Broken Trust, Broken Land: Freeing Ourselves from the War Over the Environment

By Robert G. Lee

PARTIAL list of keywords: ecological authority; green guilt; etc, etc. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885221029
• ISBN13: 9781885221025
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Bookpartners
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Essential reading on the environmental and human rights.

Broken Trust, Broken Land by Dr. Robert G. Lee is essential reading for those who want to understand how to balance environmental protection with human rights. Just as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was an alert to the excesses of uncheck environmental degradation, Broken Trust, Broken Land is an alert to the excesses of unquestioned control for environmental protection. Dr. Lee shows that democracy, personal freedom, and our institutional system of checks and balances was carefully crafted by America's founders based on a realistic pessimism about human nature. These basic institutional protections are being undermined by a movement that is using moral persuasion to "save the earth". In the process, we have moved closer to a totalitarian society where individual rights and alternative authorities, such as family, community and religion, are subordinated to Mother Earth. Only by maintaining the moral equivalent of a war over the environment has society been willing to voluntarily suspend the protection of our democratic political system. The shocking conclusion is that this voluntary erosion of our democratic institutions will ultimately lead to a lose-lose tradegy where personal freedom and the environment both suffer. To avoid this Dr. Lee argues that we must build on the strengths of our political traditions, our families, our communities, and even religion. This story weaves such diverse topics as disenchantment with Judeo-Christian beliefs, the movement away from land stewardship and toward man's subservance to nature, the paradox that we can not live without taking life, political correctness in science, the President's Forest Plan, and the rise of "philosopher kings" who use their scientific credentials to make moral choices about the environment. This brave and thoughtful book should be read by those who want to recreate the traditional balances of American society which will ultimately result in fairer and better environmental management. An excellent companion book on how science is applied to natural resouce questions is The Great Salmon Hoax: An Eyewitness Account of the Collapse of Science and Law and the Triumph of Politics in Salmon Recovery by James Buchal.