The True State of the Planet, edited by Ronald Bailey (Free Press, 472 pp., $15)
THE COURTS protect the nation’s public schools from Christian indoctrination but not from the dogmas of the Green faith. Righteousness consists of consuming less, conserving energy, buying “natural” products, eating less meat, and recycling. Environmentalism is the new civics. The Green worldview has us running out of natural resources, destroying species, endangering the fragile planet, its ozone layer, and its climate, and so forth. The green bible, Lester Brown’s State of the World, is in all the schools. This new book is the closest thing going to an alternative bible. It is excellent on population, food supplies, climate, resources, cancer, and air quality. It is competent but longwinded on biodiversity, forests, and fisheries. And the epilogue by Fred Smith is brilliantly original —despite a couple of bizarrely incomprehensible passages. I need a bible class to discover what he means by: “Mariculture, unlike the petroleum industry, has not yet made fishing noneconomic.” But a great buy for $15, and we need a Gideons to put it in all the schools.
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