Plunderers of the Earth

In Plunderers of the Earth, Julius Ruechel tells the tale of how complex political and ecological systems unravel - often in tandem - whenever a society embraces centralized decision-making, empowers a masterful administrative state, and thereby creates perverse incentives that gradually hollow out once-thriving civilizations. But because these processes work on a different timescale from the speed at which impatient humans live their lives, few can see the slow but relentless forces eroding the foundations of civilization, and fewer still recognize the implications.

No academic discipline is a better example of the corrupting influence of politics than the field of climate science. The crusade against carbon dioxide that has emerged from the toxic marriage between science, politics, and corporate interests not only serves as the "noble lie" upon which to build a new global social order - and to grease the wheels of a wholly artificial $5 trillion (and growing) "green" global economy - but in an echo of the destructive forces set in motion in the lead-up to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s by another now-discredited climate theory ("the rain follows the plow"), today's erroneous climate theory is once again preventing us from recognizing an altogether different and very real ecological story unfolding right beneath our feet that has gone largely unnoticed even as our misguided climate policies accelerate that ecological crisis and block its solutions.