The initials “DDT” still give Americans the jitters — and that fact alone demonstrates the remarkable success of the environmental movement at (as the activists say) “raising our consciousness.”
The problem, however, is that a raised consciousness and sound judgment don’t always go hand in hand. The campaign against DDT marked the first lapse of the American green movement. In 1962, Rachel Carlson published her now famous Silent Spring, which warned that the secondary effects of pesticides would destroy the environment, seep into the food chain, and threaten human life. Hysteria followed; nations around the world banned DDT; and the modern environmental movement emerged with the immodest goal of “saving the earth.”
As it turns out, Carlson and her readers simply ignored the health benefits of DDT in killing the nasty little bugs that cause even nastier diseases. Before DDT, third world countries suffered malaria epidemics. Once they started using the pesticide, the incidence of malaria shrunk to almost nothing. After the DDT ban, the deadly disease came back with a vengeance, and — despite an extensive study in which the National Cancer Institute concluded that the enormous benefits of DDT far outweigh the marginal risks — the pesticide remains banned through much of the world.
As S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman argue in their new book, Environmental Cancer: A Political Disease?, there are real, often severe, consequences when environmental activists and sympathetic journalists distort or ignore the best scientific evidence: Bad policies and costly regulations strangle the economy, misallocate resources, and needlessly encroach on liberty and property rights. Lawsuits based on myths rather than evidence unfairly punish law-abiding businesses. Court costs skyrocket. Potentially beneficial products — such as fertilizers and medicines — never make it to market. And the public is irrationally alarmed, feeding the politics of emotion.
Environmental Cancer is not a polemic against the environmental movement. It is, rather, a rigorous and empirical study of how environmentalists, journalists, and scientists differently assess the impact of various environmental factors on the incidence of cancer. As the authors explain, “We want to know . . . to what extent scientists’ findings accord with the views of mainstream environmentalists . . . and how accurately the media report the views of scientific experts on environmental cancer.” Their findings do not inspire confidence.
The book begins by tracing the intellectual and social history of the environmental movement in America, pointing out the distinction between “ecocentrists” and “technocentrists.” Ecocentrists are romantics, descendants of Thoreau, who make nature a religion and generally feel guilty about enjoying modern conveniences. Technocentrists are rationalists, descendants of Malthus, who believe government regulation is necessary for “sustainable development.” The modern environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, combining ecocentrism, technocentrism, and countercultural alienation into a vast political machine. By 1994, the so-called Group of Ten, a loose alliance of the most influential environmental groups, had a combined membership of 8,534,000 and a combined budget of $ 315 million.
“Environmentalists have had remarkable success in winning both the high ground and the grass roots away from their wealthy, well-established, politically connected opponents in corporate America,” the authors write. “This political success rests largely on their ability to embody a combination of intellectual and moral authority.” And that authority doesn’t always have much to do with reality.
Lichter and Rothman surveyed a representative sample of over four hundred members of the American Association for Cancer Research, the most respected professional organization of cancer researchers in the nation. The survey asked the researchers to evaluate how various aspects of the environment contribute to human cancer rates in the United States. It also asked them to consider specific substances, like tobacco, asbestos, and pesticides, that periodically generate political controversy. The authors asked the same questions of the nation’s most prominent environmentalists.
The findings are unsettling, if not surprising: Environmental leaders assigned higher risks than cancer researchers to eleven out of thirteen substances; 64 percent of activists but only 30 percent of experts said that industry causes cancer; and more than twice as many activists as scientists believe the country faces a cancer epidemic. Activists are equally out of sync with the public at large — despite the fact that a majority of Americans describe themselves as “environmentally conscious” — leading the authors to wonder: “If the activists don’t represent the public consciousness and don’t speak for (or from) expert opinion on scientific matters, precisely where do their views on environmental health threats come from?”
Environmentalists have a liberator complex that seems to prevent them from accepting tradeoffs, complexity, and the fallibility of man and institutions. All mistakes appear to them to be conspiracies; all injustice oppression. Liberators need a fallen world to decry and save, an evil status quo to protest against and then regulate out of existence — if only to confirm them in their belief that they are in a unique state of grace.
In his own book on the environment, Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore compares ecological activists to “resistance fighters” during World War II and modern society to an environmental holocaust. This lack of perspective, from a presidential candidate, is telling. He decries modern civilization as “corrupt” and “inauthentic,” and declares that we must “use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action . . . to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system.”
The tragedy of the environmental movement is that activists turn legitimate concerns — the effect of industry on natural resources, the need to balance technological and industrial advance with the preservation of nature and wildlife — into prophecies of doom. Seeing the world through a single prism, they ignore the inevitable trade-offs that come from balancing competing risks, goals, and values. Sacrificing scientific reality on the altar of ideology, environmentalists distort the premises upon which rational political discourse could take place.
Lichter and Rothman examine mainstream media coverage of environmental cancer from 1972 to 1992. The news agenda reflects the views of environmentalists, not scientists, misrepresenting not only the best available evidence about cancer risks but the nature of expert opinion. Eighty-five percent of media sources agreed that the United States faced a cancer epidemic, but only 31 percent of cancer researchers did; 66 percent of media sources said that cancer-causing agents are unsafe at any dose, but only 28 percent of scientists did. Furthermore, the media over-whelmingly emphasized the cancer risks of man-made chemicals, which received more than twice as much coverage as any other cancer-causing agent (including tobacco, which scientists judge to be more than three times as harmful). As the authors conclude, the information environment has become “hazardous to our health.” Environmental cancer “is at least partly a political disease.”
When it comes to environmental issues, many journalists proudly admit, as Charles Alexander, Time magazine’s science editor, said in 1989, that “we have crossed the boundary from news reporting into advocacy.” The press often functions as a “passive conduit” for environmental critics, affirmed Nicholas Wade, science editor at the New York Times: “Often we’re just doing our duty in following the activism of environmentalists.” Journalists want to be liberators, too.
Such media advocacy has real political consequences. “Making news is making policy by other means,” Lichter and Rothman observe. “This is particularly true for an issue like environmental health risks, which engages primal fears of physical safety and well-being.” Environmental Cancer is filled with historical examples — DDT, Alar, Agent Orange — of what happens when the shared enthusiasm of activists and journalists subverts reason and science: alarm, litigation, regulation, and a vast misallocation of resources, and only much later, the discovery that the original fears had been greatly exaggerated. But by then, of course, it is too late. The cancer of zealotry has spread beyond cure.
S. ROBERT LICHTER and STANLEY ROTHMAN
Environmental Cancer A Political Disease?
Yale, 235 pp., $ 35
Eric S. Cohen is assistant editor of the Public Interest.
