The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America.

• Author: Gordon, Richard L.
• Position: Book review

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America

Robert H. Nelson

University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press for the Independent Institute, 2010, 388 pp.

Robert H. Nelson, one of the world's leading natural resource economists, long has argued that the ideologies in economics are secularizations of traditional religion and that this concealment is ill advised. Less convincingly, he advocates linking these new ideologies to their religious roots. He now also brands environmentalism as a secular religion whose roots need examination. This book postulates a war between that religion and the economic religion that he previously criticized.

For decades claims of scientific objectivity in policy advice have been easy targets for charges of a "'pretense of knowledge." Critics noted the obvious implicit value judgments and the hopeless incoherence of the concepts of scientific and objective. Substantial obstacles plague efforts to go further, and all efforts with which I am familiar are noble failures at best.

Environmentalism is an even easier target. Many excellent refutations exist. Thus, Nelson has the challenge of adding something new. Nelson, in fact, provides a solid and unfamiliar argument. At best, environmentalists stress preserving natural conditions while ignoring billions of years of regular change in nature. At worst, they argue that the rise of homo sapiens is uniquely unnatural. Nelson fails, however, because of the unrealism of his central contrast and his heavy reliance on prior work to develop his comparison.

This is his third effort on secular religions. The first in 1991, Reaching for Heaven on Earth (here Heaven for short), ambitiously surveyed Western philosophy, turned to a breathless, idiosyncratic survey of modern economic thought from Richard Ely (the founder of the American Economic Association) to D. McCloskey (author of provocative discussions of the practice of economics), and ended with a call to allow succession from the prevailing political order. In the second in 2000, Economics as Religion (here Religion), he turned to a fuller survey of what he considers the critical economic streams--Samuelson's Economics, the Chicago School, and the "new institutionalists." This was followed with assorted reflections including comments on the challenge of environmentalism as a possible replacement of economic religion.

The core of The New Holy Wars (Holy Wars for short) expands the critique of environmentalism sketched in Religion. Ten of the 13 chapters in Holy Wars subsume prior publications including the chapter on Frank Knight (a long-time professor of economics at the University of Chicago) in Religion. Most critically, the new material is half of his solid case against environmentalism. Perversely, the excellence of this treatment requires far less attention than does his ongoing treatment of economics as a religion. Moreover, his treatment in Holy Wars of economic religion makes little sense without examining the two prior books.

The exposition in Holy Wars starts with a summary of his prior views so terse that it misleads. He pauses to reprint an article on Islamic fundamentalism that is tenuously related to the basic arguments. Then come three chapters on existence value, sustainability, and progress, all prime examples of his problems in dealing with economic concepts. The next section of the book starts the argument that environmentalism is a new religion challenging economics. Next is the most coherent and useful section, consisting of the three fresh chapters developing the argument made in Religion about the incoherence and unreality of environmentalists" calls to preserve "natural" conditions. He then uses prior work indicating that experience with Africa validates his concerns.

His religious approach very nicely skewers the intellectual incoherence of environmentalism. Its basic flaws are false claims. Humanity becomes an illegitimate species, and the environmentalists ignore billions of years of massive natural changes in the environment. Nelson is warning environmentalists that they must come to grips with the reality of scarcity. The next section reprises his views on Knight and inadequately expands a previously published discussion of about free-market...