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Just finished up one of Micheal Crichton's newest, the global warming gnad-kicker State of Fear. For all the controversy this book apparently generated, I can only guess that people apparently forgot that this is the same guy who wrote a book about dinosaurs being resurrected from a combination of millennia - old mosquito blood and frogs.
So, anyway. As a Crichton-thriller, it was a decent enough quick read. Thinly developed antagonists, strong-but-beautiful women, ignorant heroes who come around to the TRUTH... etc. Only paying 50 cents for it didn't hurt.
However.
Throughout this novel, Crichton made every effort to make any character that believed in global warming look like either a pompous blowhard actor, a deluded, uneducated moron, an environmental industry shill, or a murderous bastard. All of his heroes in the book (with the exception of the abovementioned character who comes around to the TRUTH), on the other hand, apparently walk around with a head (and a laptop) full of charts, graphs, quotes, and well-practiced lectures about how global warming is a complete sham and anyone who believes in it is completely ignorant of history, environmental standards, and so on.
Hypocrisy plays no small part in the point Crichton is trying to get across, when in one chapter he defends scientists who get funding from corporate and government sources, saying basically that they have to be getting their funding from somewhere, and that getting that funding doesn't necessarily render them beholden to those sources.
But then he turns around in the next chapter and accuses scientists who speak of global warming of either being tools of the larger environmental groups or too timid to speak out against global warming for fear of losing funding.
He makes no effort to recognize data pointing to a sizable increase in average air temperature over the oceans, melting tundra in northern areas that result in greater methane releases into the atmosphere, etc.
In one of his few fair points, but one that's not all that terribly surprising, he points out the falsehood of the deification of ancient races and their veneration of and love for nature, when they in fact were just trying to get by and altered their own environment to suit their needs. But he also makes what I see as a fairly spurious claim that those same peoples hunted several different species to extinction. A couple, perhaps, but they had neither the technology nor the numbers to completely demolish any significant numbers of species. Native Americans, at least, recognized the value of the buffalo and apparently didn't fuck that up too badly.
Which leads into this. Making the point above, he completely neglected to account for increases in technology allowing modern man to affect his environment at a much greater rate than was possible even 50, 60 years ago. Nor does he cover the fact that human population is growing at an exponential rate, and that the obvious correlation to be made from that is that the more people that are on the planet, the more the environment will be affected.
His social criticisms in the book are also radically unfounded. To point out that many environmentalists glorifying the horrible situation many native people find themselves in by calling it 'respect for nature' are foolish is all well and good. But to then say that it's environmental regulations holding them down while glossing over the problems with the 'free' market, globalism, rampant colonialism, and resource grabbing done by 'benevolent' western nations is just plain ignorant or purposely deceptive. Sorry, Mike, but these people aren't going to be helped any more by a 'return to nature' then they are by WalMart and McDonalds.
In the end, Crichton invests far too much time preaching to the crowd without actually examining the soapbox he's standing on.
His other overall point, that there are forces who use fear to keep the public in line (hence the title of the book), is very true. Apparently, however, this only applies to the environmental movement et. al. and whatever other issues Chrichton takes objection to. Oddly enough (or not, really), this doesn't include the military-industrial complex or the US government, the two largest fear-mongerers on the planet. |
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