In its foreward, Vice President Al Gore announces that Our Stolen Future "raises compelling and urgent questions that must be answered." The book has been promoted as the next Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's 1962 book that spawned much of the environmental movement. More likely, it marks the end of an era of gullibility, hysteria, and crisis entrepreneurship. Unlike Al Gore, intellectually honest environmentalists demand factual and logically consistent foundations for reform. Hype and rhetoric are becoming passé.

The book was written by Theo Colborn, John Peterson Myers, and Dianne Dumanoski, two zoologists and a journalist. Their "scientific detective story" - provocatively subtitled "Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, And Survival?" - alleges that synthetic chemicals (found in PVC pipes, Tupperware, Tide, etc.) disrupt hormones. These hormonal disruptors are responsible for all manner of ecological, psychological, and social ills, they claim, ranging from domestic violence to "lesbian" seagulls. The cure? Ban them.

The book's timing was perfect. The National Academy of Sciences had just convened to discuss hormone disruptors. It arrived on bookshelves just in time for April 22, Earth Day - and just as Congress was being taken to task over environmental issues. It had a sexy title, a fetus on the cover, and a dramatic detective story inside. It was, and is, a PR masterpiece.

Yet it's flopping. It has been thoroughly trashed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times for all manner of flaws, including panic-mongering, junk science, and poor writing.

Our Stolen Future falls into a trap common to conventional environmentalism: it ignores trade-offs. Abandoning the 100,000-plus chemicals that play a role in the 45% of the world's economic activity would be extraordinarily costly. The authors demand "eliminating the use and release of hazardous compounds," setting standards to protect those most vulnerable, reducing the numbers of chemicals on the market and in given products, using only easily detectable and well-understood chemicals, and phasing out synthetic chemical manufacture. Such "broad government action" doesn't come cheap. Mandatory monitoring and disclosure laws for chemical manufacturers, water companies, grocers, and distributors will ultimately impose sizable costs on consumers.

Implementing Our Stolen Future's recommendations would close off many valuable opportunities. Immense benefits to food production and delivery systems would be lost. The benefits of plastics, medical drugs, and synthetics would cease to be available. According to Dr. Lorenz Rhomberg of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, "a crash program of [hormone disruptor] control and cleanup will divert precious resources from other pressing environmental problems. This could divert regulatory and research attention away from other, true causes of breast cancer, birth defects, and wildlife toxicity." These lost opportunitites would be costly indeed.

Costs alone do not invalidate a policy option, of course. The costs and benefits of any policy must be acknowledged and reconciled. We know that reckless proliferation of synthetic chemicals may bring reproductive ruin to affected wildlife. Conversely, a ban may bring unbearable costs to economies and ecosystems worldwide. Competing interests must be reconciled. But Our Stolen Future fails to do this.

Except once. The authors do make an exception to their absolutist position when they acknowledge that breast-feeding is a primary source of contamination. Breast-feeding "exposes infants to disturbing levels of chemical contaminants ... levels ten to forty times greater than the daily exposure of an adult."

So the prime culprit in "stealing our future" is the sacred practice of breast-feeding. It is easy, trendy, and politically correct to recommend organically growing one's own foods, avoiding animal fats, and giving babies unpainted toys. It is not acceptable to bash breast-feeding. In a rare instance of prudence, the authors write, "We know too little to judge how the undeniable benefits of breast-feeding balance against the risks of transferring hormonally active contaminants. While we have great concern, it is premature to advise women against breast-feeding." The authors would do well to consider trade-offs in all their recommendations.

Pseudoscience and Pseudo-Rights

Sifting through the morass of conjecture, innuendo, and propaganda in Our Stolen Future is nearly impossible. Its backwards methodologies and hysterical biases betray what might be valuable evidence.

Our Stolen Future rejects classic ideals of scientific proof for failing to address the alleged hormonal threat. Out with hypothesizing explanations for observations; in with "eco-epidemiology." The weight of the evidence now depends on "value judgments" such as "how much risk we are willing to entertain." Of course, value judgments can't be disproven. They are sovereign decrees, not testable hypotheses.

Colborn, a leader in "eco-epidemiology," tells us that chemicals, unlike people, must be judged guilty until proven innocent. Basic logic dictates that one cannot prove a negative. Unicorns may well frolic in the forest. We cannot disprove that possibility, because someone can always claim we haven't looked hard enough. Conversely, we could readily prove it if we saw them.

Similarly, a presumption of chemical guilt places the burden of proof on chemical manufacturers, even though proving that their chemicals don't disrupt hormones is logically and technically impossible. One could always claim that the manufacturer hasn't looked hard enough. No harm to the first generation doesn't prove no harm to the second, or third, or tenth. The infinite combination of varying chemicals, circumstances, and levels of susceptibility render the task absurd.

Colborn, Dumanoski, and Myers also offer a declaration of inviolable rights, starting with "children have a right to be born chemical-free." This epitomizes the book's irresponsible and naive rhetoric. They authors do not identify who has the responsibility for guaranteeing those rights. The judicial system is responsible for ensuring a right to due process. Who can have responsibility for "chemical-free births?"

To be born free from synthetic chemicals, the authors tell us, requires that mothers are themselves free from chemicals. This requires "that women minimize the consumption of animal fat from birth until the end of their childbearing years." They must also avoid exposure to plastics, pesticides, and detergents. Little girls playing with painted or plastic toys as infants, the authors note, may be violating their future children's right to chemical-free nativity.

Obviously, this "right" is for bumper stickers, not serious analysis.

Another unequivocal right advocated in Our Stolen Future is the "right to know"what chemicals are in one's food, water, and other consumer goods. This is echoed by Al Gore, who writes, "All of us have the right to know and the obligation to learn."

In practical terms, this "right to know" is an exceedingly expensive entitlement. Its costs would first be brone by chemical manufacturers and distributors. The costs would then be passed on to consumers in the form of higher price tags and burdensome instruction manuals detailing the biochemistry of lettuce and businesswear.

The authors want us to pay for this right by imposing a duty on manufacturers and distributors, because they have deeper pockets. In this, they neglect the superior power of market forces. With proper incentives, competition - not mandated disclosure laws and high transaction costs - will drive the market to satisfy customer preferences. If the consumers really want to know, they can purchase that knowledge like they purchase organic lettuce. And lettuce producers will find ways to communicate that knowledge flexibly, effectively, and inexpensively via certification. The market rewards those who please customers.

To be fair, there is one useful prescriptive message of Our Stolen Future: the admonition that we move beyond "the cancer paradigm". Too much research has been driven by the cancer scare of the 1970s, the War on Cancer, and hype over cancer rates. In a way, our past experience with cancer helps explain why this book takes such a hysterical tone. The politics of funding research pushes money toward trendy scares. The mysterious role of natural and synthetic estrogens in the development of animals and humans does needs explaining, and a prudent, cautious, and scientific response to the important questions of Our Stolen Future is definitely in order. A "War on Synthetic Chemicals" is most definitely not - but the success of the War on Cancer, in attracting funding if not in curing cancer, speaks volumes about why Colborn and company might call for one.

Flying Blinded

Modern chemistry has brought benefits to society too numerous to list. But this better living has had its costs.

DDT and CFCs prove that not all good things go together. When DDT first arrived, Paul Müller won the Nobel Prize for his seemingly miraculous chemical compound. As Silent Spring and recent history have shown, DDT is not unambiguously wondrous. It carries severe consequences for much wildlife and some humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, similarly, were heralded as "one of the safest substances ever invented." Half a century passed before CFCs were blamed for imperiling life on this planet.

So technological progress, while beneficial, is neither free nor without risks. Colborn, Dumanoski, and Myers take this observation much farther. They find civilization plunging arrogantly into the future with "dangerous ignorance" and risky "hubris". The risks and realities of progress have always existed, they admit, but the scale of mankind's impact now encompasses the entire Earth. The stakes have become too high. The risks and trade-offs of advancement are now intolerable.

Our Stolen Future claims that we are, in essence, "flying blind" towards our destiny. What do we do when we see a dark, nebulous shape ahead? Will we race through it, hoping it is a cloud and not a mountainside? Will we slow down? Or will we "land the plane as quickly as possible"? The technophobic authors embrace the last option. Phase-outs, bans on new chemicals, and safer ways to "meet basic human needs" are "the only way to opt out of the experiment."

We are flying blind to the future, and the authors want off the plane as soon as possible. They long for an idyllic past, when synthetic chemicals didn't exist and mankind only satisfied its basic needs. But renouncing modernity and stifling progress will mean taking away most of the twentieth century's benefits. It takes a much more convincing argument than Our Stolen Future to cajole a full plane to land, just because someone with a window seat sees a cloud and feels some turbulence. Responsible analysts and policy makers will advocate policies based on sound science and the broad interests of the citizenry, not the machinations of crisis entrepreneurs.