“I study the ecology of thought. And how it has led to a State of Fear.”
Hoffman, obviously, is the character that supplies the novel with its title. His theory of an “ecology of thought” suggests that—like an environmental ecology—ideas and beliefs are evolutionary in that they grow, are embraced and then cast aside with the accumulation of facts which deny them. The state of fear is introduced during the process of that accumulation facts denying an existing idea or belief.
“There are no cannibals anywhere. Just a myth. Why are you staring at me that way?”
The novel is decidedly and unambiguously on the side of those claiming that warnings about climate change and global warming are overheated and lacking adequate supportable evidence. At the same time, however, Crichton wants to make it clear that the concern he is raising about climate change being mostly myth is not simply the deranged, uninformed ramblings of a conspiracy theorist. To fill this role, he created Ted Bradley who sometime after making this assertion is, in fact, consumed by cannibals.
In retrospect the [REDACTED] conspiracy was extremely well planned.
The novel commences with a memo complete with blacked out redactions prepared for the National Security Council. The story is structured as an investigation into this “conspiracy.”
In late 2003, at the Sustainable Earth Summit conference in Johannesburg, the Pacific island nation of Vanutu announced that it was preparing a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States over global warming.
This is the actual first line of the novel, found in the Introduction. And this lawsuit and the subsequent failure for it to be filed serves as the basis for the well-planned conspiracy which the narrative seeks to uncover. The investigation into the conspiracy to deny the lawsuit serves as the underlying foundation for the novel’s thematic investigation into the critical appraisal of the validity of scientific research on climate change and global warming.
