The Falsification of Climate and Species Science is the Key Destructor of the World's Economy

America's foremost Philosopher of Science shows us how it happened.

In the case of the clearance of dairy farmers from Point Reyes, California, what is at issue is the case of the elk on that point, and its apparent extinction. These elk are a sub-species, a distinct population segment, an artificial taxonomic rank, which means they are geographically separated. This categorization is largely invented in order to drive people from the land. On my land for instance, the red legged frog in one creek is very slightly distinct from the red legged frog in another creek, 150 meters away.

Elk are hardly threatened as a species. They may be threatened within a range where people build enterprises to feed and house us, but the fact remains that species recover very very fast when said enterprises are shuttered. Rural life, economy, traditions and community, take precedence over the luxury belief of faked extinctions. Culture is far far more fragile than nature.

There are very very few actual extinctions in either mammal, amphibian or birds taxonomies. Under ten.

The following explains how we got the science so very wrong. That mistake, that corruption is a large part of the reason for our current wild economic swings, the sclerotic growth, the impoverishment of the middle class, the impossibility for many to create families and have children, and above all the massive debt in every western economy. We have closed up shop deliberately, this courtesy of the rich kids who need to make a living swanning around the world, destroying “capitalism” and creating their summer camp dreams.

“We have wrapped the world in ineffability,” says Alston Chase. Of the battalions of writers on conservation and environmental protection, he is the only one—and I find this disturbing—who has done the necessary forensic research on how that protection has been effected. Chase, a philosopher of science trained at Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton, chronicled the results of that protection in two books: Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park and In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Myths of Nature.

After their three sons were fledged, Chase and his wife, Diana, also a professor, relinquished tenure and moved to a three-thousand-acre ranch in the Smith River canyon in Montana. The ranch was fifty-five miles from the nearest town, ten from the nearest neighbor, and thirty-five from the nearest county road. It had no telephone or electricity, and the only buildings were shacks. For almost ten years, they lived there with their animals, rusticating, writing, and running wilderness camps for kids in the summer. They kept a tiny house in Livingston, called the phone booth, because they used it mostly to make phone calls. It took a day to get there. But once Chase dug into Playing God and realized what it entailed, he and his wife sold their ranch to move closer to Yellowstone.

In both books, Chase picks apart the building of the science and the way it was used by the rising diaspora of activists. He chronicles, year by year, how that activism metastasized through the culture, forcing legislation, coming to dominate social and political life in the hinterlands.

After two decades of studying the evidence, interviewing the players, and following each trail to its end, he came to one unshakable conclusion: we got the science wrong. When I turned the last page of In a Dark Wood for the second time, I got into my car and drove to Montana.

The sky is a blue-gray haze lit from behind by the sun; it is so eerie and beautiful, it is as if I have been transported to another universe with a different color wheel. Eighteen inches of fresh snow sit on the roof of my car, and I must brush it off in such a way that I don’t spend the next few hours sitting in wet clothing. Not as easy as it sounds, so by the time I have managed that, the sky has darkened to gray and white flakes whirl and gather in velocity.

Sleet is driving into my windshield by the time I set the GPS and inch, ever so cautiously, onto I-90 to Livingston, thirty miles and an eternity of black ice over a high mountain pass. The road is virtually deserted, so it doesn’t matter that it feels as if the white film of cataracts covers my eyes.

Livingston is a town of fewer than seven thousand and lacks the usual corporate blight on its access highway. Like all boutique country towns, it is beset by its own celebrities. Jeff Bridges and Margot Kidder roosted here, as does Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall. But mostly this is a town that services ranchers and the guide outfitters who ply Yellowstone, on the slopes of which Livingston rests. The town is easy to navigate, with a sweet, small inner residential area, a serviceable Main Street—no touristy cack to be found. After a whirl along a river road, I’ve crossed the bridge over the Yellowstone River and am on the long road that leads to Paradise Valley.

The Chase ranch house is a long, one-story wooden structure built in a curve facing out toward the mountain and range. It is a powerfully comfortable house, one that creaks with thirty years of family dinners and people piling in and out, stomping snow from their boots, dumping loads of wood, canning, cooking, riding, hiking, and spending evenings around the fire reading. I climb a set of unadorned concrete steps to a back porch, thence to a mudroom, and finally the kitchen.

But I don’t make it to the kitchen because I fall to my knees in front of dog kennels. Chase and his wife have seven—seven!—Jack Russell terriers just like mine, who are penned so that they don’t swarm the visitor. I pretty much have to be dragged to my feet and into the kitchen, where Diana, a slim, beautiful woman, greets me and hands me off to Alston, who guides me into her study because his is being cleaned. The study is wood panelled, and bookshelves line the walls.

Chase is tall and thin, with large eyes and a classic egg-shaped head. He is polite, too, and mild, and after questioning me closely on my own provenance, he divines my concern for the plight of rural dwellers. I tell him that the real country people, working country people I have talked to, particularly those whose families have worked the land for generations, say that the countryside is not at risk. It changes and some things need fixing, but on the whole, it’s just fine. The threats are external—or externals, as economists would say. . . . I trail off.

Chase doesn’t exactly explode, but he comes close.

“Of course! Anyone who lives in the country knows it’s not dying. Look at the photographic record. One hundred and fifty years ago right here, there was more sagebrush, few trees, less game. And even the best landscapes, in 1870, had been created by Indians burning the forests to create hunting grounds. When the first settlers arrived, research tells us that they could have driven a wagon train across the country without stopping. The land had been cleared that much. All the landscapes of North America were improved by Indian burning.

“I have a much much darker view of the environmental movement now than I ever have—it’s been a case of successive epiphanies, the scales successively peeled from my eyes. It is congregationalism, pantheism, the religious elements of Native American environmentalism meeting Hegelian philosophy and Rachel Carson. What we have is an explosive and extremely dangerous mix.”

With Playing God and In a Dark Wood, Chase traced the intellectual history of environmentalism and came up with something so surprising that during the two weeks after I took it on board, his idea—or rather the connections between ideas—changed everything I thought about the natural world.

Chase, like many thinkers, attributes a fundamental schism in Western thought to the battle between Kant and Hegel. Immanuel Kant asserted the dualist nature of man and in The Critique of Pure Reason investigated the limitations of reason. In contrast, Hegel, Mr. thesis-antithesis-synthesis, was a monist, an early we-are-the world type, and by the late nineteenth century, his thinking ruled.

Karl Popper watched the rise of Hitler and the Nazis as a teenager, left before the Anschluss and traveled with his parents to Britain, where he converted to Protestantism. As he integrated his early experience, Popper began to ask what conditions allowed fascism to arise and quickly came to realize that all the totalitarian philosophies of the twentieth century owe their origin to Hegel.

“In science,” says Chase, “the progression goes from Hegel to Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel coined the term ecology, from oikos, meaning ‘living relations,’ and logos, meaning ‘the study of.’” Ernst was Hitler’s go-to propeller head. Individuals, Haeckel argued, following Hegel, do not have a separate existence; they are part of large wholes—the tribe, the nation, the environment.

“The gestation,” says Chase, “goes therefore from Hegel to Haeckel to Hitler, or Marx and Engels to Soviet science or Nazi science—which were both a corruption of science. We’re really talking about the corruption of science. Hegel allowed the breakdown of the firewall between science and religion. Science, therefore, now came with religious significance.

“And after Lenin’s death, the effort was to create a proletariat science. Which declared that the authorities have the power to change nature. Genetic change can be forced, we have [Soviet agriculture minister Trofim] Lysenko to thank for that. He brought forward the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics. The Soviets banned the teaching of Mendelian genetics, put to death the scientists who taught it, and sent the Darwinians to the gulag.

“H. J. Muller—an American fellow traveler—went to Russia to help Stalin breed the perfect proletarian worker. He had a profound influence on Rachel Carson, and his rave review of Silent Spring in the New York Times sent the book over the top in sales. Everything she wrote was a lie, but she is still treated as a saint.”

He’s on a roll now.

“While this was going on in the twenties in Soviet Russia, Haeckel’s influence exploded in England. The effort to control everything meant molding human nature. The Fabians Beatrice and Sydney Webb at Oxford became infatuated with Haeckel, not as a way of understanding nature, but as a schema for social engineering, for control of societies in their environment. The Fabians were racist; they had an entirely paternalistic attitude to people of color. Oxford—my alma mater, or one of them—invented Hegelian ecology.

“Hegelian ecology is an ecology for the total control of everything,” he concludes. “And its tool, the perfect tool to effect this control, was the concept of the ecosystem.”

In 1935, Oxford botanist Arthur G. Tansley invented the notion of the ecosystem. The ecosystem, he posited, is “the basic unit of nature,” more fundamental, he claimed, following Hegel, than the individuals that form its parts. The balance and unity of nature, two ancient notions, had fused and found their modern roosting place.

In 1946, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a British zoologist at Yale, advanced the theory that the ecosystem was a feedback loop of energy flows that operated to keep the system stable in the face of environmental disturbance. These flows worked like a thermostat to keep the community in balance. A healthy ecosystem is in balance. When affected by disturbance, a healthy ecosystem returns to balance. If one part is missing, it cannot be in balance, therefore it must be unhealthy.

This fueled the entirely corrupt and vicious outfit, The Nature Conservancy, which persecuted the dairy farmers of Point Reyes.

Next, using the concept of a niche—the habitat occupied by an organism—Hutchinson decided that biological diversity promotes ecosystem stability. And from the late 1940s on, governments and universities started ladling money onto scientists who worked to explore this set of seductive ideas. In 1959, Hutchinson continued the sophistry, stating that “communities of many diversified organisms are better able to persist than are communities of fewer, less diversified organisms[i].”

It is an idea that we all accept as truth. You do, your mother does, and I did too. Right, left, centrist, apolitical, whatever our stance or lack of it, we all believe that diversity and balance mean ecosystem health, the health of the planet’s natural systems. As Chase says, it was an idea that took off like a rocket.

You can imagine, if you weren’t there, how thrilling this was to the enthusiasts of the 1960s. Theoretical ecology burgeoned. Drawing on the idea of the “oneness” of nature and the pantheism of Thoreau, Rousseau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Ansel Adams, the ecosystem became God.

Policy creates the world. Policy is based on science. And the science is crap.

While much attention has been paid to the failures of climate science, these failures are just reaching the average doesn’t-care-that-much individual. Even the U.N.’s IPCC now says there is nothing much to worry about. Yet, so much of this thinking has been regulated and codified, it layers vertiginous costs on every development from chicken shed to factory. Outside of the cities, a false science owns the land. Added to the Endangered Species Act, more codified rubbish science, we are effectively crippled, imprisoned, and stalled.

This falsified science creates anger and division, and it creates poverty.

Harvard professor, Edward O. Wilson’s theory of species-area relationships still dominates; he is the Colossus astride extinctions. His ideas were so profitable for the rich and lazy, no one has bothered to fight him.

Hang on for some real sophistry.

Willis Eschenbach writes:

In their seminal work, “The Theory of Island Biogeography,” Macarthur and Wilson further explored the species-area relationship [Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton University Press, 1963 . This relationship, first stated mathematically by Arrhenius in 1920, relates the number of species found to the area surveyed as a power law of the form S = C * a ^ z, where “S” is species count, “C” is a constant, “a” is habitat area, and “z” is the power variable (typically .15 to .3 for forests). In other words, the number of species found in a given area is seen to increase as some power of the area examined.

By surveys both on and off islands, this relationship has been generally verified. It also passes the reasonability test—for example, we would expect to find more species in a state than we find in any one county in that state.

Does this species-area relationship work in reverse? That is to say, if the area of a forest is reduced, does the number of species in the forest decrease as well? And in particular, does this predicted reduction in species represent species actually going extinct? One of the authors of “Island Biogeography” thinks so.

In 1992, E. O. Wilson wrote that because of the 1% annual area loss of forest habitat worldwide, using what he called “maximally optimistic” species/area calculations, “The number of species doomed [to extinction] each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.” [Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)][

This of course is mind blowing idiocy. And every upper east side Bel Air, Malibu and Silicon Valley nut believes it. It is behind the hysteria on the streets, the morons gluing themselves to pavements, throwing paint on priceless art, and acts as engine to every street riot.

In 2010, Willis Eschenbach fact-checked this and other worrying assertions and published his findings in an essay called “Where Are the Corpses?” which burned through the Internet like Agent Orange. Eschenbach writes, “If we have lost 27,000 species per year since 1992, that’s over 300,000 species gone extinct. In addition, Wilson said that this rate of forest loss had been going on since 1980, so that gives us a claim of over well over half a million species lost forever in 24 years, a very large number.”

In fact, however, of the 4,428 mammal species (IUCN Red List 2004) living in Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and Antarctica, according to Eschenbach, only three have gone extinct in the last five hundred years: the bluebuck antelope in South Africa, the Algerian gazelle in Algeria, and the Omilteme cottontail rabbit in Mexico. We see the same pattern with birds as with mammals. Of the 128 extinct bird species, 122 were island extinctions. Of the 8,971 known continental bird species (Red List 2004), 6 have gone extinct worldwide, and two, the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet in the U.S.”

As for forest extinctions created by habitat loss, Eschenbach found none. Furthermore, he wrote, the most recent total bird and mammal extinction rate in all parts of the world, including islands and continents, stands at 0.2 extinctions per year. This is down from a peak of about 1.6 extinctions per year a century ago.

Wilson, with his species-area relationship, which is in use now in every conservation data center in the world and is the dominant equation used in making all land-use decisions outside the cities, claims extinction rates two hundred times higher than the data shows.

Fix this, and fix the world.

Dig this nonsense out of legislation and regulation and within a decade a new Golden Age.

Bible.

Absurdistan was talking to Dr. Peter and Ginger Breggin last week about how the environmental movement had destroyed the economy of the region I live in, but that two unknowns, had figured out who had paid for that shut down. It turns out it was the same people, international ‘foundations” and NGOs, in whose interest it was that the province shutter its mines, forests and fisheries in order to leave the region “pristine”. To stop our growth, to stop competition. In its place, cartels and Triads.

Two people. Totally unknown. That’s all it takes.

That’s how I see independent journalism today. We are the doing the equivalent of laying pipe, writing the basic code of future thinking and awareness. I support all the Canadian journalists on Substack paying far more than a subscription to the Globe or the Times would cost because they are doing the necessary original work up here in the demented Dominion.

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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

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