Hard Green

...And, before that, in the 19zo's , the lightweight champion our fathers reverentially called "the incomparable Benny Leonard...

...It is a book by a conservafive environmentalist for other conservative environmentalists, giving them a new lens through which to view environmental/political issues, and giving them something they can be for-federal land ownership-rather than just a series of things to be against--like the Kyoto Protocol war on burning coal or gas...

...The book's dearth of footnotes-- only 26 for over zoo pages of text-- is a political and rhetorical mistake in a field as rife with vicious disagreement over the bare facts of the matter as politico-environmentalism...

...he knows that creating markets for pollution rights can lessen pollution faster than command and control can...

...He condemns it as "Soft Green"--"the realm of huge populations (molecules, particles) paired with very weak (low-probability) or slow (long time frame) effects...

...Soft Green is the Green of the invisible, the Green of the highly-dispersed or the far future...

...The sport was considered a lowly pursuit and there was the ever-present fear of personal injury...

...N ot that all hungry young men who entered Leo Bodner's sport in the early years came out of urban ghettoes...

...In fact, as Huber explains so well, the kinds of energy that left/Soft Greens tend to fear the most, like nuclear, are in fact the most Green, giving us the greatest amount of power for the least amount of disturbance of the earth and environment...

...But there's a sophisticated world of flee-market environmental thought that can't be reduced to this easy caricature, like the writings of Bruce Yandle of Clemson University on property rights, common law, and institutional incentives in environmental preservation...

...I improved, but I remember the beatings...

...not to mention the lure of green for hard-pressed immigrant families in a world in which a young fighter could earn $3oo for a single ten-round match, an amount "that often represented ten or fifteen weeks' salary for his father...

...As it happened, while Start was still in the room the leak had occurred--Newsweek had it--and obviously the leaker(s) could not have been Start or his aides...

...In contrast, Huber's "Hard Green" is concerned with the huge, the physically observable, the beautiful: wilderness, ocean, rivers, lakes, shores...

...Of Leonard VICTOn GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...He merely offers the proposition, anathema to the more hardcore free-market environmentalist, that under some conditions-not very precisely defined by Huber, but having to do with huge size crossing many political boundaries and a national reputation that gives an aura of sanctity-public management is both more practical and redounds to the benefit of the national spirit...

...Those were the golden years of boxing not only for hungry young Jews but their Irish and Italian counterparts...

...Along with Leonard and Ross, ethnic heroes like Jimmy McLarnin and Tony Canzoneri drew avid fans to arenas across the country until, with the postwar advent of flush times and television, a new generation of urban ethnics replaced them...

...a world where government is making decisions about, say, timber sales or mineral rights on the land it owns is not what he wants...

...Knowing that the fact of an OPR investigation would be used against him in his House appearance, Starr warned Reno against a leak...

...Jewish parents were usually, though not always, opposed to their sons becoming boxers," writes Bodner...

...I was a miner and a cowboy," Dempsey told Kahn in a 196o interview...

...Huber, in a debate about his book, said that for most of what Hard Green discusses, the question: "Government: the problem, the solution...

...That the more we know, the more we can grow using less land...

...The rich are not the despoilers of the environment, but rather the only ones who can afford to consider environmental amenities...

...Bodner's book, in large part an oral history, casts light on this overlooked segment of Jewish-American experience in the early years of the twentieth century...

...Bodner's passion for boxing was passed down by his father Leo, an amateur fighter in the Roaring Twenties and professional manager in the thirties and forties...

...He has clearly been a careful reader in the world of politico-environmental debates --he knows that Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were wrong about population necessarily outstripping resources...

...That's not the sort of Green Huber is here to defend...

...What's more, Huber clearly thinks it would be a bad idea even if you could sell it politically...

...He does not stake out a cut-and-dried position that government preservation is always, or even often, superior to private preservation...

...cal perfect environmental health, with statistical constructs standing in for real agents of disease...

...also the Livermore Larruper, after the California town he came from--yet another difference between Baer and other Jewish fighters of that era...

...What that means in practical terms is a great expansion of federal ownership of wilderness lands...

...But mostly I was a hobo...

...I fought wherever I could, in school halls, outside saloons, any place they were putting up a purse...

...New ways to "save energy" lead always to more energy being used--but that's all right, we have plenty...

...Cowardly deferral it was, many times over...

...This is perhaps a little less than a reader would hope for from Huber, a Manhattan Institute policy wizard with both MIT engineering and Harvard Law degrees in his illustrious background, who has previously written insightfully and penetratingly on cyberspace law, the fnture of telecommunications, liability law, and junk science...

...As the author notes, you won't find much written about Jewish athletes in studies like Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers...

...Note that Huber doesn't discuss federal "management" of wilderness, which environmentalists of all wings can agree is often egregious--think of the recent Los Alamos fires...

...Indeed, in one wry passage where he blithely and openly makes up figures to demonstrate that neo-Malthusians are wrong, he seems somewhat contemptuous of bean-counting in the defense of his intellectual principles...

...Huber thinks that tile modern right could both do the right thing and earn political capital by emulating him...

...However, the argument isn't as simple as free-market supporters of private property versus a public-management loving Huber...

...No small star either, but one that ran from his thigh to his kneecap, as if to say, "You think all little Jewish boys grow up to be 98-pound accountants...

...Baer was not, however, the only Jewish prizefighter that little jewish boys could identify with in the mid-193o's...

...he knows that the United States isn't adding to any greenhouse gas problem...

...Soft Green is exemplified in its most politically dangerous form these days by the socalled Precautionary Principle, an idea rising in intellectual and political prominence among the enviro-left which says that no action or technological breakthrough that cannot be proven to be without long-term or unexpected deleterious consequence should be allowed to be adopted...

...is "kind of beside the point...

...What we don't have plenty of, he stresses repeatedly, is untouched wilderness...

...For most newly arrived Jewish-American immigrants, steeped in the Diaspora traditions of the Old Country, the idea of fighting as a way to make a living was, to say the least, disparaged...

...Who leaked aside - a n d the culprit has never been identified-the important issue here concerns Reno's willingness to take as seriously as she did, and when she did, so close to the impeachment debate in the House, wispy allegations pressed by Clinton's allies as part of their "continuing campaign" Write Schmidt and Weisskopf: "Starr saw only one explanation [for what Reno had don@ a cowardly deferral to the interests of the president...

...Max was a full-chested beach boy from the palm-lined boulevards of the Golden State, while they were wiry street fighters who went into the ring to escape the ghetto life of the urban East...

...On the other hand, there was the harsh reality of life in the ghetto, where merely walking to school through rival ethnic neighborhoods was a daily training camp for future pugilists...

...This sort of Green fights new advances in biotech and simultaneously wants to ban tl~e pesticides that biotech could do away with, without causing diminution in the quality or quantity of human foodstuffs...

...I got to know some presidents and beautiful women who would have rung the burg]ar alarm if I'd walked in on them once upon a time...

...As Huber always says when dismissing the more radical private propertarians, You can't politically sell the notion of selling the Grand Canyon...

...Despite being marketed as a politicoenvironmental manifesto for the conservative movement, the book's strengths really lie more in its marshaling of interesting arguments and observations than in its political advice...

...Debates about federal ownership of wilderness are indeed less important than all that, and whether or not you agree with him on that point, for most of this book Huber brings the good news with intelligence and wit...

...Such failures don't stop the left from wanting more federal control, however...

...It is desperate poverty that leads to cutting down rain forest in order to grow food for survival...

...We have never had so direct and unpretentious a champion," writes Kahn, "nor perhaps any who inside the ring fought with such snarling intensity...

...Madcap Maxie" he was called...

...This is the kind of Green that Teddy Roosevelt, Huber's beloved father of conservative environmentalism, believed in and advanced...

...In A Flame of Pure Fire, Roger Kahn recalls the rags-to-riches saga of William Harrison (Jack) Dempsey, the ninth-born of a dirt-poor Mormon family that came from West Virginia to settle in the bankrupt mining town of Manassa, Colorado...

...He explains all those issues well enough in his relatively short space, but adds little original to the body of observation, statistic, or argument over the environment...

...In Huber's elegant formulation, he praises how we in the West have learned to "dig up our energy, bury our wastes, fly high, tunnel deep, and leave more of the surface alone...

...and that the best evidence to date indicates that we The American Spectator "July~August 2000 89 are not creating catastrophes, either hidden or impending, by doing so...

...Hard or Soft, there isn't an easy way for Republicans to claim political advantage in the Green world, nor is there any real evidence that not doing so is hurting them politically in any significant way...

...Huber presents in an acidly skilled way most of the key principles of the left~right debate over the environment, the most important of which is the principle that wealth equals health--even in environmental matters...

...Though we live on more land than ever before, America is still being reforested slowly...

...If we manage to, say, make refrigerators more energy-efficient and thus cheaper, we just make a bigger better fridge that uses the same, or more, energy for the same, or less, expense...

...Regrettably, Huber spends little time in this book discussing these ideas...

...This is the only scarcity we need be concerned with, Huber argues, and its preservation is what a right/Hard Green ought to be dedicated to...

...I got beat a lot...

...Max knew clever, but preferred brawl...

...88 Ju ly/Augus t 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator To fully appreciate this book's charms and uses, which are manifold, one must remember that it is, as it says, a manifesto, not a textbook or a magisterial treatment of a body of thought...

...He says so in Hard Green and has been saying it more and louder in public discussions of his book...

...It is this Soft Green that frets over dioxin and global warming, over MTBE and pesticides, over phantom and faraway risks...

...I was lucky...

...t is because of that insistence on federal land management that Huber's work hasn't found an entirely warm reception from a dominant wing of conservative environmental thought, the largely libertarian flee-market environmentalists who were waging the scientific and ideological fight against left-environmentalism long before Huber took up the cudgels...

...wealth leads to better agricultural technologies that allow us to grow more food on less land and let old agricultural land go back to forest...

...vN Willing to Be Hurt When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport Allen Bodner Praeger / :zo7 pages / $24.95 A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s Roger Kahn Harcourt Brace/474 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold S ometimes revisionism goes too far, as when Allen Bodner asks us to believe that Max Baer, the only Jewish fighter ever to hold the heavyweight boxing title, was uncircumcised...

...which is to say, quoting Bodner, "he apparently wasn't Jewish...

...That is why the story of the unmaking of Bill Clinton was also a story, about a great department of government compromised...

...Those of us around in the mid-3o's remember the Star of David on his boxing trunks...

...One punch, that's all he looked for: Knock the SOB out and get back to Hollywood, where the cameras rolled and the golden shikses hung out...

...Good fighters all, but, unlike Baer, they were celebrated for their cleverness in the ring, not their ferocity...

...real name: Benjamin Leiter) it was said that he was so clever a boxer that "His hair is as neat after a fight as before it...

...If the right follows Huber's advice by championing increased federal land acquisition--and the May passage in the House of Representatives by 315-1o~ of the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, sponsored by House Resources Committee Chair Don Young (R-Alaska) shows they are already starting to, even if Huber isn't the proximate cause--there isn't any way for them to stake this out as a distinctively winning position...

...By contrast, Max Baer's jet-black locks flew loose with the first punch of every fight, whether delivered or absorbed...

...That is the most encouraging thing for a conservative, or any human, to understand about these issues: that through our ingenuity and the right incentives, humans can continue to live, grow, and thrive without destroying the world or themselves...

...Huber is at his best when he points out that technological advances in agriculture and materials technology in the West have allowed us to lessen our footprints on nature even as there are more of us, consuming ever more...

...What is remarkable about that r4sum6, given the self-adulation of today's generation of fighters, is its modest candor...

...Huber wants to revive for environmentalism a meaning now a century old, one more Teddy Roosevelt than A1 Gore, more conservationist than chemophobic...

...To the Soft Green the model is everything," because it is only in models, not in reality, that the harm it fears and promises to evade seems real...

...But in Huber's world of Hard Green, the government ought not manage what it owns in any meaningful sense...

...Huber does understand that private conservation has been in the past and can continue to be extremely valuable to the natural environment...

...He thoroughly skewers the kind ofecopuritanism thaf advocates living simply and frugally as the key to environmental holiness, pointing out that human wants tend to grow to fill our means...

...For Huber loves the wilderness--and wants a political movement that loves the wilderness-for its own sake, for its aesthetic glory, for what he sees it adding to the nonmonetary value of the national patrimony...

...t is that rhetorical distinction between Hard and Soft Green that comprises Huber's original contribution to the debate about the environment in this book...

...Meanwhile, "renewable" sources like solar, wind, or burning wood leave enormous marks on the land or add pollution to the air...

...There were also Barney Ross (real name: Barnet Rosofsky), the welterweight champion, and, for laughs, "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom, the light-heavyweight champion...

...By modern heavyweight standards Dempsey, at 6' 1", 185 pounds, was not a big 90 July/A~g~s t o~ o o o . The American Spectator...

...Of course, the very purpose of Huber's book is to recontextualize Green...

...The environment needn't be a source of constant political crisis, and property and markets and technology are more a boon to environmental health than a bane...

...By the 196o's , there were few if any Jewish fighters and a shrinking number of Irish- and Italian-Americans in a sport that had become a way out of the ghettoes and barrios for hungry young African-Americans and Latinos...

...One is hard pressed to read this wellinformed and well-written book and come to any other conclusion about Reno's, and her department's, performance...

...Try this one...

...Start was "furious, unable to comprehend how an attorney general could launch an investigation of the author of the impeachment referral just as Congress was getting ready to act on it...

...that we constantly learn better ways to do more things with fewer resources...

...Green is hard for conservatives because, in the modem political context, it has come to mean more federal micro-management, more federal encroachment on private property, more federal (and now often extrafederal) control in the pursuit of chimeriBRIAN DOHERTY is an associate editor at Reason magazine...

...If it's public," Reno replied, "the only person madder than you is me...

...Democrats, also fans of federal land ownership, can always gleefully outbid them in money spent and acreage taken under the federal wing...

...Max Baer not Jewish...

...Here Huber is moving into a turf that has not previously been his field of expertise, and this book is unlikely to convince someone not already steeped in the world of anti-left environmentalism...

...N Green Both Hard and Difficult Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto Peter Huber Basic Books / ~4 pages / $~5 REVIEWED BY Brian Doherty T he title of Peter Huber's new book has a double-meaning he probably didn't intend, though he may well agree with its spirit: "Green" is indeed a "hard" thing for a conservative, in the modern context...