environment gray OpinionJournal - FIVE BEST

OpinionJournal - FIVE BEST:

FIVE BEST Green Gray Areas
Books that question the conventional wisdom on the environment.

BY MICHAEL CRICHTON
Saturday, October 29, 2005 12:01 a.m.

1. 'Playing God in Yellowstone' by Alston Chase (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).
That raw sewage bubbles out of the ground at Yellowstone National Park--after more than a century of botched conservation--would come as no surprise to Alston Chase, who 20 years ago wrote 'Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park.' Mr. Chase, a former professor of philosophy turned journalist, presents a clear critique of ever-changing environmental beliefs and the damage that they have caused the actual environment. As a philosopher, he is contemptuous of much conventional wisdom and the muddle-headed attitudes he calls 'California cosmology.'
2. 'The Culture Cult' by Roger Sandall (Westview, 2001).
In 'The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays,' anthropologist Roger Sandall explores romantic primitivism--the myth of Eden and the Noble Savage. Mr. Sandall's histories of utopian communities (Robert Owen's New Harmony, John Humphrey Noyes's disastrous Oneida) are vivid, and his portraits of leading primitivists, from Rousseau to Mead to Levi-Strauss, are sharply drawn. This ignorant nostalgia for our tribal past ignores the truly horrific reality of tribal initiation, warfare, mutilation and human sacrifice.
3. 'Man in the Natural World' by Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1984).
Don't be put off by the academic title of Keith Thomas's 'Man in the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800.' The book's a delight. Mr. Thomas's account is both detailed and charming as he guid"