Eco-Fascists

August 13, 2012
In this bitter polemic, journalist Nickson analyzes the environmental movement from the perspective of property owners—herself included—who have had their livelihoods affected by onerous government regulation, while activists have hijacked the political process. Nickson argues that the “green lobby” is using bad science based on false assumptions about ecology and conservation biology to remake our country into a vast untended wilderness, with terrible economic and (yes) environmental consequences. Venom drips from her pen: “Evil may be too strong a word but what else do you call an idea that ruins everything it touches?” Environmental conservation impoverishes “working country” by taking away the land and water rights that were the founding principles of the republic and economic basis of Western expansion. The forests, plains, and waterways of North America are no longer to be cultivated for productive use; they are instead reserved only for the spiritual and aesthetic satisfaction of the “green overlords.” Nickson’s overreliance on partisan “experts” and unscientific dismissals of climate and conservation science, along with her tendency to ascribe hyperbolically dastardly motives to bureaucrats, scientists, city dwellers, politicians, philanthropists, and activists alike, undermines the effectiveness of her most stirring point: that whatever we are doing to save the environment, it’s not working—not for the land or for its people. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media Group.

September 15, 2012
A veteran journalist's screed about the tyranny of the environmental movement in rural America. With much of American biological diversity located in rural areas, it stands to reason that the people and ways of life most strongly affected by the work of conservationists are found in the hinterlands. Former Globe and Mail, Time and Life contributor Nickson (The Monkey Puzzle Tree, 1994), who owns forest property on an island in the Pacific Northwest, waged a long battle against environmentalists there for the right to build another house on her property. Aghast at her encounter with environmental regulations, the author decided to investigate environmentalism's impact across the country. Her book is a chronicle of her personal struggle to claim her rights as a property owner and a broad, ranting overview of the environmental movement, "a grand idea corrupted by powerful fanatics" whose nongovernmental organizations rely on "a suffocating web of lies, distortions, fearmongering, and bad science." Conservation biology and the "sophistry" of Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson, with his overblown claims of species extinction, have curtailed the use of natural resources, extinguished jobs, forced rural people off the land, and sharply diminished working- and middle-class incomes. Nickson characterizes The Nature Conservancy, a leading NGO, as a wealthy group of "virtuecrats" with deep corporate ties. Like other groups, it uses the Endangered Species Act as a weapon to "destroy rural America." The author chronicles her interviews with aggrieved ranchers, other property owners and like-minded individuals such as philosopher of science Alton Chase, who faults conservation biology and researchers at the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market think tank. Nickson's sledgehammer approach contributes little to understanding the clash between conservationists and property owners. A broad-brush demonization of environmentalism.

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