'Tis the season to put an end to 'ecohype'

Letter to the editor Copyright 1999 Washington Times August 28, 1999

Kenneth Smith, editorial page deputy editor for The Washington Times, was so right to castigate Vice President Al Gore's use of excessive "ecohype" in "Our Stolen Future" ("Al Gore's stolen spring," Op-Ed, Aug. 19).

For some time now, doctors have recognized a sickness called mass sociogenic illness (MSI) by proxy, which is generated by "unwarranted and exaggerated fears."

Since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in 1962, environmentalists have tried to plunge us all into deep MSI, generating one scary scenario after another, from DDT, though the imminent ice age, to the nonsense of global warming and the "hormonal havoc" of endocrine disrupters.

Surely, now is the time to call their bluff and to put an end to the doom and gloom once and for all, celebrating instead the constant adaptability, flexibility and dynamism of humans in the face of change.

Our spring may then indeed return, while Mr. Gore justly enters his political fall.

PHILIP STOTT
Professor of biogeography,
University of London
London

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