May 05, 2005
5/5 - Crying Wolf on the Environment: Now it's time to beat up the Great Barrier Reef Folks?
Clearly we are in the midst of a worldwide trend. A huge streak of skepticism, resentment, and rebuke has broken out around the world in terms of the mass audience rising up to give the finger to the environmental movement. You see it in the Death of Environmentalism essays, you read it very loudly in Michael Crichton's "State of Fear," and Outside magazine this month has gone so far as to list "The Counter-Enviro Power List" -- their list of the twenty most powerful
anti-environmentalists (note that among the list is muckraker John Stossel whom Mark Dowie skillfully dissected in The Nation a few years ago which is more evidence of why we are ready to found the Mark Dowie Fan Club).
In Dowie's 1995 book, "Losing Ground," he quoted Nobel Laureate George Wald at Earth Day 1970 stating his fear that pollution would "go on merrily in all its present forms, while we superimpose a new multi-billion dollar anti-pollution industry on top of it." Well, now it appears a third industry, the anti-anti-pollution industry has emerged. Kind of like a whole host-parasite type thing. Like those wood wasps with the hyper-parasitism. Whatever.
Anyhow, I met Walter Starck 24 years ago when he was the head of a sort of commune in north Queensland, Australia, living on his research ship tied up on the banks of the Daintree River in the midst of the rainforest. Great guy. A true character. They brewed some amazing home beer at the time. And being of the feisty, independent mind set that he is, it's perhaps inevitable that he would have had a gut full of the enviro hype, prompting him to write a little essay about the "threats" to the Great Barrier Reef. Which is just another piece of this backlash in progress against the environmental movement. I wonder when the folks at the top of the enviro world will begin to sense that the peasants are amassing outside their castle.
Before we relax our concerns about the Great Barrier Reef, let's make
sure we know what the baselines are.