Freaking out.

• Author: Gordon, Richard L.

ECO-FREAKS: Environmentalism Is Hazardous for Your Health! By John Berlau 250 pages; Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson Current, 2006

Even people who sympathize with the environmental movement worry about the current proliferation of environmental groups. It puts pressure on both existing and new groups to differentiate themselves by devising fresh concerns and launching new crusades--and exposing themselves to refutations or overreaches that can embarrass the broader environmental movement.

In his new book Eco-Freaks, John L. Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute provides such refutations. He seizes on five thrusts of the environmental movement: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring attack on the pesticide DDT, opposition to asbestos use, efforts to reduce automobile use and fuel consumption and expand the use of transit, opposition to logging on federal land, and the campaign against dams. In three of those cases, Berlau uses major catastrophes of the early 21st century as his pegs; he attributes the rapid collapse of the World Trade Center towers to the failure to use asbestos in their construction, and he links the Katrina disaster in New Orleans to city residents' limited access to cars and environmental opposition to the construction of floodgates.

Berlau's chapter on opposition to the use of pesticides like DDT is the longest in the book. He presents a solid chronological review of the subject. Criticism of Carson has become a standard part of the literature, but Berlau's effort stands out as a fuller treatment than others that I have encountered. He nicely presents the history of DDT's development as part of the push to solve serious threats to the U.S. military in World War II, details how Carson misrepresented the environmental problems associated with DDT, and extends the discussion of health threats from inadequately controlled insects far beyond that of the standard example of the malaria threat.

The asbestos chapter nicely shifts from the World Trade Center case to what it typifies. Asbestos is by far the most effective fire-retardant available. The material does present hazards, but those are hazards to workers in mining and installation who can control the risk, just as many other industries can control risk. As with DDT, Berlau nicely extends prior discussions in this chapter. Of particular interest is his treatment of why asbestos was not used in the World Trade Center. The key was lobbying by a purported expert with a falsified...