Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth
Orr, David W
A MOMENT ON THE EARTH, by Gregg Easterbrook. Viking, 1995. 745 pp. $27.95. Gregg Easterbrook begins his 745-page opus with a summary of what he calls "ecorealism," which is essentially the view...
...The "enviros" for whom he has such scorn, the very people who brought about the "extraordinary success of modern environmental protection," are more often than not motivated by some larger vision of reality than Easterbrook wishes to acknowledge...
...Easterbrook and his happy book were blindsided by reality...
...Later, he asserts that "mild warming is probably in society's interest" but fifteen pages after that he states, "Any reasonable policy that reduces the odds of climate change is more than worth the price:' Are toxic chemicals a problem...
...Even these gains are under assault...
...Similarly, after downplaying the prospect of global warming, he quickly says that "any artificial global warming may not transpire in a gradual fashion, giving warning of itself and many decades to react...
...He then proceeds to ridicule all of those, including Rachel Carson, who have ever taken this view seriously...
...From the rubble of collapsed illusions, he wrote in theNew York Times on April 21 that "until the new Congress began, all signs seemed encouraging...
...That being so, it's foolish to hold the victory party quite so soon...
...Nor does it have anything but scorn for recent attempts to recalibrate our ethics and religious beliefs to include care for the natural world...
...Yes, there have been notable environmental successes, but mostly on the things that were relatively easy to do...
...Easterbrook's "ecorealism" rests on a foundation of political naivete...
...Thirty-nine pages later he states: By tampering with the climate, people play with exactly that aspect of nature experience suggests most likely to do them in...
...When we do finally confront them we will discover that they are as much political and moral as scientific and technological...
...Easterbrook's Moment is already out of date, but its influence will, unfortunately, linger for a long time...
...Somehow I take little comfort...
...Nor do I doubt that from, say, Alpha Centauri, four light years away, a nuclear war on earth would scarcely make the mid-day farm report...
...Pessimism, for them, is "stylish...
...The hard tasks and the difficult choices are still to come...
...No, but "Public fear of chemicals is an entirely rational reaction:' Is acid rain a problem...
...Early on, for example, he ofFALL • 1995 • 553 Books fern a "running caveat" that "Humanity may be executing many subtle forms of damage to the biosphere, damage that . . . is not yet apparent from our shortlived perspective...
...The reader is whipsawed back and forth between real success stories, denial, selective use of evidence, outright error, and caveats with which Easterbrook hedges all of his bets...
...There are really two Easterbrooks, one carefully selecting evidence to advance a view that the war for a habitable earth has been won, the other following quickly behind with a caveat to say that it may not be so...
...This explains a great deal about his book: statements like "current ecological law is...
...For many "enviros" it is about the sense of wonder before the mystery of creation itself...
...Ah, yes, politics...
...First, there are some hundred aid fifty-seven pages of what the author calls the "long view," in which such things as climate change and soil erosion are portrayed as minor events...
...Genetic engineering...
...He applauds the "extraordinary success of modem environmental protection . . . perhaps the best instance of governmentled social progress in our age...
...q This review appeared in slightly different form in the August 1995 issue of Natural History magazine, the American Museum of Natural History...
...Second, having informed the reader that in the cosmic scheme of things our ecological problems are not really that bad, he attempts to prove that they really do not exist in the short-term either...
...far stronger than in the 1970s," his dismissal of the possibility of any disaster with genetically engineered substances because "regulation is strict," and his assertion that American firms operating in Mexico "will bring with them U.S.-standard ecological controls...
...Aside from a Niagara Falls of words and details, two big things happen between the description of ecorealism and the human takeover of the cosmos...
...Not a problem, but "A disaster cannot be ruled out:' Overpopulation...
...Mostly, Easterbrook likes those whose focus is purely technological and dislikes those who raise larger and messier questions about ethics, justice, and politics...
...In doing so, he cuts the ground from below any effective environmental movement...
...Now, he plaintively wonders whether "all the apparent progress in the chemical industry [has] been merely a public-relations ploy," and whether he was duped by the logging industry, which "recently embraced a bill that would make 554 • DISSENT Books a mockery of the Endangered Species Act...
...These he snidely dismisses as "enviros" and attributes all manner of bad faith to them...
...For people so motivated, the principle of precaution forbids economic and technological carelessness...
...FALL • 1995 • 555...
...The global movement to preserve a habitable and beautiful earth is not just about self-interest, it is about transcending selfinterest in order to be faithful to larger duties and obligations...
...Easterbrook advertises himself as an "ecorealist...
...Later, in a single paragraph he is capable of wondering, "why take chances with something as important as the climate conditions necessary for agriculture," but then telling us, "When people act in ways that put extra carbon dioxide into the air, all they do is confront nature with a bit more of a substance that would have been in the air man or no...
...or a world where a small human contingent uses advanced knowledge to live the nonmaterialist lifestyle of ecological longing...
...Easterbrook enjoins us to place our ecological woes into the perspective of geologic time, and from a sufficient distance they do indeed look like a quibble...
...They suffer from a "primal urge to decree a crisis" and "subconscious motives to be alone with nature...
...Few environmentalists have ever doubted that we have the know-how to lessen human damage to the environment...
...Six hundred and ninety-eight pages later he zooms back from outer space, having greened Mars, trashed all manner of what he deems to be insufficiently optimistic thinking, and created what he calls a "new nature" on earth, one without predation, aging, violence, species extinctions, or killer asteroids...
...a boon for the natural scheme:' And so it goes...
...Shifting continents, glaciation, and collision with asteroids have wreaked far greater havoc than degradation caused by humans...
...Gregg Easterbrook begins his 745-page opus with a summary of what he calls "ecorealism," which is essentially the view that the war to preserve a habitable earth is all but won or will be by the year 2000, and that those who won it ought now to be upbeat and happy...
...I do not for a moment doubt the truth of this assertion...
...He does have kind things to say about former Environmental Protection Agency director William Reilly, who in turn says exceedingly flattering things about the book on its jacket...
...In the fall of 1994, about the same time that Gregg Easterbrook, who writes for Newsweek, would have been working over the galley pages for A Moment, hired guns for the Republican party were drafting the final version of The Contract With America, one part of which aimed to dismantle all of the environmental protections so painstakingly erected over the past twenty-five years...
...A short-term "disaster," but "over the long term...
...But he does not like the tens of thousands of people who brought it about...
...Alas, they are not...
...Where has Easterbrook been for the past twentyfive years...
...The problem has always been whether we had the political and moral will to do so...
...Were ominous signs not apparent in virtually every legislative and regulatory battle...
...He had been, as it were, taken in...
...Easterbrook, who describes himself as a liberal Presbyterian, cavalierly dismisses these as "Earthianity...
...The earth is a"fortress," he says, capable of withstanding all manner of insult and technological assault...
...They "pine for bad news...
...Nature," he says, "has for millions of centuries been generating worse problems than any created by people...
...Huh...
...Well, "no," but this "does not rule out alarm...
...Even if the odds of an artificially triggered climate emergency are low, prevention is amply justified...
...In the long view Easterbrook envisions an overall "human population of hundreds of billions or even trillions of souls" living throughout the cosmos, and "Earth as a planet-size preserve...
...Easterbrook's book is not built on science, it is built on resentment...
...Easterbrook likes the result— environmental protection—but does not like the combination of moral outrage and plain good sense that have so far made it happen...
...But Easterbrook's Moment has virtually nothing to say about human arrogance, greed, stupidity, and evil—all of the things that keep people and whole societies from doing what they can do and what they ought to do...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
