Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists A Conservative Manifesto

Rating:
Summary: More of the same will NOT save us.
Review: We consumed our way into our current mess and it is the height of folly to believe we can consume our way out of it. Privatization (read commodification)is definitely not the answer. The reason the author comes to the conclusions he does is that it is just too difficult for him to give up his current lifestyle. Showing us that recycling doesn't work is easy. Recycling is what happens when we commodify something like garbage, so let's commodify everything and that will solve our other problems just as effectively. Read 'Divided Planet' if you want a really well written book on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Unequaledunrivaled Approach.
Review: The unique swipe across the cover -- Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists -- caught my attention. Clever of Peter Huber. So too is his book. I don't fault anyone for caring to work toward the continuation of keeping the planet Earth relatively intact. However. Is Huber's book HARD GREEN truly a "balanced account of what is wrong with standard left environmentalism and what we should do about it?" I question a number of the rationales presented. On the other hand no one can have an effective point of view without first seeing what someone else has to say. Read the book then make up your mind. The writing is good. You will find much food for thought, discussion and material to argue against. Reading the Nearing's articles in "Mother Earth" magazine (beginning in the 60s I have consciously tried to live as little a consumptive lifestyle as possible -- saved quite a bit of money in the process too! Money not spent gained dividends from investments. The small part I played in the scheme of things was also a tiny dividend for the planet. At least I have tried to do something to 'Save the Earth'(to use an over-worked phrase). I believe joining enviromential organizations also furthers sound approaches to protect the environment -- just pick the groups carefully. There are many out-on-a-limb organizations. To be sure, the jury is out on the fate of the earth. I too would recommend reading THE WEB OF LIFE and LIFE WITH NOAH. Why the later? To truly gain a perspective of the world's consumptive (and frazzled) civilization I recommend everyone take a 272 page journey with Richard Smith and Noah John Rondeau, the hermit of Cold River Flow -- two men who through their living tried to make sense of life and of the culture they were born into. Through their eyes and experiences you will be taken into the wilds of the world's oldest mountain range, the Adirondacks where both escaped to live almost a century ago. Smith's words are honey on a cold morning. Through their friendship and living you will be entertained, informed, experience a lifestyle not possible today and benefit from the insight hardened mountain men learned about surviving. Ultimately what mattered most in their lives was the value they gained from nature. Every citizen on the planet could gain something of value from these wise woodsmen.

Rating:
Summary: A half baked rationale for our consumptive lifestyle.
Review: There is no doubt that Peter Huber is a very articulate and passionate speaker. I have not read Hard Green, but I did catch his discussion of the book on CSPAN. He laid out his argument as to why an SUV is a more ecologically sound mode of transport than a bicycle. The conclusion of which surmised that ecological damage generated by extracting the fossil fuels to power the SUV, and building the roadways necessary for the SUV to travel on were less than the damage caused by the ranches and farms necessary to fuel the bicyclist. One of the problems with this argument, and certainly not the only one, is that one would have to assume that the SUV travels around without a driver. I think it would be hard to demonstrate that the driver of an SUV consumes substantially less food than that of a bicyclist. Then there are all the ancilliary effects on the environment of combustion engine driven passenger vehicles, such as the emissions, energy used in production, waste disposal when discarded, the social effects of isolation, etc. It is painful to listen to or read the feable arguments presented by those who wish to justify our consumptive and ultimately ecologically unsound lifestyle. May I suggest that Mr. Huber read Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life". And if he still wants to lead an ecologically unsustainable lifestyle so be it, but he should stop trying to convince us with half baked arguments about how ecologically responsible SUVs are.

Rating:
Summary: Equal to his Orwell's Revenge or Posner's Affair of State
Review: There are only two or three people who can think and write on new subjects like Peter Huber. Richard Posner and Andrew Ferguson, maybe. In the mid 1980s Huber rethought and led a quiet revolution in the law of suing people. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Huber rethought and led a quiet revolution in telecom law. Huber's newest book will be an affront to V.P. Gore supporters but should have a much larger and positive effect than Gore on environmentalism: people who love the outdoors and the environment will worry in a new way how best to protect it.

I don't have time to read everything that looks interesting. This I read and recommend to others.

Rating:
Summary: A tour de force
Review: Logical and consistent, Peter Huber does not suffer fools on either side of the political spectrum. This is a remarkably balanced account of what's wrong with standard left environmentalism and what we should do about it.

Rating:
Summary: Hard Groans
Review: the author is more often long on strident rhetoric, and too often short on solid research, rigorous analysis and fact checking. While encouraged by his recognition of the wilderness scarcity problem facing the planet, I was put off by his powerful intellect settling in all the other chapters for facile arguments unencumbered by the real complexities we face. Perhaps worth reading from the library, but not worth buying.

Rating:
Summary: Why We Disagree About Hard Green
Review: I'm not surprised that the reviewers appearing in Amazon.com disagree profoundly on the whether this is a "good" book. I've read "Hard Green" closely several times, discussed my likes and dislikes with its author, and have written three published reviews, and I'm still torn over whether I like or dislike this book.

Huber is simply magnificent at debunking the myths of radical environmentalism. If you are a "true believer" or a fan of Brown, Carson, Capra, Colburn, etc. etc. this book is a must read. It will challenge you to go beyond the fundraising letters and newsletters that often constitute "research" for most environmentalists.

Huber's achievement, though, is compromised by two things. The first is noted by several other reviewers: a writing style that is often "flippant" and "strident," and the absence of source citations or other evidence of careful research and fact checking. Most of us would have preferred more footnotes and a more nuanced writing style.

The second shortcoming, not mentioned yet by other reviewers, is Huber's unexplained dismissal of free-market environmentalism (FME), an important new movement inside the environmental movement that calls for greater attention to sound science and market-based, rather than government-based, solutions to environmental problems.

Huber doesn't mention a single scholar who has been active in this field -- Terry Anderson, Richard Stroup, Jane Shaw, Fred Smith, Bruce Yandle, etc. Worse, he makes sweeping concessions to anti-market environmentalists on issues such as public goods that reflect little awareness of the current state of the debate. And while he is careful to avoid explicitly advocating public ownership of open space and wilderness areas on a massive scale, many readers will come away from this book believing that is part of his agenda.

For advocates of a new kind of environmentalism based on sound science and private, voluntary action, Huber's book is both a blessing and a curse. Recognizing its limits, I still urge everyone to read it and make up their own minds.

Rating:
Summary: A Screed Against Reason
Review: Huber's argument does not take into account the interconnectedness of nature. To him, if humans cannot see a problem with thier own eyes, it does not exist. This line of thinking is curiously primitive. The perceptive powers of human beings were formed during the evolution of our species, in which survival did not entail managing the Earth's enviromental woes. Survival only entailed the management of enviromental problems in our immediate vacinity. Thus our evolved "astetic" sense of problems in our enviroment is limited to those problems which posed dangers to our species as we evolved. According to Huber only problems sensed by this primitive awareness can be considered real "hard" challenges to the enviroment. All other challenges to the enviroment, sensed by different means (for instance satilite data, computer models, scientific studies) must be classified as "soft" challenges, because they are imperceptable to our evolved senses. This is absolute hogwash!! Humans evolved to live primitive lives on the plains of Africa. Now that we have formed advanced civillizations there are bound to be concepts and problems that we can percieve only through the use of science, computers, or machines, and not with our eyes and ears. Just because mining is underground is imperceptable to humans dosen't mean it cannot have delterious effects upon the ecosystem we depend upon. Just because we cannot see, smell, taste, or hear carbon monoxide pollution dosen't mean its not deadly. This book, at its heart, is a screed against reason that no enviromentalist should take seriously. The author has no training in the enviromental sciences, and is financed by a right-wing think tank. His ideas are only provocative because they go against the grain, not because they make any sense. It's kinda like saying the holocaust never happened. You get attention, but no respect. This man and his screed against reason should recieve niether.

Rating:
Summary: as reviewed in Environmental History, Jan. 2002
Review: Since the mid-1970s there has been a movement to second-guess modern environmentalism. A recent book that makes extensive use of history in its critique is by Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes regular columns for Forbes Magazine.

The title Hard Green comes from a basic distinction Huber makes between "hard green" and "soft green." Huber argues that environmentalism was invented by Teddy Roosevelt, who when
using the term "conservation" really meant "environmental policy." T.R. and his contemporaries had seen the loss of natural environments and the depletion of natural resources, and they experienced it as an aesthetic loss. This is hard green. Hard greens believe the only real scarcity results from loss of wilderness. Since humans live on the surface of the planet, conserving the surface is what counts, and human needs should be provided not by exploiting the surface but by mining materials from beneath the surface.

According to Huber, T.R.'s environmentalism was complete; nothing needed to be added. But then, according to Huber, there arose a new environmentalism in the late 1970s that is concerned
with invisible threats. This is soft green. Soft greens see threats in phenomena that are highly dispersed or distant in time, phenomena that can only be found by computer modeling. Soft greens follow the Precautionary Principle. They assume that if high doses of a substance are harmful, low doses must be harmful too.

However well intentioned it is, Huber argues, soft is not truly green, for it lacks a sense of proportion. Soft green programs are prescriptive and complex and must be administered by large bureaucracies. Soft green computer models over-predict harms. Soft green economic theories are unrealistic and conjectural. Soft green remedies, which spend resources to redress imaginary harms, do not in the end conserve wilderness; to the contrary, they reduce wealth, which is what truly produces green. Thus, ironically, soft green programs ultimately produce environmental degradation. Huber considers soft green morally corrupt, likening it to communism.

The hard green manifesto is to save the environment from the softs. In other words, the distinction Huber's makes is between 'right green' and 'wrong green.'

One of the pleasures in reading Hard Green is keeping up with Huber's hard-driving intellect. Huber offers very perceptive critiques of classic environmental theories, including Malthus'
population hypothesis, the tragedy of the commons, and the theory of externalities. Huber argues that these doctrines err, first by not recognizing that nature repairs itself, and second by not considering human adaptation through market processes. For these reasons, Huber argues, the projected environmental disasters have not occurred and will not in the future.

But Hard Green also contains unsettling discrepancies. For example, Huber presents the hard/soft distinction as a clean differentiation between traditional conservation and modern environmentalism. But this creates difficulty in knowing how to address modern environmental problems such as air pollution. Modern air pollution problems are categorically distinct in character from those that were recognized before the mid-20th Century. How does the hard green philosophy deal with modern air pollution? Not very well, actually. While Huber asserts that hard greens are concerned about pollution, he notes that their concern runs only to the aesthetics of pollution. That is, the reason pollution is unacceptable is that it is ugly. It also follows, taking his premise out to its logical extension, that unseen substances must be harmless. Thus, a hard green would be concerned about a visible smoke nuisance but not the toxicological effects of smoke's chemical constituents. Nor would a hard green be concerned about lead exhausted from leaded gasoline, toxic industrial emissions, or exposure to radiation, all of which have toxic properties that are not visible. All of these implications contradict what we have learned over the last fifty years.

To rescue the hard green concept from the observation that it is inapplicable to modern environmental problems, Huber admits that unseen substances might be harmful. But his rescue effort only digs itself deeper by arguing in addition that since one cannot know which substances are the harmful ones nothing should be done about them as a class and that their harm will be mitigated by dilution.

The only consistent thread running through this set of arguments is Huber's denial that modern environmental problems should be addressed as such. Taken literally, Huber's argument defines
them into nonexistence. Indeed, one gets the sense that since he doesn't like the remedies for modern environmental problems he has to deny their existence so that the remedies won't be
necessary. Defining away modern environmental problems makes it unnecessary to address the practical questions associated with them: how to determine the extent of such hazards? how to assign responsibilities? who shall be liable for breach of a responsibility? With modern environmental problems defined into non-existence, early 20th Century conservation approaches are all that is required.

And so, when one plays out Huber's argument one finds it difficult to accept for two fundamental reasons: (1) that modern environmental problems are categorically different in nature from early 20th Century conservation, and (2) that in consequence T.R. couldn't have meant "environmental policy" when he said "conservation" because the kind of problems that gave rise to environmental policy as we know the term now had not occurred yet. Thus, it is an anachronism for Huber to call T.R. an "environmentalist," at least as we use the term now, and that mistake leads to unwarranted inferences.

In all, Hard Green is a provocative work that because of its persistent application of central ideas to all manner of policy questions could become, as touted, a conservative manifesto. But
the historian is challenged to examine the quality of the factual premises upon which the whole construct is based.

Rating:
Summary: Hardly Green
Review: I would not call myself an environmentalist, but I am a scientist. The author has written a poorly argued book in that it misrepresents the people he is arguing against, and is based on bad science. Unfortunately, this reflects poorly on conservatives in that it makes us appear to be sneaky, unintelligent, and disingenuous. Mr. Huber does a great disservice to the conservative movement, and I can only hope that this poorly researched book was the result of ignorance and not malice.