Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions.

In the early twentieth century, the American scholar William James defined religion as the belief in “an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in adjusting ourselves thereto.”47 The scholar Paul Tillich defined religion more broadly to include belief systems and moral frameworks. For environmentalists, the unseen order we need to adjust ourselves to is nature. Throughout this book we have seen environmental support for various behaviors, technologies, and policies motivated not by what the science tells us but by intuitive views of nature. These intuitive views rest on the appeal-to-nature fallacy.

The answer from many rational environmentalists, including myself, who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of apocalyptic environmentalism, has been that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study. Others, like Scruton, urge us to aim for a world “where conflicts are resolved according to a shared conception of justice” and the “building and governance of institutions, and to the thousand ways in which people enrich their lives through corporations, traditions and spheres of accountability.”83 But Scruton himself doubted that such a rationalist project could succeed against the apocalyptic tendencies of the regressive left. “Clearly we are dealing with the religious need, a need planted in our ‘species being,’ ” he writes. “There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought, no proof of the absolute loneliness or humanity or of the unredeemed nature of our sufferings, can ever eradicate.”

Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both. For while some environmentalists claim their agenda will also deliver a greener prosperity, the evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and for the natural environment.