by Lewis Loflin
The 1986 novel Nature's End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka envisioned a 2025 collapse driven by technology’s supposed evils and a call for green spiritualism. Denverites suffocated, the Amazon became a desert, and mass population control was urged—all under a banner of eco-piety. As of 2025, these fears are fiction. This isn’t about denying CO2’s role or climate change—those are real science. It’s about calling out the Luddite fantasies and quasi-religious fluff that muddy the waters.
The book channels Paul Ehrlich’s 1970s rants, labeling population growth a “cancer” to be cut out with “brutal and heartless decisions.” He wrote:
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people...The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
Nature's End doubles down, picturing acid rain, famine, and a dust-choked Iowa—blaming technology and capitalism. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb flops predicted starvation by the 1980s. Today, Iowa’s fields thrive, thanks to the very tech these Luddites scorned. California’s droughts? They hit in the 1930s and 1950s too—not a tech-driven apocalypse.
Woven into the novel is a sermon: humanity’s “sin” of progress demands repentance through ecological purity. It’s less science, more cult—shunning machines for some misty-eyed return to nature. Steven Pinker, in “Progressophobia” (Skeptical Inquirer, May-June 2018), nails it:
"Intellectuals dislike the very idea of progress. Our own mental bugs also distort our understanding of the world, blinding us to improvement."
Tech, the book’s boogeyman, has cleaned rivers, fed billions, and cut energy costs. Spiritualists clutching crystals didn’t do that—engineers did.
Pinker adds: “The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world...people estimate the probability of an event by the ease with which instances come to mind.” Endless scare stories from ivory-tower journalists fuel this green gospel. No suffocation in Denver, no Amazon wasteland—yet the headlines linger. It’s not climate denial to say tech isn’t the devil; it’s realism.
In 2018, global temperatures dropped 0.56°C over two years (Investor’s Business Daily, May 16)—the biggest dip in a century. Blizzards swept the Midwest. Climate shifts happen—CO2 matters—but Nature's End’s tech-hating doom didn’t. Nature’s tougher than the Luddites think, and tech helps us adapt, not just destroy.
This isn’t a rejection of climate science—CO2 and warming are real factors we’re tackling. It’s a jab at the anti-tech crowd and their spiritual silliness. Rolf Yungclas (Today’s Environmentalism, June 2, 2014) notes:
"The leadership of environmentalist organizations more and more consists of those motivated by an aggressive anti-industrial ideology."
That’s the rub: green spiritualism wants control, not solutions. Tech isn’t the enemy—ignorance of it is.
Nature's End isn’t prophecy—it’s a relic of Luddite dreams. The Amazon grows, food flows, air’s breathable. Technology didn’t end nature; it bolstered it. Ehrlich’s “cancer” fizzled. Forget the guilt trips—science and innovation keep us going, not green chants. Nature endures, and so do we.
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