A Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, by Robert Bidinotto, is more than a scathing critique of the environmentalist movement. It also provides a necessary and largely unique intellectual service: It explains the philosophic foundations of the modern political movement, theories that, in some cases, go back centuries.
After all, most people, especially in the West, value human life and the activities that promote it. For example, they support the building of homes, farms, towns, and cities, even though this very often requires the clearing of forests and virgin wilderness. They support mining for coal and iron ore and drilling for oil, they realize the necessity of productive factories and refineries, they value automobiles, trains, airplanes, power plants, and many other life-improving technologies.
But the modern environmentalist movement anathematizes such advances. Its leading spokesmen say this in so many words…and they do so, over and over again. For example, John Muir, a co-founder of the Sierra Club and an early environmentalist, wrote: “I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”[1] Former Vice-President (and global warming zealot) Al Gore wrote: “Modern industrial civilization…is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking….”[2] A third example is Phillip Shabecoff, a former environmental reporter for the New York Times, who wrote: “An unspoiled land of great beauty…began to change when Europeans came here five hundred years ago…. Its resources were squandered, large areas were sullied, disfigured, degraded….”[3]
What is the source of this misanthropic outlook toward human beings and their creative works? In a detailed, meticulously researched chapter, A Rebel in Eden traces the underlying anti-human philosophical premises of environmentalism back to mythological antiquity—to the myth of the Garden of Eden and man’s “fall” in the Book of Genesis, and to a host of similar transcultural myths of a lost “Golden Age.” These ancient narratives have left an indelible cultural legacy across the centuries, idealizing an imaginary lost idyllic state of pristine nature, before humans came along to develop it (or ruin it, according to the myths). Thus, the anti-human bias of contemporary environmentalism is nothing new: Bidinotto argues that today’s environmentalists are merely cashing in on subconsciously held premises that have been part of our intellectual and cultural heritage for millennia.
The philosophic animus of environmentalists to the scientific, technological, and industrial advances of modern civilization manifests itself in numerous forms—and Bidinotto discusses several of the most salient ones. One is the so-called “animal rights” movement, which, among other aims, seeks to ban medical testing on laboratory animals even though, in many cases, such testing is vital to developing treatments and/or cures for human diseases. Bidinotto writes: “Is it not perverse to prefer the lives of mice and guinea pigs to the lives of men and women?”[4]
An even more egregious example, much deadlier to human life, is what Bidinotto terms “The DDT Disaster.”[5] In 1962, Rachel Carson published her enormously influential book, Silent Spring. In it, she argued that pesticides such as DDT were harmful to animal life, that the birds would be killed off by it, and that soon our springs would be silent, lacking their robust chirping. The book was extremely popular and helped galvanize environmentalism as a broad political movement. In the early 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did a substantial amount of research on the effects of DDT and found that it had little or no harmful effect on animal or human life, including that of birds. Despite this, and despite its effectiveness as a pesticide, the EPA went ahead and banned its use in the United States; the U.S. and other countries then made its prohibition a condition of foreign aid; and numerous Third World nations, to their great detriment, complied. Africa was especially hard hit. The previous heavy use of DDT and other pesticides was largely responsible for the death of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But now, with DDT banned, there were no equally effective options to kill the dangerous insects. The mosquitoes once again proliferated and, predictably, malaria made a massive comeback. Early in the 21st century, the World Health Organization estimated “There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria globally each year, resulting in more than a million deaths.”[6] Bidinotto quotes Paul Driessen’s 2003 book, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power—Black Death: “over half the victims [of malaria] are children who die at the rate of two per minute or 3,000 per day, the equivalent of 80 fully loaded school buses plunging over a cliff every day of the year. Since 1972 [the year of the EPA ban], over 50 million people have died of this dreaded disease.”[7] Tens of millions of human dead in poor nations around the globe—killed by malaria in order to promote a spurious theory regarding the dangers of DDT—and still, environmentalists support the ban. Bidinotto writes that “even in the face of a body count that makes the slaughters by Hitler and Pol Pot seem comparatively benign, the environmentalist movement is still fighting to maintain the DDT ban—and to extend it to those nations not yet on board.”[8]
Drawing upon years of investigative journalism, Bidinotto provides many other examples of environmentalism’s war on human life and well-being: from the global warming hoax, to assaults on energy production, automobiles, land and water use, biotechnological development of medicines and crops, and more. A tour de force chapter details his Reader’s Digest investigation of “The Great Pesticide Panic,” when an environmentalist group deliberately plotted a nationwide scare campaign against agricultural chemicals used to improve apple growth. It’s a chilling account of how environmentalists routinely and deviously manipulate science in order to halt scientific progress.
The Primary Question
Where does this hatred of human life proceed from? Even the brutal National Socialist and Communist dictatorships of the 20th century claimed to ultimately benefit human life—whether of the “master race” or of the working class. So, from where proceeds such overt hatred of humanity as such?
The core philosophic principle of environmentalism—embedded implicitly in ancient myths, and made explicit by modern philosophers—is: the intrinsic value of nature. This means that nature—trees, rocks, insects, grass, swamps, snakes, alligators, bacteria, viruses, and all other things non-human, whether animate or inanimate—have value in and of themselves, inherent value, distinguished from any instrumental value they may have to man. In fact, utilitarian value to human beings is pernicious, because it encourages man to trespass on the sanctity of nature. A pristine wilderness, unsullied by human contamination, is the ideal. Better to have human beings starve to death or be killed by malaria-bearing mosquitoes than to clear virgin forests and swamps to grow crops and kill offending insects.
In answering the question of the source of man-hatred, and tracing its mythological and philosophic roots, Bidinotto provides mankind a signal service. For by exposing the intellectual causation of this venomous movement, he makes it possible to formulate an antidote. Only, after all, if we know the cause of an ailment, can we develop its cure.
Observe that human beings, unlike other species, cannot attain flourishing life by adjusting to nature. Giraffes and other herbivores survive by eating leaves off of trees or other types of flora; lions stalk the herbivores; bears might hibernate in caves; and so forth. Beavers adjust their environment slightly by constructing small dams and birds similarly build nests but, overwhelmingly, other species do not alter the natural background in order to survive; they find their needs ready-made in nature and accommodate their mode of living to the environment.
But human beings cannot prosper by nesting in trees, by eating bark and berries, or by stalking herbivores across a pristine savanna. We clear forests to build farms and towns, we invent automobiles, airplanes, and antibiotics, we build power plants to electrify our cities and our homes, we build transcontinental railroads, we construct massive dams to generate enormous quantities of hydroelectric power; and so forth. To an immense degree, we use nature as raw material to further human life. Many of us admire and savor the wondrous beauties of nature—but, overwhelmingly, to us, nature has utilitarian, not intrinsic value.
Man the productive being, conquering nature to create abundance supporting human life, is viewed by many people as a modern hero. But, Bidinotto points out brilliantly that the seeds of the environmentalist view—of viewing man positively only as a passive, non-assertive, barely productive being—go way back in human history into our earliest extant myths. In Greek mythology, for example, Prometheus was punished for gifting men with fire, enabling them to cook their food, to heat their caves and their homes, eventually to heat and light whole towns and cities, making human beings vastly more productive. Similarly, in the Bible, paradise was a Garden of Eden in which men produced nothing, altered nothing, and disturbed nothing. God provided and met all needs. God’s creation—Nature—was left untrammeled. Bidinotto observes: “In the mythical Garden [of Eden], Adam and Eve live in perfect harmony with the flora and fauna without want or fear.”[9] And how are Adam and Eve punished for their moral transgression of eating from the forbidden tree of moral knowledge? By being cast out into the world where they must take responsibility for their own lives, where they must work, produce, and where their descendants eventually will grow crops, build homes, construct towns, and rearrange nature to vastly benefit human life. This is “punishment,” Bidinotto points out ironically.[10]
The 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau re-popularized the “Eden Premise” (as Bidinotto termed it) in the modern world, arguing that civilization was a corrupting force, that humans lived better as “noble savages,” at one with nature, leaving the wilderness basically untouched and uncontaminated.[11] Further, in 19th-century America, the famous writer Henry David Thoreau authored Walden, an influential true story of the author’s experiment in living close to nature, discarding the baggage of town life. Bidinotto quotes Thoreau: “In wildness is the preservation of the world…. The most alive is the wildest.”[12]
Thoreau had a significant influence on George Perkins Marsh, a 19th century American writer, congressman, and diplomat. In 1864, Marsh published Man and Nature, what Bidinotto terms “the seminal work of American environmentalism.” Marsh stated: “Man is everywhere a disturbing agent…. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.” Marsh wrote that “men [are] brute destroyers [who] destroy the balance which nature had established.” But Marsh did revel in the belief that “nature avenges itself upon the intruder,” and imposes on human beings “deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”[13]
Marsh’s book was widely read, including by Gifford Pinchot, first director of the U.S. Forest Service under President Theodore Roosevelt, and by John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club. Bidinotto describes this pair as “the two pivotal figures in the history of American environmentalism.”[14] Pinchot was heavily responsible for vastly increasing the size of the federal government’s land ownership in the United States. Bidinotto observes: “Today, one-quarter of the entire land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government, an area five times the size of France.”[15] Although Pinchot wanted large areas of land conserved as wilderness, he still held a strong element of humanism in his value system: He desired human beings of future generations to be able to deploy the forest’s resources and to savor its wild beauty. Bidinotto commented: “Like Pinchot, most of the millions who now call themselves environmentalists are really just nature-loving ‘conservationists.’ Like him, they see the earth’s bounty as resources for human use, appreciation, development, and spiritual enjoyment.”[16]
Not so, however, with John Muir. Muir argued that nature held value inherently, independent of any utilitarian function it provided for human beings, and that men were often criminally guilty in the way they trampled heedlessly across nature’s majestic bounty. Bidinotto writes that “Muir’s basic tenet was that wilderness existed not for Man, but for its own sake.”[17] Muir himself wrote: “How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation….”[18]
Bidinotto points out that Muir’s theory of the inherent value of nature rather than Pinchot’s principle of instrumental value came to dominate the burgeoning environmental movement in early 20th-century America. For example, Horace Albright was a director of the National Parks Service between 1929 and 1933—and he maintained that it was critical to “keep large sections of primitive country free from the influence of destructive civilization.”[19]
The Rise of “Deep Ecology”
In its youthful days, the environmentalist movement held a benign façade of Pinchot’s “conservationism”—an intent to save the wilderness to benefit human beings in some form, even if only as parks and wildlife preserves for hiking, camping, and savoring the beauties of nature. But Muir’s “preservationism,” which viewed man as a baleful intruder on the intrinsic value of wilderness, would soon supplant it. The 19th-century German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, had already coined the term “ecology.” Haeckel was influenced by the “holism” of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, the theory that individuals do not exist as separate and distinct entities but, rather, are merely appendages or parts of a broader whole, which to Haeckel meant not merely races, societies, and nations, but also the environment. Ecology, to him, was a science that studied the complex interactions and relationships between an organism and its broader environment.
The stage was thereby set to remove individuals, including the human person, from our understanding of the world. In 1935, the Oxford botanist, A.G. Tansley, coined the term “eco-system.” Tansley claimed that entire eco-systems—the broad interactions of multiple organisms and chunks of surrounding inanimate matter—not individuals, human or otherwise, were “the basic units of nature” and of value.[20] So the eco-system taken as a whole, not any individual member of it, was what was truly valuable. The next step in this race to the anti-human bottom was taken by Aldo Leopold, co-founder of the Wilderness Society, in 1948 when he published his influential Sand County Almanac. Leopold sought to protect what he termed “the pyramid of life,” to which end he introduced the principle of “a land ethic,” meaning that the soil, the water, the insects, the plants, the animals, and presumably the rocks were all part of a broader community, deserving of protection. Man was merely a member of this community, most definitely not its master.[21] He possessed no greater rights than other members and no moral authority to despoil them.
Bidinotto notes that these ideas lay like dry kindling on forest ground, simply waiting to be ignited. “And the spark that ignited the organized environmentalist movement was Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.”[22] The intellectual groundwork had been laid. People of the left were certainly amenable to the new thesis: They had long believed that selfish men had exploited the poor and the workers—and were in the process of adding women, blacks, and the Third World to their list of oppressed victims. They were ripe for a broader version of the theory—that the entire human race was an oppressive exploiter of the environment. Drawing on the Eden Myth, Carson’s book, although mistaken in all of its factual claims, was philosophically correct: Man was brutally trespassing on nature; therefore, subsequent refutations of her negative claims regarding DDT were insufficient to halt its prohibition. The DDT ban may have been factually inaccurate but it was morally correct—and, after all, it was only human beings, the overbearing oppressors, who were harmed by it.
Shortly thereafter, in the early 1970s, Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, carried environmentalist philosophy to its logical conclusion. Individuals don’t exist, Naess argued—only full eco-systems do. A narrow humanism still permeated mainstream environmental organizations, Naess claimed; they were conservationist, not preservationist. This regard for the utilitarian value of nature, Naess disdained as “shallow ecology.” “He instead advocated ‘deep ecology’—a view that he described as ‘biospherical egalitarianism…the equal right to live and blossom.’”[23] This means that all organisms—including bushes, weeds, blades of grass, insects, rats, mice, venomous snakes, man-eating beasts, and all such things—possess rights equal to human beings; they have a moral right to live, to develop, to self-actualize, and to be free of human intervention, molestation, or subjugation. Naess’s theory is known as “biocentrism” or nature-centeredness. Bidinotto summarizes this theory succinctly: “Since nature is inherently valuable as it is, biocentrists regard human changes to the ‘natural order’ as evil. To them, resource development is resource destruction.”[24]
Unfortunately, this virulent anti-humanism dominates the contemporary environmentalist movement.
The Rational Antidote
Why has this venomous man-hatred been so successful in the modern world? And what is the proper means to combat it? Understanding the DDT fiasco helps us answer both questions. The errors of the anti-DDT claims were thoroughly exposed but these factual corrections, although important, were inadequate to prevent its prohibition. Why? Bidinotto provides the answer. Because the environmental movement is a crusade driven not primarily by scientific accuracy but by philosophic commitment. The identification of scientific errors in their claims will not stop the movement’s forward progress, or even slow it down; it simply causes true believers to double down on their crusade: An unsullied wilderness is sacred; man is an invasive, profoundly immoral despoiler of that wilderness. If their specific claims are proven untruthful, they simply concoct new ones and/or open a related anti-human front, such as the campaign for animal rights against medical research to cure human diseases.
The supporters of human life must continue to emphasize scientific truth and accuracy; it is important that every specific error of the environmentalists is exposed. But the supporters must also have a powerful philosophy or narrative, as Bidinotto puts it, that they promote: They must stand up and speak out strongly on behalf of individualism.
This theory is a constellation of moral and philosophic principles: It holds that human life is sacred and that nature exists solely to provide value for man—that a human being is not an interchangeable member of a collective but first, foremost, and always an individual, unique, unrepeatable, and pricelessly valuable in and of himself, possessing a right to his own life and a moral purpose to pursue his own happiness. They must stand up for the inalienable rights, not of mice, mosquitoes, or microbes, but of individual human beings to pursue their own happiness, including to develop all of nature’s bountiful resources to further human life. They need to do both this and to integrate scientific accuracy into their encompassing, passionately-held philosophy. Only then, will they defeat the man-hating devotees of environmentalism and establish a society that properly venerates human beings and human life.
Notes
A Rebel in Eden is available in trade paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.
Reviewer Andrew Bernstein is a philosopher, writer, and novelist. His most recent works include Aristotle vs. Religion and Other Essays, The Adventurers’ Club and Other Stories, and Red Meat Village—the debut novel in his Tony Just detective series. All his books are available on Amazon.
[1] John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. Quoted in Robert Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden (Chester, Maryland: Avenger Books, 2025), 1.
[2] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume, 1993). Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 3.
[3] Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), xiii. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 3.
[4] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 119.
[5] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 132.
[6] The World Health Organization, quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 134.
[7] Paul Driessen, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power—Black Death (Bellevue, Washington: Free Enterprise Press, 2003), 66. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 134.
[8] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 135.
[9] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 5.
[10] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 5.
[11] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 8.
[12] Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 8.
[13] George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography, as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), 36, 43, 44. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 8.
[14] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 9.
[15] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 9.
[16] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 9.
[17] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 10.
[18] This was from Muir’s 1867 journal. It was published posthumously as A Thousand Mile Walk To The Gulf (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 98, 122. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 10.
[19] Statement by Horace Albright to the National Park Service Personnel upon his Resignation as Director in 1933. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 10.
[20] A.G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, No. 3 (July, 1935), 299. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 11.
[21] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 11.
[22] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 11.
[23] Arne Naess, “The Shallow, and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary”, Inquiry 16 (1973), 95-100. Quoted in Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 12.
[24] Bidinotto, A Rebel in Eden, 12.
