RESEARCH REPORTS
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
The True State of the Planet. The Free Press, 1230 Ave. of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020.472 pp. $15 Editor: Ronald Bailey
For a quarter-century, the environmental movement has marched to the loud, clanging sounds of alarm bells. The human population is growing too large, too fast. Scarce natural resources are being recklessly depleted. Biodiversity is endangered. Forests are being destroyed. The oceans are being overfished. Global warming threatens the planet. Apocalypse, in short, is just around the corner, unless humanity acts--and acts now--to thwart it. In what is packaged as an "alternative" from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to the highly publicized "State of the World reports issued annually by the Worldwatch Institute, Bailey, the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (1993), and 11 environmental researchers offer some strong arguments and a great deal of data to counter the conventional doomsday wisdom. Bailey acknowledges that since Earth Day 1970, when the environmental movement was launched, it has achieved much good. In the developed world of the West, thanks to environmentalists, "air and water are much cleaner; automobiles are far cleaner to operate; belching smokestacks are far fewer and generally more efficient than ever before."