There is nothing wrong with attempting to make the often difficult and complex findings of science available to a wider audience, but environmental popularizers often present a one-sided picture and hide important scientific disagreements on issues relevant to environmental quality. The zeal to draw firm conclusions from the results of scientific research frequently prompts speculative matters to be left out or presented with greater authority than they deserve. The partisanship implicit in these failures is most often excused by the originality of the author's perspective on the subject or a passionate commitment to do good. How could one regret the "minor" confusions that might arise from such noble impulses?

But using one-sided and incomplete accounts of the state of scientific knowledge has led to projections, predictions, and warnings that, not surprisingly, have been falsified by events. No one knows what the future holds. But reports that Lake Erie and the oceans would be dead by now were surely greatly exaggerated. The United States is wracked neither by food riots nor a great epidemic of pesticide-induced cancers. Birds continue to sing in the mornings, and they do not have to face the rigors of either an ice age caused by humans or a global warming caused by the heat of increased energy production and consumption. With what confidence should we look upon the projected horrors of global warming, rain forest destruction, or toxic waste, given the record of the past?

This failure of prophecy may be an intellectual weakness, yet prophecy continues because it provides the popularizers with a profound rhetorical strength: it releases the power of fear. The central role of this sentiment in political rhetoric has long been understood. Arousing fear, though, is not always easy. Even as far back as Aristotle, it was observed that we fear things less the more distant they are. Hence when Churchill sought to rouse the British, he brought the Germans to the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, and hills of "our island." So, too, to arouse fears the popularizers have to present pictures of imminent calamities that could befall their relatively comfortable and well-off readers. Environmental disasters like endemic waterborne disease due to inadequate sewage treatment in faraway nations do not fit this category. The prospect of my getting skin cancer due to ozone depletion does. Without such immediacy, one could only arouse a sentiment like compassion, which is not as strong as fear.