https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/environmental_perspective_meets_environmental_apocalypse_.html
On the first day of teaching college-level Environmental Science, I write on the board in large letters “PERSPECTIVE.” This attention grabber focuses students on what they need to learn to get a more complete understanding of environmental issues. They need to discover not just facts and figures but the sense of those facts and figures from environmental practitioners, both within and outside the ivory towers.
Perspective is what Michael Shellenberger’s book. Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper, June 2020), provides at a time when perspective is desperately needed. In addition to being a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and “the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings,” Mr. Shellenberger is “an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Apoclypse Never went to #1 in three categories this past weekend on Amazon: Climatology, Environmental Policy, and Human Geography (Books). So, people are taking notice of this author’s real-world perspective, and well they should. I provided each of my two college summer interns with copies of Apocalypse Never as a gift when they completed their internships. I encouraged the students to consider the book’s concepts along with what they learned from their environmental science and engineering training.
Individual chapters address popular notions of impending worldwide woes that have been instilled in students and the public alike since at least the 1960s. Catastrophic climate change, overpopulation, energy crisis, whaling, and plastics are among the pertinent topics carefully reviewed and evaluated. Mr. Shellenberger relies primarily on historic and academic sources, although he includes interviews with recognized subject-matter experts and those impacted by untoward ecological and economic decisions.
Apocalypse Never doesn’t miss the unmistakable comparison of modern environmentalism with religious practice, noting that it “is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.”