And Another Thing... SOFT Greens, HARD Landings
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Rick von Flatern
  Tuesday, February 01, 2000

To many who ponder the state of the environment, despite much evidence to the contrary it must seem the natural world is doomed. Such a perception is understandable. After all, no less a person than US vice-president Al Gore, said as much in his 1992 pseudoscientific and fantastically titled best seller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

That Gore tackles such an immensely complex subject without any apparent credentials seems to bother no one in his camp, least of all the man who would be president. It serves his political ambitions and his ego to appear to have a handle on such a dire situation.

But it does bother a good many people outside the Gore compound, including Peter Huber. And the public would be better served to listen to Huber who, unlike Gore, knows of what he speaks.

Huber is an MIT-trained engineer. He has taught engineering at that prestigious university and is today a senior fellow there. He has served as a law clerk under then appellate court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and later as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He is currently a Forbes Magazine columnist.

That the political left and Al Gore have hijacked the environmental movement bothers the politically conservative Huber inordinately, not because he thinks their cause unworthy but because he believes they are ill-equipped to serve it. The modern environmental movement, he points out, grew from the work of the great political conservative land conservationist Teddy Roosevelt and it is his political and philosophical inheritors that are still best suited to the job. In fact, he says, those from the left who decry free markets and complex technology as threats to nature are not only ineffective stewards of the earth, but are in fact doing it great harm.

Huber lays out his case in his recently released book, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: a Conservative Manifesto (Basic Books, 1999). In it he refers to the environmentalists of the left as 'soft greens'. Those like himself whose hope for a greener planet lies in free markets and technological solutions he labels 'hard greens'.

So well has the left propagandized the environmental dialogue, that one is tempted to read Huber's manifesto with a great deal of skepticism. He is after all an unapologetic conservative and is therefore open to (and no doubt will hear) the charge from the left that he is only an attack dog for those seeking to justify their abuse of the earth in pursuit of profit.

A fair reading allays such fears. One is forced, through the force of Huber's logic, to believe he is out to do only what he says he is: save the earth. Not as in 'Save the Earth' slogans that show up on car bumpers at Earth Day celebrations and really mean protect all manner of organism from whales to darter snails no matter the cost to humans. Huber means save earth quite literally, proposing that the environment is best served by saving actual chunks of land, as in the tradition of Roosevelt's establishment of Yellowstone Park.

Perhaps surprisingly, given Huber's political persuasion, he does not share the belief of some that these pristine preserves should be placed in private hands. Indeed, he seems destined to raise the ire of some of his political pals by suggesting the management of such giant bits of land is something to which the government is better suited than private enterprise since preserving land and making it economically viable are goals at odds with each other and therefore should not be mixed.

Equally out of conservative character, Huber does not justify his call for the preservation of beautiful pieces of land via some convoluted economic reason as is the fashion among conservatives fearful of being labeled liberals. They should be preserved, he claims, simply for their aesthetics. Again, hardly the sentiments of a hard-nosed conservative. (His conservative colors do reassert themselves however when he adds that management of such lands is where government meddling in the matter should end.)

And all of that does not lead to an argument for the rights of private enterprise to treat the remainder of the planet with cavalier disregard. In the hard green philosophy, conservation of earth is also a private matter. The difference is it works not by government mandate, the favored ploy of the soft greens, but because it makes good economic sense. For instance, hard greens favor fuel sources that render the most power while disturbing the least amount of land. As such the best fuel from an environmental standpoint is uranium, a very small bit of which generates enormous amounts of power.

Next on the hard green's list of preferred fuels, and one without the baggage of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, is oil. Mining oil after all requires a relatively small footprint and most of the real estate it disturbs is beneath the earth's surface.

The use of oil has the added attraction of preserving land in secondary ways. Because of the pesticides derived from it more food is grown on less land. And food lasts longer and therefore can travel farther when wrapped in petroleum-based plastics. That translates to less spoilage, the need to produce less food and more land freed up.