Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Recently, Stanley Fish, a prominent left-wing academician who believes that political correctness is good for you, and Dinesh D'Souza, a prominent right-wing analyst who believes academia has become a thought-police state, began doing little two-man shows, appearing jointly at college campuses to denounce each other with polite magniloquence. It might seem odd to schedule joint appearances with someone whose positions you claim to detest, but at least Fish and D'Souza are mutually civil, which is more than can be said for many other literary antagonists.

In Scarcity or Abundance?, the antagonists Norman Myers and Julian Simon join this vogue, this volume being the transcript of a joint appearance the two made at Columbia University in 1992. Myers, an English environmentalist and a leading doom-sayer, believes environmental affairs to be so unswervingly bleak that, among other things, "global warming will mean no more winters at all in Britain" because colder weather in the United Kingdom has already "been forever eliminated by human agency." Simon, an American economist and a leading cornucopian, believes the environment and a range of other issues are peachy keen, and his "central premise" is that "almost every economic and social change or trend points in a positive direction."

In this book Myers and Simon do a better job of being civil than of forming fully persuasive arguments for their positions. Scarcity or Abundance? does not do justice to either's work, and contains such eminently dispensable filler as transcripts of audience questions, one of which begins, "I've listened very carefully to both of you and in your arguments I think you make very different assumptions..."

Myers and Simon both have important things to say, but both often succumb to the temptation of trying to make their views all-encompassing by dismissing every point on the other side. Myers first gained the public eye with his 1979 book The Sinking Ark, which posits that species extinction is running rampant. He has since taken orthodox doomsayer positions on nearly every ecological issue, becoming something of a darling of the establishment left foundation set, in part because of his Oxford affiliation and his fashionable British accent.

Myers is correct in thinking that species extinction numbers are among the most damaging ecological impacts caused by people--perhaps the worst, given that, unlike pollution or ozone depletion, extinction is irreversible. The...