Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

But a homegrown backlash against industrialization and agricultural modernization had started to brew even before the federal government created the TVA. In 1930, forty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar and Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in the opening essay in a famous collection, I’ll Take My Stand, “the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.”58 Ransom and the other “Southern Agrarians” disparaged cities and industry for their impact on the environment and on people. They declared farm machinery, paved roads, and indoor plumbing as part of the “disease of modern industrial civilization.” Ransom’s perspective as a poet at Vanderbilt University was quite different from the one of the poor sharecroppers. The people of the Tennessee Valley region who suffered from malaria and hunger likely might have disagreed with the view that they had been living at peace with nature. Critics of Ransom and the Southern Agrarians called them “typewriter agrarians” in the same way people sometimes criticize upper-middle-class progressives as “latte liberals.”