Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) [Hardcover]

Robert Zubrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2012 | Series: New Atlantis Books

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.

Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its pernicious consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world.

Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to all of antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, and industrial development.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The book is replete with scientific studies and facts, though it’s Zubrin’s view on the people and history behind antihumanist movements that’s the most disturbing. Whether pointing out that the first Green Party was founded under the leadership of August Haussleiter, a former Nazi SS officer; that Fujimori’s genocide in Peru was funded by international aid; or that Qian Xinzhong was given the first United Nations Population Award (together with Indira Gandhi) after forcing thousands of Chinese women to abort their children, Zubrin paints a dark and disturbing picture of antihumanism that’s worth everyone’s time to read." —Publishers Weekly

“Robert Zubrin’s masterful study…makes for riveting reading. Merchants of Despair is a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress.” —Steven W. Mosher, President, Population Research Institute

“Merchants of Despair is an extraordinary and important book….This fascinating volume carefully traces developments of the Malthusian hypothesis right up to the present: through eugenics to population control and genocide; through the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and extreme environmentalism to climate change and the myth of global warming apocalypse. Robert Zubrin has my nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.” —S. Fred Singer, Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years

“I believe no one to date has so clearly explained the thread of the antihuman movement throughout history. To read this book is to become a warrior in the battle against it.” —Jay Lehr, Heartland Institute

“The most devastating account and refutation of antihuman environmentalism ever written.” —Gregory Benford, Author of Chiller

About the Author

Robert Zubrin is the author of several highly successful books, including Energy Victory, a powerful and hugely popular work on achieving energy independence, and The Case for Mars, a 100,000-copy bestseller on space exploration and the human future. He frequently writes, lectures, and gives radio and TV interviews on a wide range of policy questions as a fellow of the Center for Security Policy, the president of the Mars Society, and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis. A scientist and engineer by training, with advanced degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and nuclear engineering, he has nine U.S. patents granted or pending.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (April 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594034761
• ISBN-13: 978-1594034763
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #202,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Merchants of despair, enemies of humanity April 9, 2012

By James F. Mcenanly

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have been following Dr. Zubrin's work since the early 1990's. Usually his writings deal with the exploration and of the Planet Mars, such as The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. In this book, he takes on what he considers to be an enemy of Mankind, an enemy that , with intellect cold and vast and unsympathetic, looks to be the master of all who live. They go by many names, but Dr. Zubrin refers to them as Malthusians, after Thomas Malthus, who, on his Essay on the Principle of Population, noted that while food supplies increase arithmetically, population grows exponentially. to this end, Malthus and his followers have proposed increasingly drastic methods to control populations, and also human activity and thought.
This book lays out the history of the movement in frightening detail. To these people, all men are not created equal, but rather some are born to be masters and the rest cattle. To them, human ingenuity, which increases our quality of living, is an unaffordable luxury."

64 of 78 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-Documented Study of Pessimism in High Places April 9, 2012

By William L. Brown VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Robert Zubrin has produced a carefully documented analysis of the people who, from positions of power, have developed the art of using fear as a means for controlling whole populations and maximizing their power over the direction of government policies. The result has been, instead of a utopian Garden of Eden as promised, the destruction of hundreds of millions of human lives and the throttling of progress in disease control and human economic improvement.

Armed with mathematical models and supported by politicians, popular authors and a gullible media network, these "nattering nabobs of negativism" (to borrow a phrase from Spiro Agnew) convinced themselves in the 1970s that overpopulation would soon overwhelm the world's natural resources and lead to mass deprivation and starvation. Today, they claim that Climate Change will cause the Earth to overheat, leading to a crisis of epic proportions. As a result of these beliefs, they view death and destruction of populations as a positive good, since it will reduce the number of mouths to feed and reduce our ultimate "carbon footprint."

[I realize that this sounds extreme, but Zubrin produces documented evidence showing that such positions have actually been supported by presumably expert scientific leaders over the past few decades.]

Zubrin shows how persons with limited scientific credentials have taken over positions of leadership in the administrations of US presidents as well as in the halls of the United Nations. A classic example is John Holdren who, as a neo-Malthusian "science advisor" with no real scientific experience, has exercised considerable power in the United States as well as worldwide via the United Nations. Holdren coauthored with Paul Erlich The Population Explosion in the early 1970s that predicted massive worldwide starvation before the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been credited with almost single handedly putting an end to the global effort to eradicate malaria using DDT, which had been demonstrated to be a very safe insecticide that could eliminate the scourge of a disease that has ravaged Africa for generations. The Environmental Protection Administration banned further use of the chemical, despite a clear bill of health from the National Academy of Science in 1970. Nations that continued using DDT to fight malaria were instructed that they would no longer be eligible for foreign aid unless they discontinued the practice.

As a result, over 100 million Africans alone have died from malaria in the ensuing years. Although DDT had been demonstrated to produce tumors in rats when exposed to massive quantities, for humans to develop such cancerous growths would have required drinking large quantities of the pesticide. This error by the EPA has yet to be rectified.

If you have not already done so, please consider reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear for more on how powerful special interests try to manipulate public opinion to support measures that are not in the public interest. It is a scientifically based fictional account that makes a good companion to Zubrin's book.

Lord Acton stated that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Read Zubrin's book for one of the best analyses of Acton's dictum ever written.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Erroneous Throughout and Biased March 17, 2013

By Cernunnos

Format:Hardcover

Zubrin's book is so filled with mistakes and sloppy research that it would take an equally long book to correct it. A book such as this is what happens when an ideologue starts with a premise--"government regulation of the market is always bad"--and picks (and misrepresents) data to prove it.

As an example of his sloppy research, Zubrin cites the famous bet made by Julian Simon and Paul Erlich over whether natural resources are becoming scarce as humans impact the planet. Zubrin notes that Simon won the bet over resource prices in 1990, which Zubrin argues undermines environmentalists' point that the earth has limits and that we have to consume resources with more environmental care. If Zubrin would have done a simple Google search, he would have learned that those resource prices have gone up over the long haul--Erlich would have won the bet today. (see[...] ). This type of erroneous writing occurs throughout the book, with some of Zubrin's claims about nuclear energy, climate change, and chemical toxicity, among others.

I'll take a brief look at a couple claims from chapter 8 to show how Zubrin ignores important information. In this chapter, Zubrin claims that the banning of DDT and the regulation of pesticides were wrong decisions and led to a large loss of human life. Here is a sample of Zubrin's wrong or misrepresented claims with corrections from Naomi Oreske's much better book on the subject, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" (her book also points to scientific studies for below claims):

Zubrin: He claims that DDT bans in Sri Lanka led to many unnecessary deaths, and he concludes: "A great many studies...over many decades have failed to show significant evidence of cancer as a result of exposure to DDT."

Oreskes: "There is now strong scientific evidence that many pesticides carry serious risks to humans. (Recall that Silent Spring was not just about DDT; it was about pesticides in general. [Zubrin misrepresents Carson's argument]...A recent review in the Lancet--the world's leading medical journal--concluded that when used at levels required for mosquito control, DDT causes significant human impacts, particularly on reproductive health...A few years ago, medical researchers realized that there was a shocking flaw in previous studies that investigated DDT exposure and breast cancer [in humans]...In a remarkable piece of medical detective work, Dr. Barbara A. Cohn and her colleagues...showed a fivefold increase in breast cancer risk among women with high levels of serum DDT or its metabolites...DDT does cause cancer...and it does cost human lives."

Zubrin: "The death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded 100 million people."

Oreskes: "Between 1948 and 1963, DDT worked, and malaria cases dropped dramatically [speaking of malaria control in Sri Lanka]...In 1968, malaria flared up again, and DDT couldn't control it....Sri Lanka didn't stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working...As a WHO [World Health Organization] committee concluded in 1976, "It is finally becoming acknowledged that resistance is probably the single obstacle against vector-borne disease and is mainly responsible for preventing successful malaria eradication in many countries." The WHO in 1976 studied DDT usage in Sri Lanka, and concluded that 'The [heavier] use of DDT...did not result in any significant difference in malaria prevalence as compared with an area with normal (lesser) coverage.'...Malarial eradication failed in less developed nations because spraying alone didn't work. Spraying along with good nutrition, reduction of insect breeding grounds, education, and health care did work, which explains why malaria was eradicated in developed nations like Italy and Australia, but not in sub-Saharan Africa."

Zubrin misses these important points, as he does with other claims in the rest of the book. Conclusion: the book is politically biased toward corporate libertarianism, and lacking the broader analysis necessary for public policy debates.