Customer Reviews

Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health!

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This is basically a good book, but flawed in ways that will reduce its effectiveness.
Berlau argues that the modern environmental movement has harmed people. He is not
complaining that corporations are constrained in their greed. Rather, individual men,
women, and children are killed or harmed because of the actions of environmentalists.

Most of the rules he complains about were based on bad, even fraudulent science.
In the areas I'm familiar with, Berlau got the science mostly right. There are good notes
and references so you can check up on him, and on the people he relies on. I'm not going
to try to summarize the science as that would make this review too long.

A person can contract malaria several times during a lifetime. There are 300 to 500
million cases per year, and over 2 million deaths from malaria each year. Most of those
cases could be avoided by the use of DDT. There are no documented cases of anyone dying
from DDT or from a condition caused by DDT.

Asbestos is fireproof and reduces the flow of heat. Steel is not as strong when it is hot.
The World Trade Center towers were designed to withstand the impact of the largest
airliner of the day, a Boeing 707, and the resulting fire. The steel framework was to be
wrapped in asbestos. But then politics kept the asbestos out. With asbestos the towers
would have remained standing much longer, so more people could escape.

There is a mix of political influences in autos. Greens are not the only ones that apply
pressure for more expensive than necessary, less efficient than possible, less safe cars.

Trees are nice, and we have more of them than we had prior to the Civil War. Here in
Massachusetts the land is more forested than it was during the Revolutionary War.
Leaving forests untouched means really big fires when fires happen.
The deer population is about the same as in colonial days.

Environmentalists prevented the building of flood protection gates near New Orleans.
The proposed gates were based on those used in Netherlands, where they know a lot about
how to prevent flooding low lands.

Almost everyone agrees with the expressed desire of environmentalists. Clean air is better
than dirty air. Clean water is better than dirty water. A mountain is prettier than an
open pit mine. A Redwood tree is nicer than a clear cut forest. Bambi is nicer than a
slaughterhouse. But these are not the real choices. The real choices are matters of degree
and there are real costs associated with the alternatives. Is it worth 5 less mpg on every
car to get the air from extremely pure to ultra pure? Is it worth $1500 extra for every new
house to save 113 spotted owls? These are the kinds of questions that are avoided by the
environmentalists.

The extreme environmentalists seem to hate humanity. They preach about huge harms from
hypothetical situations and ignore real threats that have proven defenses. Berlau points
out much fakery in the movement. The most telling lines come from David Brower, long the
head of the Sierra Club, on page 210. "The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservatory look
reasonable. Then I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable.
Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth
First! now makes us look reasonable. We're still waiting for someone to come along and make
Earth First! look reasonable."

The extremists are not going to be changed by this book. They seem to have a religious
faith that anything is justified to "save the planet." But this book might help most
people think about the trade-off and the costs of things that would be nice if they were free.

That is where the weaknesses appear. There are problems with facts and attitude problems.
First the factual flaws. None reduce the message of the book, but they provide ammunition for
those that will attack it. "If he's wrong on these things, why trust him on any claim?"
It was not a light plane that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. It was a B-25
medium bomber. Berlau seems to confuse minivans and SUVs, generally using the later term
for both. Native Americans used fire intentionally in forests, and burned prairies as a
hunting technique, but they did not create the great plains by burning down the forests.
I don't promise this is a complete list. There are also a bunch of editing flaws, the kind
that appear because word processing is so easy. An example is adding a second example to a
sentence and forgetting to change a verb to the plural form.

Other reviewers have pointed out the insulting title and the "sarcastic" cover illustration.
Politicians are rightly blamed for many foolish actions. The Democrats seem to have a majority
of the environmentally idiotic politicians, even though Nixon gave us the EPA and the DDT ban.
Berlau often labels the politicians as liberal. I think this makes many potential readers
less receptive to the good information in the book.

Overall, this is a good book on an important topic. I just wish it was a little better so it
would be a more persuasive book.

Eco-Freaks is a must read if you honestly want alternative perspectives on environmentalism. Berlau shook up my thoughts what it means to be an environmentalist. Personally I focus on minimizing consumption, eco-friendly choices, and promoting a clean environment. While I love trees and have just renewed my Arbor Day Foundation membership, I have more freedom to enjoy fresh air and warm sunshine in the back yard. Humankind has and is altering the environment of the world daily. Did my American Indian ancestors have their way with the environment as much as they could? I definitely believe so. Before reading Eco-Freaks I was perplexed when visiting my extended family in Napoli. They were extremely grateful to see the death of their friends and family stop with the spraying of DDT when the US troops invaded the Italian peninsula during WWII. Did this save my wife's family from dying of Typhus? I can't imagine having the arrogance to tell the 25% of Neapolitan's dieing of Typhus during WWII that there might be longer term health risks so we can't help them. My father spent 2 years in the South Pacific during WWII. I can't image not saving my family and friends and the local population from Malaria without at least a critical debate. Given that the Gates foundation has listed Malaria as one of the top three health hazards in the world, shouldn't we at least critically review our stance? I hope that we can move to a level where we can have debates without labeling and marginalizing each others positions.

Berlau's insightful and down-to-earth writing style has me see that even the "greenest" environmentalist and the "worst" industrialist are more aligned than the "public debate" would have us think. Perhaps the greatest take-away from Berlau's Eco-Freaks is to really look at how our public debates on environmentalism are polarized into a very young "right" and "wrong" positions. This has the effect of hampering or eliminating dialogue on the subject at hand.
Berlau didn't give me all of the answers, but I am definitely more critically looking at the assumptions that I make and inherit from others.
-Tom

Several reviews below are informative, correct but a bit long. Here's a quick overview. The Hoover Dam saves lives & prevents flooding. Environmentalists (Eco-Freaks) would like it blown up. There is no evidence DDT kills or even harms hardly anything. It can and has saved millions of lives. Eco-Freaks support it's ban. Asbestos is a fire prevention wonder and it's few negatives can easily be controlled. Eco-Freaks are against asbestos use. Trees put way more hydrocarbons in the atmosphere than cars. Eco-Freaks love trees and hate cars. The Netherlands has a wonder life-saving system of water & flood control. Eco-Freaks pursue lawsuits rather than allow a system like that to save lives in New Orleans. The book points out many other examples. Environmentalists are amazing in their consistent ability to be wrong on everything. Being stubbornly wrong in the face of mountains of contrary evidence propels them to honorary status with the liberal left. The brainlock that will not budge in the face of logic is the hallmark of the liberal left. The author presents the scientific backup that Eco-Freaks have chosen to ignore for decades. Here's hoping a few finally see the logic.

Of course, with a title like that it is unlikely to appeal to mainstream professional environmentalists; those thousands of groups who make a nice living by misleading the rest of us about many environmental issues, but then I am a different kind of environmentalist. I care both about the environment and humanity, and so does this author. I found it to be a highly informative narrative, and one that should be read by anyone who wants to learn how most environmentalists actually operate against both humanity and the environment.
The author deals with many thorny issues and corrects many of the incorrect impressions that too many special interest factions attempt to leave us with, and which cost us so dearly.
In one chapter the author deals extensively with DDT. You may not have heard the recent news, but after 30 years of suspension, the use of this miracle insecticide is about to be widely restored in Africa. This could not happen, of course, if anything demonizing it over the last 30 years had actually been true, but it has taken 30 years to demolish the various scary mythologies that have long been believed. It does not kill birds. It does not cause eggshell thinning. And it is not a human carcinogen. In the 30 years that its use has been suspended in most of the world, there have been about 60 million needless human deaths from malaria, and about 1 billion sufferers. The economies of many Third World societies have been severely damaged by the ravages of this ongoing disease and many others spread by insects, all of which would have been controlled by DDT. The many alternatives to DDT, forced upon society by this ban, were significantly more dangerous and significantly less effective, as we have all too clearly seen.
Later chapters cover Asbestos, Public health, Forest management, Hurricanes, and the role of some extreme environmentalists in Eco-terrorism.
The chapter on asbestos points out how many more lives have been lost by a hysterical perception of the dangers of asbestos than by using it where it can do the most good and with the least harm to humans. The most obvious example is possibly the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Part way into the construction of the two towers, asbestos was banned from use in these buildings. Warnings were issued even then by engineers about the substandard quality of fire protection. After the collapse, specialists in construction noted that had asbestos been used throughout the two buildings as had been originally planned and specified, it is very likely that the steel would not have softened to such a degree that the buildings would have collapsed. The New York authorities' ban of asbestos in these buildings - following environmentalist dogma - may have actually caused most of the 3000 deaths which resulted from the collapse, along with the loss of hundreds of firefighters. And the needless loss of billions of dollars.
In clamoring for public safety, the `do-gooders' in society frequently do very much more damage than if they had left things alone. Inadvertently and unintentionally, they have indirectly killed more people than even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao ever achieved. Actions always have consequences, and if we do not assess those consequences and relate them to the benefits we think we are aiming for, we frequently do far more damage than we should. This is typically the outcome of most environmentalist-inspired regulatory interventions. The situation has become so bad that one commentator noted that if the EPA was so interested in protecting humans and the environment (its reason for 'being') it should disband itself, as it causes far more deaths by its actions, than it might save, and contributes to greater environmental damage.
We all are aware of hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans. Contrary to the usual impressions, this was only a category three hurricane, but even that was sufficient to produce major damage on a city that was inadequately protected by levees. It had nothing to do with global warming. Thirty years earlier the Army Corps of Engineers had proposed several measures of flood protection to stop flood surges from Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the city, as they knew would happen eventually. Their plans were blocked by environmental obstruction in the courts, with the result that almost 1600 people died, and the city of New Orleans was severely damaged by a relatively weak hurricane. It may never recover, and is costing billions of dollars in attempted remediation. Environmentalists however have largely succeeded in escaping significant blame for this. How fortunate that the Netherlands, faced with a significantly greater risk of flood devastation, recognized that to give any environmentalists significant enough power as to block such essential human protection was to see the greater part of their country under the North Sea. The other reason of course was that those same environmentalists who might be tempted to protest, also stood a chance of being drowned if the dykes failed. Had the protesting environmentalists, concerning the protection of New Orleans been obliged to live in that city instead of living hundreds of miles away in disconnected comfort and isolation, their objections may not have been so strident, or so heedless of human safety.
This book is both easily read and entertaining. It exposes so much of the softer underbelly of most of the hypocritical environmental movements, and puts the lie to most of their power-seeking objections and actions. It is strongly supported by more than 500 references and explanatory notes.
John K. Sutherland.

I enjoyed the book and it's contrast to much of the published news on the subject matter. I was initially troubled by the authors qualification in writing an environmental book but since Al Gore has become the diviner of eco-truth and with his total lack of scientific gravitas, I thought what the heck. I'm glad I read it but will remain skeptical of both sides. I do recommend the read as a counter weight to the current flood of propaganda from the other side. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle though.

Mr. Berlau has written a very informative expose of the environmentalists who are continuing to wreck havoc on the economy, health, and living standards of the United States and the world. Spcifically Berlau explains how the hard core environmentalists have banned DDT and help spread the vicious desease malaria to millions, stopped the use of abestos and added to the deaths from fire and the terror attack on the World Trade Center, place unreasonable restrictions on automobiles and automobile manufacturers, mismanaged forests and forest fire protection, and stopped dams and other means of flood control, thus causing the flooding of New Orleans during the Katrina hurricane. Berlau has a quite impressive rap sheet on the enviros.

Wisely, Mr. Berlau avoids discussing global warming. Instead he refers readers to the book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by Dennis Avery and S. Fred Singer. Thus Mr. Berlau does not have to repeat the arguments of Avery and Singer thru most of his book.

A particular sensational expose is of the politican and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt who wanted to do away with levees on the Missouri River. Babbitt ignorantly stated that no cities existed on the flood plain of the Missouri. In reality St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City and smaller towns lie along the Missouri and are protected by levees. Babbitt demonstrates the pernicious wilfull ignorance found all too often in the environmental movement.

Plainly it is time the United States and the world faced up to the problem of environmental extremism.

I read this book with an open mind. I myself have debunked over reaching statements and conclusions by environmentalists. This included exposing that bulk buying of groceries does not reduce net packaging.

I found Berlau's history of DDT and Asbestos and why our society embraced their benefits very helpful. While these products were invented to help people, sometimes - like cigarettes- defending revenues and reputations often drives people to suppress the truth and lie to keep it on the market.

Interviewing old time DDT users and the inventor of DDT, whose personal reputations depend on DDT being good, John Berlau claims DDT is harmless and is needed today because malaria mosquitos have never gained resistance to DDT. I googled DDT mosquito resistance in Google Scholar. While banned in the U.S., DDT continued to be used elsewhere in the world. I found that malaria mosquitoes in Gambia and Liberia have become resistant to DDT by the mid 1970's. Perhaps John should have looked beyond 1940's - 1960's.

Berlau also claims DDT does no harm to humans or wildlife. However, the early studies he refers to were typically based on adults getting direct exposure - not a fetus being exposed in the womb or kids getting higher bio magnified doses up the food chain by eating fish (salmon) who ate fish who ate littler fish. This is why toxic effects first show up in predators like Bald Eagles whose eggs became brittle and Alligators whose penises became too small to breed effectively. Berlau fails to note the enormous come back eagles have made since the banning of DDT.

Getting ideological, Berlau alleges Greenpeace as having " seized a ship" containing asbestos to "stop the distribution of Asbestos". I googled that too, and Greenpeace had boarded a ship and merely posted signs on it. The ship was also not distributing Asbestos for use.

The French Aricarft Carrier in question was bound to a ship breaking facility in India where there is virtually no worker protections- OSHA standards or even air filter masks. Under international law, The Basel Convention, the French government had failed to remove hazardous materials from the ship to prepare it for recycling. The French government had no concern over the health of these underpaid, unprotected workers in India. When the Goverment of India requested that this French ship not be sent to India, Greenpeace stepped in. So much for Berlau repeated claim that enviros don't care about the poor.

Berlau points to Enviros using fear, but then spends lot's of time describing deadly fires killing hundreds of people in the pre-asbestos fire-proofing days. However, Berlau fails to highlight hazardous electrical systems, oil lamps and other fire lights in use and the complete lack of smoke alarms during these fires.

Berlau also tries to scare us by bringing back the specter of pest carried plagues. These plague problems are most often caused by hellish conditions created by war, over-crowding and poor, bombed out or non-existent sewage treatment. However, Berlau's conclusion is that that it's nature's fault. As opposed to fixing the above human caused problems or using shots, vaccines and immunization like we did for polio, Berlau's solution is to bring back DDT.

Dutch Elm disease, which Berlau discusses, effected my hometown. We lost seven giants on my family's lot alone. Today, Oak Park has a greater and more interesting diversity of trees that have replaced the mono-crop of Elms. Mono-crops are always more susceptible to disease than a diversity of species or crop varieties. Narrowing the Irish potato crop to just two high yield varieties brought on the Irish Potato famine. Again Berlau's solution is DDT.

Berlau also fails to note that international trade spread Dutch Elm disease in log shipments from Netherlands to the U.S. much like the importation of West Nile Virus, Aids and Zebra Mussels.

Today, Alberta has the largest number of elms unaffected by Dutch elm disease in the world. The City of Edmonton has banned elm pruning from March 31 to October 1, since fresh pruning wounds will attract disease carrying beetles during the warmer months. It also turns out that if pruning equipment is not sterilized or wiped with 10% with bleach solutions- the disease can also be spread by well intended city foresters taming nature.

Berlau also talks about how nature is bad and things are so much better since we tamed it. Before the Illinois river was tamed by dams, it was a top three global fishery. Protecting and preserving natural ecosystem functions often improve economics. Marine preserves, with nofishing allowed, have increased fishing yields outside the reserves as has happened in the Bahamas and in the Philippines. Here in Wisconsin, the best fishing lakes have natural reproduction as opposed to the stocked lakes tamed by humans. Since Madison banned phosphorous, our lakes have been much cleaner.

I've heard some mechanics say cars ran better on leaded gasoline, but I don't think we should bring that back either.

I think the important lesson in John Berlau's work is that we should take no one person's word for granted. We should keep thinking and look into matters because knee jerking happens on both sides of the fence.

Ricardo Jomarron

First the artwork on the cover is terrible. One of the most embarrassingly childish covers I have ever seen on a book and I would be ashamed to have anyone see it sitting on my coffee table. The writing is also second rate and consists of emotionally laced infantile rants and personal attacks on environmentalists and scientists without a shred of objective reasoning. The author's dishonesty, manipulation, distortions, and lies takes the term "psychopathic" to new levels. If there is a hell, the author and his fans will probably be visiting it very soon.

I tried to maintain an open mind and think that a book about the environmentalist movement written by the director of a center for investors and entrepreneurs wouldn't simply be another story of how "left-wing wackos" are impinging on his right to build anywhere, dam everything, and basically alter and destroy anything natural to fit the purposes of John Q. Real Estate Developer. I was disappointed. Not only do the allegations in this book show that the author has little knowledge of ecological principles...his arguments are completely false. The author states that the environmentalists that banned DDT are responsible for millions of deaths due to malaria, and DDT "poses no harm to humans"!!! As the author has no citations in critical locations such as these, it's hard to tell where he's getting this misinformation from, but the effects of DDT have been well-known for years. He also blames Hurricane Katrina's devastation on environmentalists that prevented strengthening levees, but he doesn't look back far enough in time to recognize that biologists were warning of the consequences of channelizing major rivers systems decades before. Asbestos also doesn't pose threats to human health according to the author, despite the fact it is a known carcinogen. Selective citations, skewed perspectives, and unfamiliarity with the subject matter by the author make this a book you should avoid at all costs.

This book is a clone of dozens of other "free market" rants. They all share the agenda that nature must shrink as humanity expands (by over 70 million people per year) and that Man can live above the "dirty" laws of nature, being innately superior to it. Such attitudes are termed anthropocentric, and go against the evidence of what's really happening to nature. Anthropocentrism is largely a religious opinion and shouldn't be confused with evidence-based biology, geology and climatology (of course the author is a global warming denier).

This general attitude toward nature usually comes from the "free enterprise" crowd that worships money and thinks the economy can grow forever on finite resources, with nature absorbing any amount of man-made damage. Scientific evidence shows the opposite, with ongoing declines in wildlife populations, ocean stocks, forest cover, fresh water supplies, soil quality, and increasing pollution in developing areas.

Also, we are seeing reversals in previous ecological gains that environmentalism made possible - in reaction to unregulated capitalism. People like Berlau, who want to weaken (already besieged) environmental regulations, don't care about the downsides, or have forgotten why those regulations were needed. Their very attitudes created the need for regulations! The EPA wasn't formed as a conspiracy against business. It was a direct reaction to the fact that people (mostly Republicans) won't self-regulate when they don't respect nature.

Berlau dwells on the notion that trees cause "air pollution," revealing a serious lack of context. Were he truly concerned about pollution he'd focus on the huge amounts of man-made toxins that we never evolved to live with. Aerosols from trees are a natural background effect that we've added to with fossil fuel burning and laboratory chemicals (things that don't occur naturally). You don't see residents of L.A., Phoenix or Beijing complaining about tree haze. Why bash trees when they've been around for eons and provide critical oxygen supplies? It's like saying rainwater is "pollution" because it damages houses, despite the fact that life would cease without it.

The rant against banning DDT (only a partial ban, actually) sounds very familiar. Only upsides relating to malaria are mentioned, with damage to wildlife (e.g. bald eagles) minimized as trivial. These arguments have been tried over and over, and they always conclude that nature is "unnatural" and people are somehow correcting its flaws, despite ongoing negative side effects. We tend to fix one problem and cause another unforeseen one.

Mr. Berlau mindlessly blames hurricane Katrina damage on a lack of man-made infrastructure, not the human destruction of natural wetlands barriers that used to absorb storm surges. It's the same old theme of nature being flawed, requiring Man to fix it with engineering projects. It's a wonder that nature lasted billions of years without us. The need to manage nature was mostly created by human tampering in the first place, especially too many people trying to live in areas subject to natural disasters. You can only control those processes so much.

The author also minimizes the risks of asbestos, despite clear evidence that it kills human lungs. Asbestos has not been banned outright, it has just been removed from installations where it's known to affect health. Same as DDT. Deliberate confusion is created between banning something altogether and intelligently regulating its use. The general theme is that nothing people have done or made is corrupt, and nature is the dark entity. One of the first passages is about his Kansas childhood where he learned to fear nature; a common religious attitude from people who don't understand the world, scientifically.

If you admire 1800's-style arguments for destroying nature in the name of Manifest Destiny, you'll like this book.