Michael Crichton was a challenging individual. His books generally centered around some controversial policy issue: medical malpractice, airline safety, biotechnology, sexual discrimination, Japan’s economic dominance, nanotechnology, and—the issue that brought us to each other’s attention—global warming. His approach was unique—he would spend about a year reading everything he could find on the topic, then take one side of the controversy, and lock himself away for a month to produce the novel. His was a highly disciplined approach that created a range of always readable, enjoyable, novels. And he made money—lots of it—even when he challenged Chattering Classes’ orthodoxy.
His 2004 novel, State of Fear, elevated CEI into the pop culture world. In the novel, we are castigated by an environmentalist villain as “Neanderthals.” After the book’s publication, we invited him to speak at our Annual Dinner speaker, but, unfortunately, he was unable to do so.
His arguments were sensible. “I’m a writer, not a crusader,” he said. “I write popular novels, not intellectual treatises.” Despite this modesty, his writings, speeches, and television interviews broadened and deepened the debate about environmental policies—and science policy more generally. Considering the success of movies based on his books, I asked him for only one favor: If State of Fear ever becomes a movie, I pleaded, please retain the scene where the green villain attacks CEI!
With his untimely death, Hollywood’s liberal establishment will probably sidetrack any plans to bring State of Fear to the screen. Hollywood has long preferred the Day After Tomorrow vision of noble greenies fighting to save our planet; Al Gore even received an Oscar for his An Inconvenient Truth. And America has just emerged from a presidential campaign in which both candidates, in the name of fighting global warming, adopted eco-theocratic faith-based energy policies. Both argued that energy rationing would have no significant costs and would create large numbers of well-paying “green jobs.”
Crichton would have found much meat for further novels in America’s intellectual dithering. He’ll be missed; let us hope others will pick up his mantle.
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I have enjoyed some of Michael Crichton's novels, but he didn't always get his science right and spent a lot of time preaching his own opinions, from a simplified vision of how chaos theory predicted that a zoo wouldn't function to how genetic engineering was possible on a massive scale despite huge gaps in the genes to be sequenced. Even a relative amateur in any of these fields could see how preposterous his ideas would stretch reality.
I would also take issue with his view of sustainability. The main issue I have with it is that US and international wealthy people see sustainability as how to build your new luxury house using a variety of “Green Technologies”, when in my view sustainability is how to make a smaller footprint on the world. That means that we build smaller, more densely packed homes in cities and near cities, saving more of the open space. We don't building billions of luxury homes into hill-sides on half acre lots, we teach people how to rebuild their sense of community through the development of urban villages.
Sustainability is using available technologies to reduce our use of polluting chemicals and developing new chemicals that do not cause as much harm, and developing agriculture that increases crop yields on less land in a manner that doesn't price poor farmers out of the seed market place. It also involves evaluating what energy sources are truly less polluting rather than selecting energy sources by allowing the market to choose.
Third world countries and poor nations are the ones that stand to benefit the most from these ideas because many of these solutions do not involve huge changes in infrastracture, but small, local changes. I was most disturbed by humanities impact on nature during my most recent trip to Brazil. Rivers in urban areas are cess pools because connecting houses to sewer lines and treating the waste water is viewed as requiring an enormous capital investment using huge infrastructure. Therefore, solving the issue is never even considered possible. In my view undertaking hundreds of small neighborhood projects that build very simple treatment systems would allow the people from individual areas to make their own areas sustainable by treating their waste before it reaches the rivers and streams around their shanty towns, and finding a use for that waste.
Sustainability is always discussed on a global scale, when really it is a billion solutions on a local scale. If we can start making it work in urban as well as rural areas we can make a huge change to the planet. Think sustainably, act locally.
State of Fear wasn't really about global warming. It was about the control exerted by what Crichton called the “politico-legal-media complex,” which has replaced the cold war military-industrial complex as the principal power bloc and organizing force in American politics.
Say what you like about Crichton's conclusions about climate change (and it seems as if everybody has)–his observations on how politicians and interest groups collude with the media to whip the electorate into a frenzy were dead-on. They deserve special attention this week, when the media's reprehensibly biased coverage was a major contributing factor, perhaps even the deciding factor, in the election of our next president.
Much has been made about how alternative media and the blogosphere are rendering the mainstream media irrelevant. This is nonsense. The only thing that alternative media has done is to whet the public's appetite for news and the public still turns overwhelmingly to the MSM for that news. The media has lost all concern for anything approaching the public interest and is perfectly happy to report stories with no regard for anything other than maximizing its own current profits and furthering whatever agenda it thinks will increase those profits in the future.
State of Fear was far from my favorite Crichton novel but he did us all a favor when he included this theme in the book. This is an issue that we'll be wrestling with for the foreseeable future and it deserves more debate than the plot vehicle concerning global warming.
Besides, any book where a thinly-disguised Martin Sheen character gets eaten by cannibals just can't be all bad.
good said Michael Crichton'