To Whom It May Concern

Book Review: State of Fear by Michael Crichton

There are times when a book can be a complete revelation in terms of how it rocks your belief’s structure, in how you view a significant part of your world. This book will do that to just about any environmentalist who even has half a brain. For me it was more of a reinforcement of my own beliefs than a revelation, however. I have long been skeptical of environmentalist groups and the policies they employ, lawyers who are hell bent on ‘saving the world from humans’ regardless of the conflicting facts from the data that their own scientists’ studies are showing them.

Crichton is a master of preparation and research when it comes to writing. The book itself is fiction, but the facts presented within are formulated from actual data and studies that are done in real life, so in some ways it has a very non fiction feel to it. There are literally dozens of sources listed in his bibliography, some of which I have checked out myself by searching the internet for them, and they are true. These aren’t conspiracy theory web sites either, these are university professors, doctors of geology, meteorology, actual environmentalist scientists, and many other well educated members of the scientific community who in many cases went into these studies looking to prove the existence of global warming only to find out that the facts presented themselves in such a way as to deny that the phenomenon even exists.

That’s only part of the theory the book presents, there are so many amazing surprises within the book, from debunking the cancer from power lines myth, to showing how Yellowstone National Park was nearly destroyed due to environmental policies that were enacted to ‘save the park’, to how so much data exists that demonstrates the very idea of ‘global warming’ may be one of the greatest farces ever entertained by the scientific community.

This is one of the more important books I have read in my life, in terms of opening up people’s eyes and making them really see the facts for what they are. If more environmentally minded people read this book, it would really rock their world and change their viewpoint about a lot of things. As Crichton is quick to point out, he is not anti environmentalist, except in the fact that most environmental groups are more interested in maintaining an elitist status quo than in actually doing anything about the environment, hence having far too many lawyers on their payrolls and far too few scientists.

I cannot begin to describe the amount of work the author put into this book. As I was reading it, I suddenly put two and two together and realized he was the same author who wrote “Rising Sun”, a book about the Japanese culture and how it interacts economically with the culture in the United States, again, an amazing book with a ton of research supporting Crichton’s viewpoints.

The basic viewpoint in “State of Fear” is that we have created a society that needs to continually develop grand new scary theories of doom, the idea of a ‘state of fear’ that we live in, in which the media screams about the danger and scientists back up the doom with all this suspect evidence. This is true from the Salem witch trials all the way to the current day Global Warming theories. As Crichton explains, if anyone is really interested in an open and frank discussion of the facts about global warming, they will find that the majority of data involved in the studies on global climates do not support the theory of global warming at all, and that those who are trying to further promote the theory thru strong editorial positions in scientific magazines, have no business doing so do to a big time conflict of interest, in that there is a name to be made by attaching one’s self to the new ‘state of fear’, regardless of whether or not there is any truth to the theory.

As far as the plot of the book and the storyline, there are times where Crichton gets a little lost in the details of the characters, likely because of the complexity and brilliance in the presentation of the scientific details backing the conclusions within the storyline itself. For instance, one character is trying to decide between two women he likes and you never do get any idea as the book comes to a close whether he ever makes a choice or not. This happens throughout the book, and is the only real reason I didn’t give it a full 5 out of 5 stars. 4 and a half stars is a stretch in terms of the fictional quality of the book, but the staggering amount of scientific influence on the story pushes the rating up, in my mind.

Crichton’s own views at the end of the book are very insightful, and it’s best to close with one: "We haven’t the foggiest notion how to preserve what we term “wilderness,” and we had better study it in the field and learn how to do so. I see no evidence that we are conducting such research in a humble, rational, and systematic way. I therefore hold little hope for wilderness management in the twenty-first century. I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners. There is no difference in outcomes between greed and incompetence.”

Rating: ****1/2