A review of Chris Skates’ “Going Green: For Some It Has Nothing to Do With the Environment” (384 pages, Bridge Logos, 2011) For decades, experts in religion, science, economics and politics have warned of false theology, agenda-driven and often irrationalist post-normal science, statist command-and-control economics, and Big-Brother, expansionist, intrusive political visions of the global environmental movement.
One early and prescient warning was by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961. He warned that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had “grave implications.”
But he warned of another, related danger: “the technological revolution,” which threatens a free society in two ways. “In this revolution,” because research “becomes more formalized, complex, and costly,” more and more “is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the federal government.”
Consequently, “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. … The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet … , we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Thirty-three years later, Charles Rubin, then associate professor of political science at Duquesne University, echoing Eisenhower, warned in “The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism” (1994) of a “reign of science,” actually a pseudoscience that dominates the environmentalist movement.
Environmentalism’s comprehensive vision of global degradation and global restoration give it “the pronounced tendency for the ideals described to be at best utopian and at worst totalitarian in character,” Rubin writes, so that “the thorough-going reforms they propose are most likely to involve powerful, centralized, and intrusive institutions of governance either at the global level or within individual societies.”
Since then, many scholarly nonfiction books, including the Cornwall Alliance’s “Resisting the Green Dragon” (and accompanying 13-part DVD series), have critiqued environmentalism’s sloppy science, poor economics, anti-biblical religion and dangerous politics.
To spread the message to a much wider public, however, not just nonfiction but also fiction must play a role. Some talented authors have stepped up to the plate. Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” (1994) is a best-selling page-turner despite embodying a great deal of technical science.
L.P. Hoffman’s “The Canaan Creed” (2008) gently and sensitively tells a story of a small community in Wyoming entangled in a web of international intrigue and danger.
Now a new novel dramatizes the dangers of a utopian movement gone haywire. “Going Green: For Some It Has Nothing to Do With the Environment” is Chris Skates’ white-knuckled, whirlwind tale (I read it in a single sitting!) of a young environmental engineer who discovers, when she goes to work at a power plant, that her bosses aren’t the Earth-abusing monsters her college professors portrayed.
Rather, they are caring, responsible people who balance serving people’s energy needs with protecting air, water and soil even at the cost of millions of dollars — but that they have enemies not quite of that sort.
When heroine Ashley Miller travels to Washington to testify before a congressional committee, she becomes the target of terrorists bent on crippling America by destroying its energy infrastructure.
Particularly impressive is Skates’ extensive understanding of the scientific and economic aspects of both the energy industry and environmentalism, the latter particularly in its ties not only with ongoing socialist attempts to undermine America but also with radical Islam.
British journalist Melanie Phillips’ chapter “The Red-Black-Green-Islamic Alliance” in “The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth And Power” (2010) comes to mind.
Skates brings to his writing not only a firmly Christian world view but also 21 years of experience in nuclear, industrial and environmental chemistry, enabling him to weave realism about the power industry into his narrative.
Readers get an inside look at the kinds of safety measures implemented by power plants to protect not only people but the environment. The result is a thoroughly entertaining tale that offers a well-informed glimpse into the worlds of power generation and eco-terrorism.
E. Calvin Beisner is founder and national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and author of “Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate” (1997).
