The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated. This book is the first one I've seen that tells the truth and lays it on the line. It's a must-read for anyone who cares about people, progress and our planet.

— Patrick Moore

Greenpeace co-founder

Paul Driessen has given us an amazing tour de force. He explores one of today's most perplexing problems: the environmentally sensitive rich demanding that the Third World's poor forego feeding themselves, solving their health and energy problems, and taking their rightful place among the earth's prosperous people. Eco-Imperialism provides terrific intellectual ammunition and is outstandingly written. Very gripping to read.

— Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Toward Tradition

Developing countries need to be free to make their own decisions about how to improve their people's lives. Activists who've never had to worry about starvation, malaria and simple survival have no right to impose their fears, prejudices and ideologies on the world's poor. That's the central message of this book. It's a message that needs to be spread far and wide.

— CS Prakash

Professor of plant genetics
Tuskegee University

Driessen does a masterful job of stripping away the radicals’ mantle of virtue, dissecting their bogus claims and holding them to the moral and ethical standards they have long demanded for everyone except themselves. And he does so with humor, outrage and passion – and always without pulling any punches. Every concerned citizen and policymaker should read this book. The environmentalists will hate it. The world’s destitute masses will love it. And everyone will be challenged by it to reexamine their beliefs and the environmental establishment’s claims.

— Niger Innis

Congress of Racial Equality

As the author Paul Driessen, forcefully points out, the precautionary principle may safeguard healthy people in wealthy developed countries from risks associated with conjectural, or concocted, environmental catastrophes. But it does so by imposing real, immediate, life-threatening risks on the world’s most powerless and impoverished people – denying them the chance for better lives and thereby perpetuating the misery, malnutrition, disease and premature death that suffocate hopes, opportunities and lives in poor nations...

... It is a battle that must be fought – and one that can be won. In so doing, we can prove to India and the world that poor people have every right to enjoy the health and prosperity that so many in the West accept as their birthright. And that protecting the environment does not have to mean trampling on the hopes and human rights of the developing world.

— Deepak Lal

James S. Coleman Professor of International
Development Studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and
Professor Emeritus of Political Economy,
University College, London
(Excerpts from the Foreword)

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise, which are nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. During a 25-year career that included staff tenures with the United States Senate, Department of the Interior and an energy trade association, he has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility and other topics. He has also written articles and professional papers on marine life associated with oil platforms off the coasts of California and Louisiana – and produced a video documentary on the subject. Driessen received his BA in geology and field ecology from Lawrence University, JD from the University of Denver College of Law, and accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America. A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognised that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognise our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electri-city, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted.