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Sheesh. Saving the world hasn't been this hard since Noah assembled his bestiary, and it just got a lot harder with the publication of Peter Huber's "Hard Green," a dreadfully irresponsible, though wildly engaging polemic that accuses the so-called "soft green" approach to environmental protection with doing much more harm than good. Were it not for the fact that we're talking about the fate of the planet, Huber's all-too-clever gutter-sniping and groan-inducing riffs would come off as mere trifles from the litterbug fringes of latter-day market Darwinism.

Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto By Peter Huber Basic Books, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

As it is, impatient capitalists and heads of industry, eager for a voice from the Teddy Roosevelt wilderness, are flocking to Huber like moths to a dim bulb. William F. Buckley says Huber's manifesto is the "richest contribution ever made to the political mind"; former Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston claims that Huber's goal, to "save the environment from the environmentalists," is the only way to color the planet "truly green." They, and for that matter, Huber's publishers at Basic Books, should be ashamed of themselves for getting suckered into this Manichaean sump of bad faith and Potemkin science.

Huber's recommended approach to most current, small-scale or localized environmental disasters is to do nothing. Too much money has been wasted, he says, on "trans-science"-- "the study of phenomena too large, diffuse, rare or long-term to be resolved by scientific means." There aren't enough lab rats in the world to properly test it, so, he says, let sleeping dioxins lie. According to Huber, we don't really know if toxic-waste dumping causes cancer, so we should just forget about it. We made the mess, let nature deal with it.

Huber calls for a harking back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, insisting that the only way we'll save the planet -- not that it's in particular need of saving, he reminds us -- is by refocusing our efforts on preserving and protecting national parks and other majestic tracts of land. Technology-fearing, scarcity crazed "soft greens," he says, have been so wrong in the past about everything from global warming to solar power to the benefits of free-range chickens that we shouldn't trust them on anything. Disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill and Love Canal are the exception. Most of the time, Huber argues, technology doesn't blow up in our faces, so trust it, and trust it wholly -- from bionic cows to nuclear veggies.

And he's in your face about it; they say "scarcity," he says "abundance." They say organic tomatoes, he says supersize it. The markets will sift the good from the bad, and our wealth will save the forests: "It is the rich, not the poor, who pour their wealth into green. The richer we get, the farther the footprint of our wealth extends ... to our lands, shores, rivers, lakes and oceans. Wealth solves the problem of scarcity with abundance." It's all nice and neat -- way, way too neat.

Rather than dither about in the nether world of trans-science with the softs, Huber says, we should instead renew our faith in the conservation movement founded by Teddy Roosevelt around the turn of the last century. Glassy-eyed with awe at the God-given joys of the natural world, he asks that we soar like eagles with him over to the marketplace, offering it as the ultimate arbiter and salvation for the environment. Markets are inexact, chaotic; so is nature. Ipso facto ... you get the reductionist point.

Unfortunately for Huber's argument, the so-called softs never lost their faith in conservationism; they've been fighting the eco-war on two fronts for years. It is very easy to talk the conservationist talk, and Huber does it well, but the hike is a much more difficult proposition.

Sure, the self-righteous eco-lovers of the left certainly are not without their excesses. But Huber willfully and disdainfully ignores the progress the softs have made in the area of land conservation. Environmental groups have long been pushing that agenda in the rough-riding corridors of state and local legislatures and at the Environmental Protection Agency, locking horns with loggers, snowmobilers, hunters, farmers, snow boarders, ranchers, campers and squirrels -- all scrambling for their share of the outdoors.

Meanwhile, the stonewalling Darwinists of big industrial capitalism have been fighting against any environmental regulations since, well, forever, flaunting their toxic output with such surreal vulgarities as "pollution rights" -- a notion Huber heartily embraces. Of course he does: He trusts them to do the right thing by nature, if only those useless softs would stop interfering.

Next page | Militia men vs. nature boys