Eco-Scam.

Let me confess, before anyone complains about the smell of bias rising from this review, that I am indeed one of Rush Limbaugh's "long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wackos." I've been known to birdwatch before breakfast, eat camping food at home and wear a hemp baseball hat to protest chemical cotton. We're a peaceful bunch, my maggots and I, so we were shocked to open Limbaugh's monumental bestseller, The Way Things Ought To Be, to read that we want "to roll us back, maybe not to the Stone Age, but at least to the horse-and-buggy era." I'd quote further, but my mastodon is now eating his book.

Green-bashing has become a popular conservative sport. Limbaugh celebrates Earth Day by playing a medley of chain saws on his radio show, and he devotes a brief chapter in his book to the Mother of All Planets. She's a four-billion-year old veteran of calamities much worse than anything white males can cook up. "Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all of the evil fluoro-carbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical, and insensitive corporations in history," Limbaugh writes. And, look, we're all still alive and buying his book like mad. "The fact is, we couldn't destroy the earth if we wanted to., With the issue settled, he takes a jab at Hollywood recycling advocate Tom Cruise for wracking up 35 stock cars in one film, and moves onto a pithy chapter about crime.

A slew of books have now followed Limbaugh, seeking to transform green-bashing from radio chitchat into a genuine science. They cast environmentalism as paganism or Marxism; quote Earth First! and Paul Ehrlich ad nauseam; bombastically defend the virtue of true science against the corruptions of "climate catastrophists" and "apocalypse abusers"; and keep the word warriors of capitalism gainfully employed after the fall of communism. My maggots and I discovered that they're fun to read, if you approach them like lost episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Dixy Lee Ray is the queen bee of green-bashing. Limbaugh blesses her new book, Environmental Overkill, with a cover blurb: A way must be found to get this book into the hands of as many Americans as possible." My maggots and I would suggest theft, except that Ray's enthusiasm for radiation might set off the store alarms. ("For those who do not like radioactivity, the Earth is no place to live," she writes in an earlier book, Trashing the Planet.) Ray had a colorful career before she took up green-bashing, serving as a chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and as a governor of Washington State. Progressives mostly remember her dogs, which she named after Seattle Times reporters and made her staffers walk, but Limbaugh treats her as an oracle of science. She sprays the page with numbers and quotes from Ph.Ds., dedicates Environmental Overkill to "factual information about basic science," and writes with overbearing confidence. "Whatever happened to common sense?" she asks repeatedly.

What really drives Ray, though, is her Pavlovian need to disprove almost everything that environmentalists say. Dixy World is the photo negative of Mother Gaia. Acid rain is "manna from heaven," she writes, loaded with nitrogen and sulfur, "nutrients, essential for plant growth." Wetlands are villains, breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry malaria, encephalitis, yellow fever and River Blindness. So it goes, as she flip-flops every issue of our day. The Northern Spotted Owl lives in 40-year-old trees; the toxic wastes buried at Love Canal didn't even cause one common cold; and a thinner ozone layer may be good for people, especially the elderly, since increased ultraviolet radiation could strengthen their bones.

My maggots and I enjoyed our visit to Dixy World, until a reality probe landed from Science magazine. For all of her protestations to the contrary, Ray quotes outsider scientists rather than those in the mainstream. Science dug into her theory that volcanoes blow much bigger holes in the ozone layer than do human chemicals, an idea which delights Limbaugh, and found that much of her information comes from a source funded by supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a jailbird who keeps running for President with plans to colonize Mars. She goofed, too, in writing that Mount St. Augustine, which blew up in Alaska in 1976, spewed 570 times as much chlorine into the atmosphere as CFCs did that year. The U.S. Geological Survey speculated that a volcanic eruption 700,000 years ago released that much gas, based on its measurements of the much smaller Mount St. Augustine blast, which belched only a fourth as much chlorine as civilization did in 1976. (Limbaugh concocted his claim about Mount Pinatubo himself, since not even Ray mentions it.)

In Eco-Scam, Ronald Bailey, a former writer for Forbes magazine, creates his own world, Planet Apocalypse, from the crystal ball goofs made by such green eminences as Lester Brown, Stephen Schneider and Paul Ehrlich, who is quoted so often he seems like a co-author. In their rush to catch the public's eye, these men have sounded like God in the Old Testament, predicting that the wrath of nature will fall upon our heads. In 1969, for example, Ehrlich foresaw killer smogs smothering Los Angeles and New York City in 1973, famine spreading around the globe by 1975, and World War Ill opening on October 13, 1979. Lester Brown has predicted major dropoffs in world grain production - in 1967, 1974 and 1989. And in 1975, when scientists worried about a 30-year cooling trend, Nigel Calder wrote, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."

My maggots and I had a good chuckle over Planet Apocalypse, which proves that MacArthur Award geniuses can be wrong like the rest us, but Bailey takes them so seriously. "The march toward something like world government remains for the most part unacknowledged by the apocalyptics since they don't want to alarm the public," he warns. If he likes, I will saddle up the mastodon and start herding the masses down to the United Nations today. Poor Bailey, like Dixy Lee Ray and Rush Limbaugh, only thinks in absurd extremes: If we're not on Planet Apocalypse, we must be on Planet Pollyanna, where overpopulation and global warming don't exist. My maggots and I finally grew bored with these cartoon worlds and returned to the real one. "The more I learn about the interaction of all life-forms on the planet and the more I witness, with my own five senses, the beauty and magnificence of nature, the more awestricken I become," writes Rush Limbaugh himself. My maggots and I couldn't say it any better. Now, if we could steal him away from "the interaction of all life-forms" on his dinner plate and take him to the held to see real environmentalists at work, we might convince him that the Mother of All Planets is worth saving as more than a verbal battlefield.