This file is a single-author polemical essay/pamphlet, originally tied to Reisman’s broader defense of capitalism. Its scope is not technical environmental policy but a philosophical indictment of environmentalism as Reisman understands it: an anti-human ideology rooted in hostility to reason, industry, capitalism, and human flourishing.
Reisman begins from the contemporary fear of trace toxins—benzene in mineral water, pesticides, preservatives, and “parts per billion” risks—and turns the metaphor back against environmentalism itself. The movement, he argues, contains not merely errors but moral poison, especially where “deep ecology” values wild nature above human life.
Such statements represent pure, unadulterated poison.
The central conceptual move is Reisman’s attack on the doctrine of nature’s “intrinsic value.” He claims that once nature is treated as valuable apart from its relation to human life, human action necessarily appears as destruction. Industry, roads, energy, agriculture, and technology become moral crimes because they transform wilderness for human purposes. For Reisman, this is not a benign reverence for nature but a negation of human value.
In other words, the doctrine of the intrinsic value of nature is nothing but a doctrine of the negation of human values. It is pure nihilism.
From this premise, the essay unfolds as a series of linked arguments. First, Reisman contends that environmental scares—Alar, asbestos, acid rain, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, ozone depletion, and global warming—depend on pseudo-scientific extrapolation, statistical panic, and politically useful fear. Second, he redefines “environment” from a human-centered standpoint: the environment is not wilderness as such, but the material surroundings of human life. On that basis, production is not environmental destruction but environmental improvement, because it rearranges nature’s elements into forms useful to people.
Production and economic activity are precisely the means by which man adapts his environment to himself and thereby improves it.
This definition allows Reisman to present industrial civilization as the culmination of human environmental adaptation. Roads, bridges, mines, factories, sanitation systems, electricity, and medicine are all examples of improving the human environment. The environmentalist, in his view, calls these achievements destruction only because he has already displaced man from the center of value.
The essay’s next major section argues that environmentalism is, above all, anti-energy. Reisman treats energy consumption as the foundation of modern prosperity and regards opposition to fossil fuels, nuclear power, dams, and industrial development as an effort to undo the Industrial Revolution. Conservation, in this argument, is not an energy source but a euphemism for deprivation.
Energy use, the productivity of labor, and the standard of living are inseparably connected, with the two last entirely dependent on the first.
Against environmental regulation and central planning, Reisman offers capitalism, private property, and technological freedom as the proper remedies for real environmental problems. Even if global warming occurred, he argues, free individuals coordinated by prices would adapt more effectively than bureaucratic planners. His proposed solutions include privatizing land and resources, extending property rights to lakes, rivers, beaches, and parts of the ocean, and allowing nuclear power and industrial innovation to proceed.
The closing movement broadens the polemic into cultural diagnosis. Environmentalism is described as the successor to socialism: “green” rather than “red,” but similarly committed to restricting individual liberty through centralized control. Reisman then links it to a wider intellectual decline—irrationalism, collectivism, relativism, determinism, Keynesianism, Freudianism, and other doctrines he treats as assaults on reason and human agency.
Environmentalism is the leading manifestation of the rising tide of irrationalism that is engulfing our culture.
The essay concludes by calling for “new intellectuals” to defend reason, capitalism, and industrial civilization, especially through the works of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. Its relevance lies in its stark articulation of an Objectivist/free-market response to late twentieth-century environmental politics: it rejects compromise with environmentalism and frames the conflict as civilizational.
The twenty-first century should be the century when man begins the colonization of the solar system, not a return to the Dark Ages.
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