HOLGER J. THUSS (JENA)
With 150.000 copies and about twice as many readers every day, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung is not only the largest Swiss newspaper, but also the most respected daily paper among the German-speaking Europeans. Under the headline “Eco-imperialism at the expense of the poor,” it also was the first major print media that informed its readers of CFACT’s newly published German edition of Paul Driessen’s Eco-imperialism: Green Power Black Death on September 11.
According to the reviewer, Detmar Doering of the German Liberal Institute, it is “fully comprehensible” that “humans care for an environment worth living and want it protected.” However, that should be a reason to challenge environmentalism, because apparently “its cultural hegemony in the public sphere corrupts” this movement. “Many scenarios by which environmentalists impress the (western) public are based on bogus science, e.g. the ‘climate catastrophe,’ as Driessen can meticulously demonstrate. Justified concerns for the environment,” the review concludes, “must not be directed against the economic perspectives of the world’s poor. It is a pity that only few have the courage to say it that way.”
This might have been the reason that sociology professor Dr. Joseph Huber of the University of Halle included Eco-imperialism in the recommended reading list for his course on “The global system and sustainable development.” On December 6, today, the book was discussed by his students.
Christian Bartsch of Junge Freiheit (“Young Freedom”), a conservative weekly with 30,000 readers from Berlin, reviewed the book on October 6, and predicted the new Driessen book “will be a shock for many” because of its “appalling” facts about the global activities of self-appointed guardians of the environment. According to Bartsch, modern environmentalists act like medicine men or shamans in prehistoric times: Both “discovered fear as the best means to make their sheep compliant.” In both cases it is about them silencing “evil demons which were invented by themselves” and presenting environmentalist shamans as the “keepers of public morals and ethics.”
On October 21, as well Dirk Maxeiner, one of Germany’s most renowned environment writers, reviewed Eco-imperialism in Die Welt. With some 800,000 readers, the paper is one of Germany’s major national dailies. Its literary supplement “Die literarische Welt” (“World of Literature”), where the article appeared, represents the great humanistic journalistic tradition of the 1920s. Maxeiner not only mentioned the devastating consequences of extreme environmentalism but also focused on the dangerous “ethical standards” of several “green” investment funds: “From Nike to Reebok, from BP to Shell, Paul Driessen’s book is full of examples of opportunistic companies practicing a fatal appeasement policy toward noisy lobby groups in rich countries, at the expense of the poor. For managers and entrepreneurs this book is a must-read, because it could also bear the title ‘Corporate palookas in green pinstripe suits.'”
Other reviews of Eco-imperialism: Green policies with lethal consequences – this is the book title retranslated from German – appeared in Eigentuemlich Frei (“Peculiarly Free”), Neue Nachricht (“Current News”), and NOVO – Germany’s most distinguished libertarian periodicals, in Civis, a quarterly loosely affiliated with Chancellor Merkel’s ruling Christian-Democrat party, and the Chemische Rundschau (“Chemical Review”), a specialized magazine for chemists from Switzerland. Altogether, reviews of CFACT Europe’s most important 2006-publication reached more than 1.1 million readers.