seveso, the poisoning of apples by spraying orchards with the carcinogenic Alar--were false alarms? Not even honest mistakes but outright, willful lies and frauds? How, in a society where the average adult has over 14 years' schooling, could fits of mass hysteria arise, so reminiscent of hunts for witches, incubuses, or plague-spreaders? In 448 pages Michael Fumento shows that 'this is indeed the case, and that a profitable industry has grown up to exploit the American people's growing scientific illiteracy. Environmentalism's main hold on the public comes from manufacturing stories about how this or that product causes cancer--in short, from shouting "fire" into crowds of New York Times readers.

There is no evidence that the chemical Alar, when ingested at the minuscule rates in which it is found on fruit, causes cancer in humans or for that matter in rodents. On the other hand there is every reason to believe that virtually any substance, natural or man-made, will cause tumors in some living organism when administered at its "maximum tolerable dose" (MTD), defined as the dose at which a third to half of the lab animals die of non-cancer causes within a few months. The MTD is usually hundreds of thousands of times greater than the dose at which the substance occurs in normal life. A human would have to eat hundreds of tons per day of foods laced with the tested substance to ingest an amount comparable to that fed to a typical batch of lab rodents. The very fact that a substance is chosen for MTD testing virtually ensures that it will cause some tumors in something.

The chemical Alar was indicted by an MTD pseudo-study issued by the leftist Natural Resources Defense Council. The study was then passed along by a public-relations firm to friendly media (the firm had previously marketed the Sandinistas as well as the Grenadan and Angolan Communists). Alar was convicted by 60 Minutes, Donahue, and The Today Show, as well as by the women's magazines. The responsible scientific community stood on the sidelines as the quacks made money, fame, and their point: Unless the right people--guess who--receive draconian regulatory powers, American capitalism will give cancer to you and your children.

In the 1970s all the right scientists, meaning the few to which the liberal media paid attention, declared that the chemical Dioxin was the most lethal substance ever produced by man. Imperceptible doses of it would give you cancer, deform unborn babies, and alter your genes. Thus the U.S. Government evacuated and relocated residents of the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, and of Times Beach, Missouri. The Italian government did the same with the town of Seveso, and the Veterans Administration is still dealing with a flood of complaints from servicemen who had contact with the chemical a generation ago. The dollar costs are astronomical, and thousands of people have been needlessly terrified. Ninety Italian babies were killed because their mothers, having been assured that they would give birth to monsters, aborted them. In June 1981 the New York Times reported that "Love Canal, perhaps the nation's most prominent symbol of chemical assaults on the environment, has had no detectable effect on the incidence of cancer." As the years have passed, none of the other above-mentioned groups supposedly victimized by Dioxin have developed diseases at rates significantly higher than people like themselves elsewhere.