Our Stolen Future portrays a frightening world where synthetic chemicals assault our fertility, intelligence, and survival. But instead of delivering substance, it capitalizes on hype. It hit bookstores just in time for Earth Day and on the heels of the National Academy of Sciences' investigation of synthetic estrogens. Thanks to the big behind-the-scenes boost given to the book by Fenton Communications-the same PR firm that ginned up the 1989 Alar-on-apples scare-the book received coverage in nearly all national media, and backing from hip cultural figures like Robert Redford.

The book's message is dramatic, urgent, and personal: In a terrible "Faustian bargain," we have bought technological progress at the price of the environment, the well-being of our children, and perhaps even our survival. Touted as a "scientific detective story," the book combines suspenseful narrative and apocalyptic overtones into a real page-turner. Ambiguous prophecies of "fates worse than extinction," of terrible forces that are "slow, invisible, and indirect," are bandied about darkly.

The villains are chemical manufacturers and profiteering corporations. Synthetic chemicals, the authors say, are disrupting human hormones and causing widespread developmental abnormalities. The authors suggest that synthetic chemicals could potentially be responsible for nearly every prominent social ill. Poverty, educational breakdown, crime, homosecuality, deteriorating family life-these may all be the fault of corporations like DuPont and Dow Corning.

Actually, hormones disruptors are poorly understood, and there is no conclusive evidence linking developmental problems and environmental chemicals. The science behind Our Stolen Future is also unorthodox. It indicts causality and other basic tools of the scientific method that have been used to challenge envirnomental claims. Indeed, it rejects the scientific method itself as Enlightenment arrogance. That kind of thinking, the book argues, is what got us into this mess in the first place. A new wave of thinking, "eco-epidemiology," is now required.

This brings to mind the debate over global warming. Problems in human reproduction and development, like climate change, can only be reliably observed over long periods of time. Links between plastic lining in beer cans and illiteracy are about as tenuous as links between chlorofluorocarbons and the 1996 blizzard in New England. But the authors are very clever. They display short-term tragedies and augur long-term catastrophes. So none of their claims can be disproved in the near future.

The marketing appeal of the synthetic chemical scare far surpasses that of global warming alarmists. It is racy and anecdotal: Synthetic chemicals affect our sexuality; they are so prevalent no one can escape them. Painful, personal experiences pile up. One couple's dreams of a family are ruined by DES, another sees their children's future spoiled by DDT, a third is rendered infertile by declining sperm counts. Al Gore, who wrote the introduction for this book, invokes children three times.

Fortunately, Our Stolen Future will not become the next Silent Spring. Reputable responders trash the book for all manner of scientific and logical flaws. And after repeated wolf-calling, the public has become more jaded and cynical about predictions of ecological catastrophe.