Literally a day or two before we were to go to the printer with this wonderfully provocative paper by columnist Warren T. Brookes, I received a call saying he had died of complications of pneumonia, at 62. What a loss to his family and friends, of whom I was one, and to American journalism, which he served as an invaluable original.

I know of no other newspaper writer who brought as much technical detail, and passion, to subjects in which rounded-off facts and cliches usually prevail. This was especially the case with his writing about economics and the environment, the joined topics of this speech.

This is how the Wall Street Journal noted his passing: "In the economic history of the 1970s and 1980s, a prominent place should be found for Warren Brookes. . . . Few voices stand as Warren Brookes did, shouting facts into the gale of fashion. He will not be easily replaced, and will surely be missed."

For those who did not have the intellectual treat of hearing Mr. Brookes talk about taking greater advantage of the free market in protecting the environment, at Center of the American Experiment's 1991 spring conference, I urge you to read what he had to say that afternoon in the following pages.

I started reading Mr. Brookes in the Washington Times when I served in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan Administration. I did not meet him, though, until 1990, when I heard him give two speeches in Boston. One was on education, and it was one of the very best education speeches I had ever heard. The other was on environmental protection, and that one was body lengths above all contenders: It wasn't one of the best; it was the very best address I ever had heard on the subject.

Happy for American Experiment, he accepted our invitation to speak at our spring conference last April, "Freeing the Free Market: Making Minnesota the World's Newest Capitalist State."

One of the Center's three main issues (along with improving education and reducing poverty) is applying market principles to state and local government. This piece, "How Government Turns the Learning Curve From Green to Brown," pertains more to federal policies, but its central argument is wholly germane: The economy is not the only thing that suffers when confidence in the free market weakens. So does the environment, as Mr. Brookes wrote in his introduction:

I will argue that . . . regulatory overkill is very likely to give us a worse environment, as well as a worse economy, because the effect of that regulatory overkill will be to slow this nation's advance along the technological learning curve, a curve that I maintain is bright green.

That is primarily because the nature of all technological and innovative advance is to teach us how to produce more value for less waste and less cost. . . . Anything that slows that process, that puts roadblocks in the way of innovation and technological advances, will automatically make our environment dirtier, not cleaner.

Mr. Brookes, who lived in Lovettsville, Virginia, was syndicated by the Detroit News. He is survived by his wife, Jane Schwartz Brookes, and a brother. My colleagues and I thank him posthumously for this essay and the opportunity to publish it, and we extend our condolences to his family.

Additional copies of "How Government Turns the Learning Curve From Green to Brown" are available for $4 ($3 for American Experiment members). Discounted bulk orders also are available. Please call (612) 338-3605.

Mitchell B. Pearlstein
President
January 1992

We tend to take these rights and the market economy they have generated so much for granted, we are always in danger of losing them. Even as it watched the collapse of the socialist planned economies of Eastern Europe, Washington was deeply in the grip of the most advanced case of regulatory fever I have ever seen in that city, as Republicans tried to outdo Democrats in demonstrating their concern that free markets are destroying the environment -- and threatening our health and safety.

In the process they passed one of the most costly and inefficient regulatory monstrosities in U.S. history, the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, variously estimated at from $35 to $65 billion -- of which at least 40 percent is estimated by practically all observers will be spent entirely on lawyers.

Yet even the most optimistic enthusiasts are hard pressed to demonstrate even $5 billion in benefits to society, even as the costs of this bill will push total U.S. pollution control expenses up to nearly $150 billion a year. That's about 2.6 percent of GNP, or nearly triple what Western Europe and Japan spend.

There is little evidence that this environment is significantly cleaner than theirs, and there is even less evidence that overspending on our environment has made the quality of our life and economy more competitive in the global marketplace.

Indeed, I will argue that this regulatory overkill is very likely to give us a worse environment, as well as a worse economy, because the effect of that regulatory overkill will be to slow this nation's advance along the technological learning curve, a curve that I maintain is bright green.

That is primarily because the nature of all technological and innovative advance is to teach us how to produce more value for less waste and less cost. Since waste and inefficiency are the essential ingredients in pollution, the natural thrust of a free-market competitive economy is to reduce the amount of pollution per dollar added of gross national product, not only through refinement of technology, but through rapid turnover of both the equipment and processes of production. Anything that slows that process, that puts roadblocks in the way of innovation and technological advances, will automatically make our environment dirtier, not cleaner.

Furthermore, that is getting more true each day, as the high-tech information revolution is rapidly substituting information, or software, for physical inputs or hardware. Most if not all of the gains in resource efficiency over the last two decades came from this substitution of mind for matter. For example, over the last 30 years our per capita standard of living has nearly tripled. Yet our use of raw materials per capita has hardly changed, by weight. Over the last decade U.S. exports have risen nearly 60 percent in real terms, but the weight of those exports has declined by about five percent.

A laptop computer now contains only six or seven pounds of metal and plastic, but sells for as much as $5,000 or so. From cars to washing machines to toaster ovens, information is reducing input costs and wastes, while increasing output values.

Eastern Europe is filthy today not because of too much technology, but of entirely too little; not because of too much economic growth, but entirely too little; not because of too few controls, but far too many. Its factories are not merely decades, but generations out of date. The older the equipment the higher the pollution; the cruder the products the higher the waste.

If you don't believe this, remember that 90 percent of U.S. automotive pollution is generated by the 45 percent of cars made before 1983, and that on any given day in the Twin Cities, 95 percent of the carbon monoxide emissions come from the five percent of cars that need either a tuneup or trashing.

Japan and Germany now generate from 50 to 70 percent less waste -- and thus pollution -- per dollar of value-added than the U.S. Yet their environmental controls are far less draconian. They are simply further down the learning curve than we are, and they have wasted less money on environmental overkill. Above all, they have cleaner production capital because it costs them less to turn it over, both in taxes and in regulatory delay.

All this is by way of saying that the best way of reducing pollution is to reduce the production of waste. But the best way of doing that is not to turn your factory management over to the Environmental Protection Agency, as Administrator William Reilly would like, but to push it down that learning curve faster.

Sadly, almost to a person, the environmental movement in Washington totally rejects the idea, and believes that private markets, ownership and development are bad for the planet, and that only governments can be trusted to protect it. The goal of those governments, say the environmentalists must not merely be pollution clean-up, or controls, but pollution prevention, which for them means government control over every production process.

As eco-socialist Barry Commoner says in his recent book, Making Peace with the Planet, there is a deep "ideological contradiction between pollution prevention and the free market: Pollution prevention means governing the design of production processes in keeping with the social interest in environmental quality. But in the United States," Commoner laments, "production processes are under private governance, and are therefore designed solely as profit-maximizing responses to market forces."

Those responses, he argues, "govern the choice of productive technology which in turn determines its environmental impact, generally for the worse. Since environmental quality has been adopted as public policy, it follows that the hitherto wholly private decisions that determine production technology must become subject to social governance."

Dr. Commoner wisely refrains from arguing for socialist governance, given not only the collapse of the economic premises of socialism in Eastern Europe, but the hideous environmental degradation that "socially governed" systems apparently produced.

Dr. Commoner admits this when he asks: "If private governance of production -- the characteristic feature of capitalism -- is at fault, why do the environmental problems that it generates also occur in socialist countries where production decisions are presumably under social or government control?"

That, it seems to me, is the number one intellectual challenge facing the Green left in this hemisphere, and abroad. Whenever their agenda of government ownership and control has been adopted, both the people and the environment suffer. Dr. Commoner's response to that obvious challenge is predictable: He blames it on us!

"Most of the systems of production that the socialist countries have adopted were in fact developed in the capitalist countries after World War II: for example, chemical agriculture, nuclear power plants, and the petrochemical industry. Having been developed with no concern for their environmental impact, these production systems wreak havoc on the environment equally in capitalist countries and the socialist ones."

That is, of course, absurd. The pollution levels from the Third World to the old Warsaw Bloc are infinitely worse than ours, not only because old technology is more polluting than new, but because higher standards of living naturally reduce the greatest threat to environmental pollution --namely, runaway population growth. As Commoner admits with somewhat tortured logic: "There is a powerful social force that reduces the death rate (thereby stimulating population growth) and leads people voluntarily to restrict the production of children (thereby reducing population growth.) That force, simply stated, is the quality of life: a high standard of living; a sense of well-being; security in the future."

"Thus in human societies," he concludes, "there is a built-in process that regulates population size; if the standard of living, which initiates the rise in population, continues to increase, the population eventually begins to level off."

Dr. Commoner is merely confirming an obvious demographic and socioeconomic fact -- the more advanced a nation is technologically and economically, the slower its population growth rate. Not counting immigration, virtually all of the 10 major Western industrial democracies are at zero or negative population growth.

If Commoner's ecological soul brother Paul Ehrlich is right when he says "deterioration of the environment . . . can all be traced easily to too many people," then it is clear that the technological learning curve that lowers mortality rates, raises living standards and cuts population growth is bright green.

Sadly, Commoner anticipates that logical conclusion by a circuitous Catch-22 argument, by which he contends that in the technologically advanced countries, it is technology itself that is the greatest polluting force. Indeed, the response of the environmental movement has usually been to sow seeds of guilt and doubt about whether this advancing quality of life is not, itself, destroying the planet and its "other inhabitants."

In 1972 environmental hero and Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gary Snyder argued, "What we must . . . do . . . is incorporate the other people . . . the creeping people, and the standing people and the flying people and the swimming people . . . into the councils of government." We have done that, with mixed results. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, the protection of the spotted owl, and its favorite Pacific Yew trees, may not only cost the jobs of 100,000 timbermen, but it may also now be costing the lives of 10,000 or more women a year whose battle with ovarian cancer could be won with medicines drawn from the yews.

But in 1990, Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace, told a conference that "Man is the AIDS of the earth." And in 1986, British television featured a three-part special on a revolutionary environmental action group called Gaia, whose members believed that human beings were an unhealthy force in the ecosystem and must be eliminated from the "earth-organism."

As the Greenpeace Chronicles said in 1979: "Humanistic value systems must be replaced by supra-humanistic values that bring all plant and animal life into the sphere of legal, moral and ethical consideration. And in the long run, whether anyone likes it or not, force will eventually have to be brought to bear against those who would continue to desecrate the environment."

In May 1987, George Alexander, the operator of a sawmill in northern California, was almost decapitated when a spiked log caused a 15-foot section of blade to brake off and strike his face. Earth First founder, Dave Foreman, commented that he was sorry about Alexander but, "I quite honestly am more concerned about old-growth forests, spotted owls, and wolverines and salmon -- and nobody is forcing people to cut those trees." His partner Mike Rosell said, "I don't think people are more important than trees or trees are less important than people."

These views once seemed extreme. Today they are practically the mainstream, not only of the environmental movement, but increasingly of government policy itself. Across this country governmental agencies at all levels are at war against both economic and property rights, as well as technology itself, against which they are hurling hysterical risk estimates whose premises are so unscientific as to border on the occult, and whose regulatory overkill invariably does more harm than good.

Take, for example the now infamous CBS "60 Minutes" program on February 27, 1989, alleging that apple juice containing trace elements of UDMH (synthesized from daminozide), or Alar, constituted a major cancer risk for children. What CBS failed to point out is that the study on which that estimate was based had been formally discredited by the EPA's own Science Advisory Board in 1985, because it had been conducted at 266,000 times human exposure. Likewise, no other reputable study of daminozide had ever produced tumors in rats or mice, let alone humans, even when fed to animals at 30,000 times human exposure.

In the fall 1990 issue of the National Academy of Sciences magazine, Issue in Science and Technology, Rutgers University Professor of Food Science Joseph Rosen takes the reader carefully through the way in which first the EPA and then the private National Resources Defense Council, with CBS' help, managed to hype the cancer risk of a product that otherwise had shown no carcinogenicity. He concludes that CBS showed "utter disregard for objective reporting," and ignored the facts that: "Cancer epidemiologists do not consider chemical residues to be a significant food safety problem. After 40 years of widespread pesticide use there is no evidence of increased cancer linked to pesticide residues on food." No wonder in November 1990, the Washington State Apple Growers sued CBS and NRDC for $150 million.

The irony was that the use of Alar, which is designed to strengthen stems and prevent premature apple drops, actually reduces the need for harsher, insecticide interventions against leaf miners and other cutting insects. Its banning not only will have no positive effect on health and safety, it actually will increase pesticide spraying.

But then that is fairly typical of all too much of the environmental hysteria whipped up over alleged threats and regulatory extremes that only produce worse results. In 1988 the average cost, per cancer risk averted by EPA regulation, was over $440 million. In 1990 and 1991 it routinely ranges from $2 billion to $20 billion, 10 times the entire budget of the National Cancer Insitute. This is not environmentalism, it is insanity.

But it's no more insane than when Congress mandated that we spend another $9 billion a year on even tighter tailpipe standards on new cars, taking their net reduction of emissions from 96 percent to about 98 percent. Yet new cars emit only three percent of the total vehicle volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which in turn are less than 30 percent of the total VOCs from all sources, which in turn are less than one-third the total precursors to ozone.

This means we will spend $9 billion a year to reduce ozone precursors by less than six-tenths of one percent. Yet raising car costs by 5-7 percent will slow down total fleet turnover by at least 2-3 percent, and actually raise total ozone precursors, instead of lowering them. Annual car inspections and required tune-ups would cut total automotive emissions by at least 50 percent, with no cost to industry. Instead, we will slow down the nationwide trip down the automotive learning curve, and add to pollution.

In the same bill was an acid rain program calling for crash installation in nine years of limestone scrubbers in 106 power plants, at a cost of $8 billion a year to midwestern power consumers, to cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 10 million tons a year.

Yet the $540-million, 10-year National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program showed not only that acid rain is not a crisis, but that at the present rate of installation of new plants with clean coal technology, sulfur dioxide emissions would be cut by 10 million tons in 20-30 years, instead of nine years, and at no cost either to the consumer or to the environment. Instead, forcing scrubber installation on a "crisis approach" will actually delay a technology which ultimately would produce a better environmental result.

Worse, by adopting a crash, scrubber strategy, we will generate up to 30 million tons a year of limestone sludge -- that's the equivalent of 30 Boston harbors or five New York Cities a year -- that will have to be placed somewhere -- and scrubbers also create one ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of sulfur dioxide they remove.

The Departments of the Interior and Agriculture are recommending in the Northern Forest Lands Study to put 27 million acres of mostly private forestland in the northeast under the control of the government in a "greenline" park. The purpose would be to shut down further commercial foresting in that region.

Yet, the USDA's own inventory of growing wood volume -- that's trees on the stump, not cut -- shows that in the east and the northeast total growing volume has gone up 79 percent since 1950, with 90 percent of that area privately owned. By contrast in the west, where the government owns 70 percent of the forest, growing wood volume is down by 10 percent since 1950. During the forest fires of 1988, Yellowstone accounted for 70 percent of the lost trees, mainly because of government mismanagement.

As Mark Cathey, head of the National Arboretum told me, "The trouble with environmentalists is that they want to lock everything up. What we need are more gardeners, not more environmentalists." Sweden has one of the finest forest systems in the world today, and 80 percent of it is privately owned and managed as a renewable resource. Indeed it is forested today, as is most of the U.S. east, primarily because it became a better cash crop than other farming.

Ironically, even as the environmentalists are trying to lock up forests and slow paper production, they are rabidly trying to replace polystyrene and polyethylene packaging with paper. Yet study after study shows that for comparable packaging coverage, paper uses 2-3 times as much energy, and puts out 3-6 times as much effluents and emissions as polystyrene.

Not only was McDonald's forced into trading polystyrene foam for a very lightweight greasy wrap, but a growing number of chains have been forced back into offering kraft paper bags as an alternative to "green-minded" consumers, substantially raising their costs. Now it turns out, the environmental benefit is totally in favor of plastic. According to a major study done by the Federal Office of the Environment in West Germany: "For ecological reasons it is not sensible to change from polyetheylene to paper carrier bags. Polyethylene carrier bags require less energy for manufacture, and cause, all in all, less damage to the environment."

OK, so it is more polluting to make paper than it is to make plastic. But what about the problem of waste disposal? The German study concludes that "there is no significant difference between the polyethyelene and paper carrier bags regarding waste management on disposal sites or in waste incineration plants."

Studies like these have forced the environmentalists to adopt a new tactic: Go after alleged health effects. In March 1991, the EPA made an initial determination that the styrene monomer that allegedly migrates from polystyrene into food and beverages in micro-minute quantities is a "possible carcinogen."

That comes on the heels of decisions against any such findings at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and EPA's own Drinking Water Office, all of which looked at 30 years of epidemiology on humans, and found nothing. EPA's decision is based entirely on rodent tests, which have in the last five years been almost totally discredited as a predictor of human cancer risk. Indeed, that same week EPA Administrator William Reilly publicly admitted the entire risk model on dioxin (the chemical judged most carcinogenic in rodent tests) has turned out to be wrong.

The modeled assumptions of dioxin risk are predicated entirely on feeding rodents massive doses (up to 30,000 times human exposure) of dioxin-saturated foods. From these high-dose rodent results the EPA uses a straight-line "no threshold" (linear multistage) basis for extrapolating human danger. In other words no matter how small the dose, it's dangerous.

But that "no threshold" assumption -- which underlies all EPA chemical risk assessments -- has been blown away, as one epidemiology study after another has failed to confirm dioxin's alleged toxicity. As Science magazine reported in February 1991, "Even among highly exposed groups, like the people who lived near the chemical plant that exploded in Seveso, Italy in 1976, the only undisputed effect until recently has been the skin disease chloracne."

Ironically, last January, the first study ever to show even a weak link between dioxin and human cancer published in the New England Journal of Medicine, destroyed EPA's risk model.

That study, carried out by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, under the leadership of Marilyn Fingerhut, was the most comprehensive look at human dioxin exposure ever done, involving 5,172 workers at 12 plants in the United States that produced dioxin-containing pesticides and defoliants. The average exposure of these workers was 80 to 500 times U.S. average background levels, and up to 200 times the exposure levels of even the most exposed Vietnam-era veterans, the Ranch Hands Air Force personnel who did the Agent Orange spraying.

If the EPA models were correct, these workers should have shown at least 5-10 times the expected level of cancers for non-exposed persons. Instead, the researchers found, "Mortality from several cancers previously associated with dioxin, stomach, liver, and nasal cancers, Hodgkins disease, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was NOT significantly elevated in this cohort." (Emphasis ours.)

As Science reported on February 8, 1991, scientists meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory a month earlier agreed that, "That implies there is a 'safe' dose or practical 'threshold' below which no toxic effects occur. And that in turn means that the model EPA uses is wrong."

The whole foolish notion there is no safe level of anything proven to be "toxic" in animals (at thousands of times human exposure or more) has repeatedly been blown away as excessive. While EPA regulates dioxin exposure at 0.006 picograms per kilogram of body weight per day, Canada and Europe have been correctly regulating at 1 to 10 picograms, or 170 to 1700 times higher.

Given this, one would have thought the agency would be cautious about destroying yet another industry on the basis of an animal test and at least 50 unproven and unscientific assumptions. After all, they have had to back down on asbestos, dioxin, EDB's, and most recently, fluoride.

The plain truth is that while supposedly rational environmentalists such as Dr. Commoner argue for "environmentally safe" growth, their routine rejection, as "hazardous," of the technologies that have given us both economic growth and slower population growth, veils their real objective: To use unwarranted hysteria based on foolish risk models as a premise for a massive increase in government power over industry, and a slowing of technological development.

The Clean Air Act could never have been passed had it not been sold on the basis that ozone and sulfur dioxide were causing, as Bill Reilly said, "50,000 premature deaths a year." When we asked EPA's public affairs director Lewis Crampton where that number came from, his response was "Beats me." In fact even EPA's most extreme theoretical risk models could not project more than 1,200 potential cancer risks to be averted by this entire bill, and its own internal scientific reviews dismiss SO2 as either a carcinogen or a general health risk.

Indeed, by far and away the most seriously impacted air pollution city is Los Angeles. In January 1991, California released its exhaustive new tumor registry data. Not only does it show the state's overall cancer rate is 9 percent below the nation, but Los Angeles and Orange counties are 18 percent below the nation, and far below on every form of cancer. This suggests, at the very least, the cost per cancer risk avoided in the new Clean Air Act, which is built on dealing with the California health hazard model, likely will be in the hundreds of millions. As environmentalist Paul Portney said last fall, the costs of this new legislation outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.

Yet, anything that produces higher costs than benefits and decreases technological advancement and efficiency will automatically make the environment worse, not better. That is why countries with rapidly advancing economies and high-tech development invariably have cleaner environments.

That, in fact, is the conclusion of a new study, "The Wealth of Nations and the Environment," by Mikhail Bernstam, an economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, who looked at the growth/pollution curve, and discovered that while the early stages of industrial development do engender large increases in pollution emissions, the advanced stages produce a steady reduction.

While some of that reduction is due to pollution controls, Bernstam finds that most of it simply arises from massive reductions of material inputs relative to value-added outputs. For example, "The decline in pollution was so significant that in the United States emissions of 128 million metric tons in 1986 were 13 percent lower than in 1940, although the U.S. population rose by 82 percent and the real gross national product increased by more than 380 percent over the same period."

Bernstam continues: "Annual amounts of emissions decreased so steeply in the U.S. that even absolute levels of accumulated concentration of pollutants in the air began to decline after 1977." In fact, since 1980, total pollutants in the U.S. atmosphere have fallen on average more than 22 percent, and some as much as 87 percent.

Environmentalists will immediately rejoin, but that was because of the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Acts. The problem with that is that the biggest declines in the pollutant levels were from the least regulated stationary sources, not from the heavily regulated mobile sources -- and they correlate mainly with the decline in the relative ration of material resource inputs per dollar of GNP.

As Dr. Bernstam shows, "declines in pollution occurred across most physical chemical substances, not only those from fossil fuel sources. Therefore, neither the energy crisis of the 1970s and 80s, nor the Clean Air Acts, could have been solely responsible."

Indeed he found declines in pollution went right across the industrial democracies regardless of environmental controls, and "the extent of government environmental regulation . . . across countries does not correlate with the steepness of the pollution decline. If anything there is a slight negative correlation."

Finally, the decline in pollution in the United States and the rest of the West was much faster in the 1980s than in the 1970s, while both economic growth and population growth were about the same. Most of that gain came not from controls, but a faster rate of substitution of high technology and information for low-grade and polluting inputs.

For example, Western countries cut their steel use per $1,000 of GNP by 24 percent from 1975 to 1985, and their energy usage by nearly 15 percent, while the Warsaw Bloc countries increased their energy use by 8 percent and their steel use by 12 percent. Bernstam concludes that market economies promote resource efficiency, while no-market countries promote resource waste.

I think there is a broader, deeper reason for this, and it is brilliantly summed up in a book by one of the world's great ecologists, Sir James Lovelock, a book called Ages of Gaia , which has been completely distorted by the "greens."

Lovelock sees Gaia not as some actual pagan goddess protecting Earth from man (the picture painted by Ted Turner's fatuous network shows), but a useful paradigm for the self-regulating and self-correcting power of the Earth's biosphere: "I have frequently used the word Gaia as a shorthand for the hypothesis itself, namely that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment."

He first evolved this concept during his lengthy work on the Jet Propulsion Laboratories' probes of Mars and Venus, where "our results convinced us that the only feasible explanation of the Earth's hugely improbable atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis from the surface, and that the manipulator was life itself."

Lovelock argues that we cannot explain the continuously perfect balances of oxygen and nitrogen, of land and sea areas, and of temperature conditions as some freakish and delicately balanced accident: "The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth, now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfolded through rush hour traffic."

For Lovelock the only explanation is what he calls Gaia, but defines as "the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by active control may be conveniently described by the term 'homeostasis'." To put it bluntly, human life itself operates as a kind of biostat keeping the planet's ecosystems in balance.

But is not even this "homoeostasis" threatened by human insults to it from our technological development? Unlikely, he says: "Life on this planet is a very tough, robust, and adaptable entity and we are but a small part of it." He conducts his readers through millennia of simply colossal "natural insults" both to the planet and its biosystems which, nonetheless, failed to halt the steady advance of both the complexity and sturdiness of life systems. He concludes that, "So far, no doom scenario yet imagined has the slightest chance of achieving such a degree of destruction. Contrary to the forebodings of many environmentalists, finding a suitable [planet] killer turns out to be an almost insoluble problem."

Indeed, Lovelock, himself a committed fighter for responsible conservation, nevertheless saves his most powerful scorn for environmental nihilism. "It is not clear whether their motivation is primarily misanthropic, or Luddite, but either way they seem more concerned with destructive action than with constructive thought. The exploitation of human ecology for political ends can become nihilistic, rather than a force working for reconciliation between mankind and the natural world."

The result, he says, is that we have unnecessarily limited economic growth, and the development of technology, and thus held back the improvement of the human condition: "There can be no voluntary resignation from technology. We are so inextricably part of the technosphere that giving it up is as unrealistic as jumping off a ship in mid-Atlantic to swim the rest of the journey in glorious independence."

One of the angriest contemporary environmental philosophers, Murray Bookchin, has called for a full-scale dismantling of America's "institutional and ethical framework." Without these "revolutionary" changes and the resulting establishment of an "anarchistic ecological society," Bookchin grimly predicted "the end of humanity's tenure on the planet."

That anger, so deeply rooted in mysticism, but so lacking in sound scientific evidence, must be met by both industry and government, not with a defensive or apologetic response, but tough-minded, reasoned scientific evidence. As Lovelock argues, "in our response we must take care not to overreact." He says such overreaction may seem like "good policies but it is bad science."

Nearly every one of the scenarios of doom we have heard, from asbestos to Alar, from dioxin to DDT, from acid rain to EDB has turned out -- when exposed to good science -- to be vastly overdrawn, and our reactions to them have nearly always been counterproductive. While we must take pains to deal with real environmental problems, we must take great pains not to turn the learning curve, and our economy and ecology, from green to brown.