FT,
Someday people will look back on this time as an era of madness
Same could be said of most times. Berliner may indeed be brilliant, but he doesn't show it in the piece of work I cited. Some excerpts:
The fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water; rather it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Their goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion...
To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing, compromising approach of those who urge a "balance" between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment. To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress, and human life.
Berliner judges all environmentalists by the statements of a small but loud lunatic fringe, which is neither just nor logical. He ignores the history of the environmental movement, which was a response to a pattern of grossly irresponsible abuse that sacrificed collective needs like clean air, potable water, and the maintenance of a reasonable amount of wilderness space not to the needs of development, but to indulge individual greed. Environmental standards in the US are stricter than almost anywhere in the world; has our development or comfort been irretrievably compromised? To be sure, some in the environmental movement have overreacted, and the pendulum will inevitably swing back. That is the nature of the policy debate. Urging the wholesale rejection of one side of a debate, though, especially when that side has demonstrably valid points, is downright stupid.
It is always easiest to argue with the extremists of any cause; they rarely display any intelligence or common sense, neither of which go very well with extremism. Discussion of the core issues is a little harder, but anyone as brilliant as Berliner ought to be able to manage it.
Steve
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