Rating: 
Summary: HARD GREEN ... A BOOK TOO LONG
Review: Hard Green is an advocacy worth reading, but after the first 30 pages or so the author gets repetitive and does so for the entire 204 pages of the book. Its like the same theme written over and over.
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Summary: Read Carefully
Review: I have read a few of Huber's essay's concerning the environment. Many of his arguments have merit, many of them don't. Anyone who has limited knowledge of biology or ecology would not be able to make the distinction between his good and bad arguments. If you are a laymen in terms of biology, ecology, chemistry, etc., it would be better to choose a book with less bias, or couple the book with one written from the other side of the argument.
Rating: 
Summary: Very, very good
Review: An easy read. Hard Green is a good blueprint for folks like me who share the green objectives (hate pollution, desire more green space, love trees), but disagree with much of the collateral "environmentalist" agenda. Peter Huber has done his homework and the book is quite helpful.
Rating: 
Summary: Unsubstantiated Rhetoric
Review: Being a conservative, I have been looking for a good book to support the conservative environmental cause. "Hard Green" is NOT that book. Peter Huber falls into the same trap as Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance" ... Unsubstantiated Rhetoric. Save your money and more importantly your time.
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Summary: once again, the straw man
Review: Unfortunately this book, or at least the prologue, which is all I cared to read, mostly engages in a common debate trick: misrepresent and distort the views of your opponents to make them look bad and to make it easy to refute them. Its the fallacy of the straw man.Here are a few examples from just the first few pages of the book: (Softs are Huber's term for the bad guys, people typically referred to in our culture as 'environmentalists'.) "Convinced that markets fail left and right, the Softs set about moving the production of ordinary goods -- food, transportation, power, and countless others -- out of the market and into the public sector." "(Softs) believe that only government can set things right and can set it all right, every last wisp and trace and molecule of it." Softs think that the computer models that they use "can link any human activity, however small, to any environmental consequence, however large." "To the Soft Green, the model is everything. Only the model can say just where the dioxin came from or how it may affect our cellular protein." You get the idea. It seems that Huber is basically saying (allow me to oversimplify a bit) that if you can't put a physical border around it (e.g. a park), it is not worthy of environmental concern or protection. If you are interested in doing something positive for the environment, I suggest that you read instead "Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices - Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists", by Michael Brower and Warren Leon.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Concept, Lacks Substantiation
Review: I really wanted to read a contrarian environmental view, either to improve my own environmentalism or just to clarify the issues. Huber's concepts were aimed at the right target, misguided environmental policy - his own idea is using recovered land as the ultimate goal of our policies - but I was gravely disappointed by his lack of supporting data.
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Summary: A Must Read on the Environment!
Review: As expected, the so-called environmentalists have logged on and attacked this book with half-truth and inuendo because they cannot contradict the facts that Huber so cogently presents. These tree-huggers are afraid that putting the truth before the American people will end the sham they have perpetrated for so long. Everything an open-minded person needs to know about what is going on in our world is in Huber's book. If we would just follow this manifesto, we would be in a lot better shape.
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Summary: A Wonderful Book!
Review: Huber's magnificent book blows the environmentalist wackos out of the water! Meticulously researched and magnificently argued, _Hard Green_ shows that the liberal "sky is falling" approach to the environment can't hold water. Those people are simply anti-business and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. People need to read this book and see how the wackos have been trying to fool them.
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Summary: Environmentalism For Rich People
Review: "Hard Green" is the same old right-wing tirade against environmentalism we've heard since Reagan announced that trees pollute. Basically, Huber blames environmentalism for not being as successful as it ought to be, conveniently forgotting the fact that conservative Republicans like him have fought all sensible environmental regulation and done their best to hamper what protection the environment has. Huber's argument reduces to "Environmentalism for Rich People," as he recites the empty litany of free-marketeers that the pursuit of money is the only real way to protect the environmental. Unfortuately for Huber, he doesn't even seem to know what "the environment" is, as he equates a tree plantation with a natural Old Growth forest. It's the same gospel of greed and materialism that got us into the environmental mess we're in. Absolutely nothing new in this book; even the smarminess seems pilfered from Ron Arnold, the great grandsire of anti-environmental bomb throwers. Read "Green Rage" instead -- a pro-environmental book cited in "Hard Green," which debunks the free-market, technocrat arguments Huber repeats (endlessless).
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Summary: Hard Green An irrational rant.
Review: BOOK REVIEW - HARD GREEN - by Peter Huber Basic Books, 1999, ISBN 0-465-03112 -4 This book is an insult to the intelligence of any thoughtful and even-handed reader. At least the book has an apt sub-title - "a conservative manifesto". It is a repetitive, ranting, & repellent polemic, that employs all the tools of a master propagandist, i.e. - half truths, unsupported (and usually insupportable) declarations, distortions of data, misinterpretations of history, confusions of cause and effect, generalizations from the particular, selective reasoning, etc. Unfortunately, the uncritical reader can be readily taken in by such devices when they are deftly employed, as they often are herein. In the first 185 pages, including the introduction, I have noted 36 egregious errors, distortions, or false arguments, and only 3 good but not original ideas. The author is so annoyingly and repetitively argumentative, that even when he makes a good point he repels this reader. I would like to note just three examples of flawed reasoning or argument: - The author presents a world of black and white - environmentalists are divided into two extreme fringe groups of "soft" and "hard" which are extensively defined. The great middle ground, inhabited by all of the environmentalists I have met, doesn't exist, and I have never met a "soft" as described herein. Given even the modest level of reasoning needed to be concerned for the environment, it is almost impossible to be such a "soft". I would have thought it nearly as unlikely to be such a "hard", but the author is proof that they do exist. - In rejecting "efficiency" as one practical environmental measure, the author presents selective data to argue that people simply increase consumption to offset all of the efficiency gains. Many pages later (when you have hopefully forgotten this alleged propensity), to support his "value of wealth" proposition, the author augues that individual appetites and therefore consumption are limited. The wealth proposition is probably valid, but the arguments are mutually contradictory. He can't have it both ways. - In dealing with pollution, the "softs" are accused of having a micro mind set, driven to the detriment of all by the immeasurably small. Later, on economics, these same softs suffer from a mind set that is macro, not micro, seeing only in collective terms. These "softs" must be as contradictory as the author. Two quite representative idiotic quotes will illustrate the general level of rational expression: "Conservation and economic exploitation are indeed irreconcilable, but only superficially, only in the snap-shot of the short term.--In the longer term, under sufficiently involved and smart private management there is no reason why both objectives cannot be advanced. Lumber companies need forests today and tomorrow, too." Unfortunately, the proviso about smart management rarely gets fulfilled in the real world. Without severe external pressure, greed usually beats smart. Has the author never heard of clear cutting or MacMillan Bloedel? "Emissions standards for chimneys and tailpipes now require the air to be cleaner coming out than when it came in the intake at the front end." When was the last time he breathed from a tail-pipe? The author writes well on politics, on Marxism vs. Capitalism, on planned economies vs. free markets, on limited government vs. socialist regulations, i.e. on left vs. right, but insisting that Green can, is, and must be equated to left and right is simply not tenable. There is just enough good in his recommendations to make the wrongheadedness of his global prescription a tragedy. On balance, for the reasonable, centered, thoughtful man, with a concern for the environment, more than "a little bit" of knowledge, and the ability to maintain a consistent and rational thought process, this screed boils down to a load of old cods-wallop. At the end, the only useful prescription presented is that we should prefer free market mechanisms to regulation when promoting environmentalism. Virtually all Greens support this idea. The only opposition seems to be the so-called "Carbon Lobby". I recommend the book highly to any extremists who thrive on irrational rants, or to narrow-minded libertarians who despise anything left of very far right.
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