Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
by Michael Crichton
San Francisco
September 15, 2003
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the
most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a
fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing
mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality
from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the
truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in
the information age (or as I think of it, the
disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and
importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are
real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any
good, whether the problems we're told exist are in
fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us
has a sense of the world, and we all know that this
sense is in part given to us by what other people and
society tell us; in part generated by our emotional
state, which we project outward; and in part by our
genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle
to determine what is true is the struggle to decide
which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are
false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or
generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today
about environmentalism. And in order not to be
misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I
believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in
a way that takes into account all the consequences of
our actions, including the consequences to other
people, and the consequences to the environment. I
believe it is important to act in ways that are
sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this
will always be a need, carrying into the future. I
believe the world has genuine problems and I believe
it can and should be improved. But I also think that
deciding what constitutes responsible action is
immensely difficult, and the consequences of our
actions are often difficult to know in advance. I
think our past record of environmental action is
discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best
intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not
recognize our past failures, and face them squarely.
And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the
things I learned was that certain human social
structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated
from society. One of those structures is religion.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which
many people---the best people, the most enlightened
people---do not believe in any religion. But I think
that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of
mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely
re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in
God, but you still have to believe in something that
gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of
the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the
Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism
seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the
beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that
environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century
remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and
myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace
and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into
a state of pollution as a result of eating from the
tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions
there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all
energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek
salvation, which is now called sustainability.
Sustainability is salvation in the church of the
environment. Just as organic food is its communion,
that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with
the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming
doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures.
They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may
even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I
certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I
don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus
Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But
the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these
beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out
of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These
are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism.
Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because
the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.
It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or
saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people
on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom.
Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not.
Because we know a lot more about the world than we did
forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not
so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet
the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those
beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden
of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when
infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five
died of disease before the age of five? When one woman
in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan
was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When
plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a
stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that
when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state
of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they
never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people
who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set
about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals,
and they did this several thousand years before the
white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And
what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful,
harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World
lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of
hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike
tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche,
Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of
them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And
those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were
exterminated, or learned to build their villages high
in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the
world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres
regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The
Polynesians, living in an environment as close to
paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and
created a society so hideously restrictive that you
could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint
of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the
very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The
noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That
anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau,
shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability
to hang on in the face of centuries of factual
contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter
20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a
white man's invention to demonize the indigenous
peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.)
It was some thirty years before professors finally
agreed that yes, cannibalism does inbdeed occur among
human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New
Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to
eat the brains of their enemies until they were
finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a
fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the
Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a
nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the
highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a
blissful Eden is only held by people who have no
actual experience of nature. People who live in nature
are not romantic about it at all. They may hold
spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they
may have a sense of the unity of nature or the
aliveness of all things, but they still kill the
animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to
live. If they don't, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for
a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all
your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the
jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have
festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all
over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your
nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and
sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows
what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death.
But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you
won't experience nature so directly, because you will
have covered your entire body with DEET and you will
be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off
you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real
nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in
a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows.
They want a simplified life for a while, without all
their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few
days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody
wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody
does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the
world population grows increasingly urban, it's
uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking
about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to
note the number of people who die because they haven't
the least knowledge of how nature really is. They
stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture
and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in
dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to
death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they
can't conceive the real power of what we blithely call
"the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But
they haven't been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the
way they want it to be. They think all life
experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the
natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a
damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock.
Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment
experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as
they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and
decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits,
they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases
them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the
contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if
you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and
unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have
never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum
mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to
a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river,
freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it
wasn't deep---maybe three feet at most. My guide set
out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the
river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with
extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal
about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well,
supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture.
We were now four days trek from the last big town,
where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back
double time to get help, it'd still be at least three
days before he could return with a helicopter. If a
helicopter were available at all. And in three days,
I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why
everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in
nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy
that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and
kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then
what about the rest of the religious tenets? What
about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day?
What about the coming environmental doom from fossil
fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on
our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that
something has been left off the doomsday list, lately.
Although the preachers of environmentalism have been
yelling about population for fifty years, over the
last decade world population seems to be taking an
unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost
everywhere. As a result, over the course of my
lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world
population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15
billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate
around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less.
There are some who think that world population will
peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some
who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we
do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say
halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now
hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a
shrinking population. We hear about the impending
crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will
say that the core fears expressed for most of my life
have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into
the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a
mirage in the desert. They were never there---though
they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one
prediction wrong; they're human. So what.
Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a
whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are
running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60
million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s.
Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half
of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000.
And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that
environmental predictions would become more cautious.
But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the
sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of
the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on
the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets
a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the
streets. One of the defining features of religion is
that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because
they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read
any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper,
because newspapers literally don't report them. I can
tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not
cause birds to die and should never have been banned.
I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that
it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can
tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of
tens of millions of poor people, mostly children,
whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous,
technologically advanced western society that promoted
the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy
about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the
third world. Banning DDT is one of the most
disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history
of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and
we let people around the world die and didn't give a
damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health
hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always
known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global
warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever
admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area
that is taken by urbanization, including cities and
roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is
shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is
increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in
Science magazine concluded that there is no known
technology that will enable us to halt the rise of
carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not
solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally
new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary,
otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime
all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that
when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative
technologies existed that could control greenhouse
gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis
for these views, and I can cite the appropriate
journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the
most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and
Nature. But such references probably won't impact more
than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a
religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are
matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with
religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one
of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have
no perspective on themselves. They never recognize
that their way of thinking is just one of many other
possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful
or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is
the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the
business of salvation, and they want to help you to
see things the right way. They want to help you be
saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested
in opposing points of view. In our modern complex
world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its
rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a
major shift in our thinking about the environment,
similar to the shift that occurred around the first
Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first
heightened. But this time around, we need to get
environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We
need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop
the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard
science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get
rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a
movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a
religion. We know from history that religions tend to
kill people, and environmentalism has already killed
somewhere between 10-30 million people since the
1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs
to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable
science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be
flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix
environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that
people have about one political party or another is to
miss the cold truth---that there is very little
difference between the parties, except a difference in
pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective
legislation for the environment is not helped by
thinking that the Democrats will save us and the
Republicans won't. Political history is more
complicated than that. Never forget which president
started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which
president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil
drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get
politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is
more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but
the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are
dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and
we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those
who are certain are demonstrating their personality
type, or their belief system, not the state of their
knowledge. Our record in the past, for example
managing national parks, is humiliating. Our
fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a
well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will
never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in
the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need
to be trying various methods of accomplishing things.
We need to be open-minded about assessing results of
our efforts, and we need to be flexible about
balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these
things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the
clutches of religion, and back to a scientific
discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute
far more stringent requirements for what constitutes
knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly
sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't
true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of
an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain
organizations are spinning their case to present it in
the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more
groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and
simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it
persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is
hossly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it
is probably better to shut it down and start over.
What we need is a new organization much closer to the
FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless
about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund
identical research projects to more than one group,
and that will make everybody in this field get honest
fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out
of politics. And if we allow science to become
politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the
Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting
fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who
don't know any better. That's not a good future for
the human race. That's our past. So it's time to
abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return
to the science of environmentalism, and base our
public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
