Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame) has written an environmental thriller, State of Fear

The bad guys are eco terrorists, who go to great lengths to trigger environmental catastrophes in order to bring the world to its senses, and the good guys are those who understand or come to understand that conventional wisdom about environmental doomsday being just around the corner is mainly bullshit.

It's a novel (obviously) but it's full of scientific footnotes, contains an Author's Message at the end where he reviews his opinions about the state of the environment  and a lengthy annotated Bibliography of books and journal articles that Crichton has read

It's a bad novel IMO, in terms of characterisation and totally implausible with regard to what the heroes go through and survive.

However, the dialogue about environmental issues which is continuous throughout the book is very interesting and quite plausible as dialogue even if the settings are somewhat contrived

I'll try to write more about it in a followup post

In the  meantime, for anyone interested, Crichton has setup message boards on his official website to discuss State of Fear

There are separate discussion boards on these topics at Crichton's site:
The Science - CO2 & Global Warming
The Science - Battle of the Scientific Studies
Politics of Science
Consensus Science

These are the most popular, there are others
http://www.crichton-official.com/messageboard.html

Bill wrote;

"It's a bad novel IMO, in terms of characterisation and totally implausible with regard to what the heroes go through and survive."

Implausible?, next you will be saying that Jurassic Park is Implausible! I should write such a bad novel with such characterisation!  The one thing I kept seeing were people that I recognized (not least of which myself in various guises; notably the mad professor being ejected from the conference). 

 

There is a huge market for Fantasy and Romance novels even though I’ve never bought one, and I can’t wait to see these ideas spreading into Mills and Boon etc.  I just wouldn’t know how to review those books either.  This book is just not my normal fair and I think that sums up the problem.

It would have been better if it had been cut, and the whole section about the lightning strikes dropped altogether and if it gets to the film stage I suspect that would probably happen, but cut, or not, as a totally over the top James Bond type book, I think it makes a great impact.  It is, like the book The Skeptical Environmentalist; both hated, feared and maligned by green opponents, for the very good reason that it does very effectively and systematically expose their religion.  If it is made into a film the charaterisations would be hilarious. 

 

Being ill equipped to review this book I will get a better feel for its comparative value when I get some feedback from three people I have lined up to read it, (all big novel readers and all infected with the standard green virus) so I will update this in about a month's time.

 

 

But any novel, from this author no matter how far out could well be turned into a film that would work well. (And perhaps as a novel it might make a better film)  But in the novel form it seems to me a very accessible attack on green philosophy, and not just green global- warming theories.  As a film it would be great fun.

 

 

Greenies have been warning people off reading it, because of its dangerous ideas, just as they did with Lomborg.  However with people being the way we are, that may have the opposite effect; at least I certainly hope so.  Whatever the green mulch spreaders do, as with Lomborg’s book, time will make its message more powerful, as its target issues continue failing to live up to all the hype.  

 

 

This book will also embolden others to write similar works of fiction and there is a huge market for changing Lomborg type material into a more mass item and the market for teens and children for example is not even started.

 

Popular authors writing this type of book is evidence to me that Global Warming, as ‘the’ all conquering green issue is now past its peak.  I loved the book even though I don’t like the James Bond type stuff, because it is a whole new front in the war on green mush thinking.

 

 Well worth the effort. 

AUTHOR'S MESSAGE: Michael Crichton (printed at the end of State of Fear)

We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to  how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause

We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a four-hundred-year cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age"

Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon

Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made

Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century. The computer models vary by 400 percent, defacto proof that nobody knows. But if I had to guess - the only thing anyone is doing, really - I would guess the increase will be 0.812436 degrees C. There is no evidence that my guess about the state of the world one hundred years from now is any better or worse than anyone else's. (We can't "assess" the future, nor can we "predict" it. These are euphemisms. We can only guess. An informed guess is just a guess.)

I suspect that part of the observed surface warming will ultimately be attributable to human activity. I suspect the principal human effect will come from land use, and that the atmospheric component will be minor.

Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better.

I think for anyone to believe in impending resource scarcity, after two hundred years of such false alarms, is kind of weird. I don't know whether such a belief today is best ascribed to ignorance of history, sclerotic dogmatism, unhealthy love of Malthus, or simple pigheadedness, but it is evidently a hardy perennial in human calculation.

There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or the interminable yammering of fear mongers. So far as I know, nobody had to ban horse transport in the early twentieth century.

I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.

The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism. Public education is desperately needed.

I conclude that most environmental "principles" (such as sustainable development or the precautionary principle) have the effect of preserving the economic advantages of the West and thus constitute modern imperialism toward the developing world. It is a nice way of saying, "We got ours and we don't want you to get yours, because you'll cause too much pollution."

The "precautionary principle", properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle. It is self-contradictory. The precautionary principle therefore cannot be spoken of in terms that are too harsh.

I believe people are well intentioned. But I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortion of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

I have more respect for people who change their views after acquiring new information than for those who cling to views they held thirty years ago. The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don't.

In the thirty-five-odd years since the environment movement came into existence, science has undergone a major revolution. This revolution has brought new understanding of nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, chaos theory, catastrophe theory. It has transformed the way we think about evolution and ecology. Yet these no-longer-new ideas have hardly penetrated the thinking of environmental activists, which seem oddly fixed in the concepts and rhetoric of the 1970s.

We haven't the foggiest notion how to preserve what we term "wildnerness", and we had better study it in the field and learn how to do so. I see no evidence that we are conducting such research in a humble, rational, and systematic way. I therefore hold little hope for wilderness management in the twenty-first century. I blame environmental organisations every bit as much as developers and strip miners. There is no difference in outcomes between greed and incompetence.

We need a new environmental movement, with new goals and new organisations. We need more people working in the field, in the actual environment, and fewer people behind computer screens. We need more scientists and many fewer lawyers.

We cannot hope to manage a complex system such as the environment through litigation. We can only change its state temporarily - usually by preventing something - with eventual results that we cannot predict and ultimately cannot control.

Nothing is more inherently political than our shared physical environment, and nothing is more ill served by allegiance to a single political party. Precisely because the environment is shared it cannot be managed by one faction according to its own economic or aesthetic preferences. Sooner or later, the opposing faction will take power and the previous policies will be reversed. Stable management of the environment required recognition that all preference have their place: snowmobilers and fly fishermen, dirt bikers and hikers, developers and preservationists. These preferences are at odds, and their incompatibility cannot be avoided. But resolving incompatible goals is a true function of politics.

We desperately need a nonpartisan, blinded funding mechanism to conduct research to determine appropriate policy. Scientists are only too aware whom they are working for. Those who fund research - whether a drug company, a government agency, or an environmental organisation - always have a particular outcome in mind. Research funding is almost never open-ended or open-minded. Scientists know that continued funding depends on delivering the results the funders desire. As a result, environmental organisation "studies" are every bit as biased and suspect as industry "studies". Government "studies" are similarly biased according to who is running the department or administration at the time. No faction should be given a free pass.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

I personally experience a profound pleasure being in nature. My happiest days each year are those I spend in wilderness. I wish natural environments to be preserved for future generations. I am not satisfied they will be preserved in sufficient quantities, or with sufficient skill. I conclude that the "exploiters of the environment" include environmental organisations, government organisations, and big business. All have equally dismal track records.

Everybody has an agenda. Except me

I think the environment is one of those topics where you need a philosophy to come to grips with the issues, just listening to the conflicted scientists doesn't seem to do the job.  On  the basis of the following reviews I would put the following book on my ought to read list.

Chase, Alston. In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature.

Michael Crichton's review:

Essential reading. This book is a history of the conflict over the forests of the Northwest, a cheerless and distressing story. As a former professor of philosophy, the author is one of the few writers in the environmental field who shows the slightest interest in ideas - where they come from, what consequences have flowed from them in the historical past, and therefore what consequences are likely to flow from them now. Chase discusses such notions as the mystic vision of wilderness and the balance of nature from the standpoint of both science and philosophy. He is contemptuous of much conventional wisdom and the muddle-headed ramblings he calls "California cosmology." The book is long and sometimes rambling, but extremely rewarding.

Editorial review:

When Chase's history of environmental politics first came out in 1995, critics praised it, readers went wild for it, and lots of people<-- >scientists, executives, environmental activists--were angered by it. But, as Chase (a former philosophy professor) notes in a new introduction, in the end the work "had absolutely no effect on public policy at all." That's a shame, because in describing the ongoing conflict over forests and threatened animals in the Pacific Northwest, Chase provides a startlingly clear view of why America will continue to lose landscapes and wild species: because its preservation policies rest on deeply flawed premises. It's a compellingly written narrative, full of the personalities involved in the conflict, as well as an important analysis

amazon readers review, Reviewer:Emily Zimmerman

Until reading "In a Dark Wood" I espoused "politically correct" environmentalist views -- such as "all old growth forests must be saved at any cost from evil logging" -- in a knee-jerk, emotionally charged, self-righteous way, without ever taking the trouble to study or think through what was really at stake, and what premises about reality underlay my views. Alston Chase's thinking on conservation is so clearly presented, so well backed by evidence, so carefully analysed, and so full of good will and integrity, that I find it impossible to read his book without respecting his intentions -- and his conclusions, which challenge everything I had unthinkingly assumed in the past. This is the kind of book that not only addresses concrete problems, such as the political struggle between, say Earth First and Maxxam Corporation, but also inspires the reader to think more deeply, and question his/her assumptions. This is the kind of book I think most self-labeled "environmentalists" -- especially those who come from white, middle class, college-educated backgrounds -- will dismiss prior to investigation, and will never read. If so, it is a sad loss. It's a book that can change your views and help you learn to think better -- and I believe most people would rather not do so, since thinking better might well spoil the dramatic excitement of waging a war of good against evil, nature against humanity. Still, I hope people will read this book. It's one that changed my life.

patrick wrote:

Implausible?, next you will be saying that Jurassic Park is Implausible! I should write such a bad novel with such characterisation!  The one thing I kept seeing were people that I recognized (not least of which myself in various guises; notably the mad professor being ejected from the conference).

It's a side issue but I'm not sure that Jurassic Park is implausible. Richard Dawkins believes that one day dinosaurs will be reconstructed by humans (I would have to dig up that reference but ask if you want it) and this was before a recent news report where I read that the flesh of dinosaurs has recently been found (but that doesn't mean that the DNA has survived)

Crichton uses the "mad" professor to make some of his more philosophical speculations about about how things are. One of these is that there is no such thing as a balance of nature. The professor says:

Similarly in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called 'the balance of nature'. If you just left nature alone it would come into a self maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice.

However, by 1990  no scientist  believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance ... that means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway.

I don't know why Crichton chose a "mad" professor to say those words rather than one of the more stable and authoritive members of his cast because what the mad professor is saying is similar to what Crichton says in the authors message at the end of the book, which is quoted in full in the crichton's message post earlier in this thread:

In the thirty-five-odd years since the environment movement came into existence, science has undergone a major revolution. This revolution has brought new understanding of nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, chaos theory, catastrophe theory. It has transformed the way we think about evolution and ecology. Yet these no-longer-new ideas have hardly penetrated the thinking of environmental activists, which seem oddly fixed in the concepts and rhetoric of the 1970s.

In his author's message, printed at the end of State of Fear, Michael Crichton said:

The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism. Public education is desperately needed.

I just read an article by Christina Hoff Sommers, Enough already with kid gloves, which outlines some of this near hysterical crimp of the human spirit that is currently being introduced into American schools.

Some schools have replaced red pens with purple pens for teacher marking because purple is more pleasant than red.

Other schools are prohibiting or banning competitive games such as tag and dodgeball because some child's feelings might be hurt.

A parent teacher organisation has recommended that "tug of war" be replaced by "tug of peace."

Sommers writes:

... many adults today regard the children in their care as fragile hothouse flowers who require protection from even the remote possibility of frustration, disappointment or failure

Christina Hoff Sommers links these changes to a misguided self esteem movement that is intent on praising children even when they haven't achieved anything.

Sommers and Crichton are suggesting that both our children and the planet are more robust and resiliant than those who want to save them suggest.

Maybe we should just get on with living rather than wrapping the world up in cotton wool