Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

by Robert Zubrin

Overview

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.

Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its pernicious consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world.

Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to all of antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, and industrial development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594035692
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Series:	New Atlantis Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Robert Zubrin is the author of several highly successful books, including Energy Victory, a powerful and hugely popular work on achieving energy independence, and The Case for Mars, a 100,000-copy bestseller on space exploration and the human future. He frequently writes, lectures, and gives radio and TV interviews on a wide range of policy questions as a fellow of the Center for Security Policy, the president of the Mars Society, and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis. A scientist and engineer by training, with advanced degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and nuclear engineering, he has nine U.S. patents granted or pending.

Editorial Reviews

In this look at the rise of “antihumanism”—an ideology that argues that humans are a cancer on the earth—scientist Zubrin (Energy Victory) charts the troubling shift from one’s “unalienable rights” and “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to forced mass sterilization, eugenics, and Nazism. Zubrin finds within Thomas Malthus the foundation for “justifying human oppression and tyranny.” From Malthusianism, he continues to Darwinism—“human compassion toward the unfortunate is not merely useless (as per Malthus) but actually morally wrong”—following the path eventually to eugenics. The book is replete with scientific studies and facts, though it’s Zubrin’s view on the people and history behind antihumanist movements that’s the most disturbing. Whether pointing out that the first Green Party was founded under the leadership of August Haussleiter, a former Nazi SS officer; that Fujimori’s genocide in Peru was funded by international aid; or that Qian Xinzhong was given the first United Nations Population Award (together with Indira Gandhi) after forcing thousands of Chinese women to abort their children, Zubrin paints a dark and disturbing picture of antihumanism that’s worth everyone’s time to read. Agent: Adam Keiper, the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"The book is replete with scientific studies and facts, though it’s Zubrin’s view on the people and history behind antihumanist movements that’s the most disturbing. Whether pointing out that the first Green Party was founded under the leadership of August Haussleiter, a former Nazi SS officer; that Fujimori’s genocide in Peru was funded by international aid; or that Qian Xinzhong was given the first United Nations Population Award (together with Indira Gandhi) after forcing thousands of Chinese women to abort their children, Zubrin paints a dark and disturbing picture of antihumanism that’s worth everyone’s time to read." —Publishers Weekly



“Robert Zubrin’s masterful study…makes for riveting reading. Merchants of Despair is a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress.” —Steven W. Mosher, President, Population Research Institute


“Merchants of Despair is an extraordinary and important book….This fascinating volume carefully traces developments of the Malthusian hypothesis right up to the present: through eugenics to population control and genocide; through the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and extreme environmentalism to climate change and the myth of global warming apocalypse. Robert Zubrin has my nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.” —S. Fred Singer, Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years



“I believe no one to date has so clearly explained the thread of the antihuman movement throughout history. To read this book is to become a warrior in the battle against it.” —Jay Lehr, Heartland Institute


“The most devastating account and refutation of antihuman environmentalism ever written.” —Gregory Benford, Author of Chiller

From the Publisher