text: Paul and Anne Ehrlich's One with Nineveh employs the newly popular technique of drawing an analogy between the collapse of an ancient civilization due to environmental factors and the prospective collapse of modern civilization. The Ehrlichs look to Biblical Nineveh; last year Jared Diamond used the same technique with the ancient Mayan civilization in the pages of Harper's magazine. Declaring with certitude from the murky and incomplete history of Nineveh and Maya that environmental factors were the cause of their collapse and that their example is applicable to modern technological society is just the kind of superficial analysis that leads more and more disinterested observers to dismiss popular environmentalism as cranky obscurantism.