Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism.

• Author: Gould, James Jay

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a leader of Earth First! in the Adirondack Mountains, where I've lived for the last twelve years. The Earth First!er said the group's members had recently located their Northeastern U.S. headquarters here because they were prepared to join the political fray over the future of the Adirondack Park, a six-million-acre patchwork of public and private wildlands and home to more than 125,000 people.

Earth First!'s land-use plan for preservation of a wilderness region larger than the state of Massachusetts included the elimination of most roads and all motorized vehicles. When asked if this goal meant an end to economic and social life for the region's citizens, the environmental leader suggested that "the people who now live here, for instance, might become guides and take advantage of the wild nature of the place."

This is a ridiculous idea, but not a surprising one, coming from a group whose rallying cry is back to the Pleistocene! If taken seriously, it means the dismantling of a mountain community and culture that the radical environmental leader later admitted "would be very difficult to achieve." It also means the tens of thousands of able-bodied folk who live in the Adirondacks would have to find jobs guiding visitors, a market that many of the hundred or so guides now licensed already have trouble locating.

This is the brand of environmental activism to which Martin W. Lewis reacts in Green Delusions. Lewis's study is a primer in eco-extremism. According to the author, radical environmentalism thrives on four basic assumptions: Eco-radicals believe that "primitive" native peoples exemplify how to live in harmony with nature and each other; that decentralization is essential to ecological and social well-being; that advances in technology and science are deceptively and innately dehumanizing and harmful; that free-market economics are, by definition, "destructive and wasteful."

What these radical green tenets all mean, of course, is that we must turn our backs on our cities, factories, and capitalist economy and march up into the hills. The eco-radicals, says Lewis, believe the movement back to nature will place us back in harmony with the natural world and put an end to all environmental devastation.

Lewis counters these assumptions incisively and with convincing support. First, he believes that eco-radicals have so romanticized and exaggerated the purity of native, or "primal," cultures that they...