Environmentalism Is Dead. What’s Next?

[Guest guest]

[i hate to say it, but it could just be that the human

animal for the most part just doesn't give a damn

about the other creatures we share the planet with, no

matter what most may say when polled on the issue.

Hell, Most of us don't even care that we're giving

ourselves life threatening diseases with our careless

use of chemicals in the air, and water, and food

supply. Much less does our species care about what we

do to other life forms. We truly do seem to be a

broken species. We appear to be relishing in the role

of a huge meteor hitting the planet. Where did nature

go wrong in our species. Rick.]

 

 

Environmentalism is dead. What’s next?

By Adam Werbach

 

Source > http://www.inthesetimes.com/

 

 

When the U.S. Senate voted to allow drilling in the

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this past March, a

casual observer might have expected the leaders of the

environmental movement to curl up into the fetal

position and start making plans to build their own

personal arks. Instead, within hours, e-mails from the

leaders of the nation's environmental groups quickly

spread out to their members, announcing their defeat.

 

" I am not going to soft-pedal today's defeat, " wrote

John Adams to the Natural Resource Defense Council's

mailing list. " It is distressing that pro-oil forces,

significantly strengthened by last November's

election, were able to pass this terrible bill in the

Senate, where we've blocked them before. " Similar

sentiment was echoed by John Flicker, president of the

National Audubon Society, who wrote this to his staff

and board: " Over the last several years we have faced

one challenge after another defending the Refuge,

including a similar vote in the last Congress which we

won. "

 

Decidedly missing from environmental leaders'

post-defeat e-mails, however, was any admission that

it was time to go back to the drawing board.

 

A vaguely post-coital glow emanated from conservatives

in the wake of their 2004 electoral victories, which

had given them the leverage to trounce the greatest

symbol of America's uncompleted environmental agenda.

Since the 1980 passage of the Alaska National Interest

Lands Conservation Act, the Arctic National Wildlife

Refuge--the 1.5 million acre area that comprises the

breeding ground of the Porcupine Caribou Herd--had

been left in limbo. With the highly symbolic battle

over the Arctic Refuge won, conservatives are now free

to kick-start America's nuclear power binge, expand

coal-bed methane mining in the Rocky Mountain West and

ensure that no serious efforts to combat global

warming will ever see the light of day.

 

The loss of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is yet

one more piece of evidence that environmentalism, as a

political movement, is exhausted. The signs of

environmentalism's death are all around us.

Environmentalists speak in terms of technical

policies, not vision and values. Environmentalists

propose 20th century solutions to 21st century

problems. Environmentalists are failing to attract

young people, the physical embodiment of the future,

to our cause. Environmentalists are failing to attract

the disenfranchised, the disempowered, the

dispossessed and the disengaged. Environmentalists

treat our rigid mental categories of what is

" environmental " and what is not as things rather than

as social and political tools to organize the public.

Most of all, environmentalism is no longer capable of

generating the power it needs to deal with the world's

most serious ecological problem--namely, global

warming.

 

Over the past year, I, along with Michael

Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus and Peter Teague, whose

work appears on these pages, have made the argument

that environmentalism is dead in America. The purpose

of describing the environmental movement as dead is to

allow the space for a new movement to grow--a new

movement that does not set arbitrary limitations for

what is considered an " environmental issue, " in

service of building a larger progressive movement.

 

It's time for environmentalists to step outside the

limits of an artificially narrow discourse to

articulate a more expansive, more inclusive and more

compelling vision for the future. In doing so, they

will cease to be environmentalists and start to become

American progressives.

 

The problems facing environmentalists are not unique

to environmentalism. The failure of the environmental

movement is symptomatic of the failure of most liberal

social movements, including the labor, civil rights

and women's movements. All have failed to build an

aspirational narrative for America.

 

For at least the last 25 years, environmentalists have

joined American liberals in defining themselves

according to a set of problems, whether they be class,

race, gender or the environment. We have spent far

less time defining ourselves according to the values

that unite us, such as shared prosperity, social

progress, interdependence, fairness, increasing

equality and ecological restoration. We can no longer

afford to allow the laundry list of liberal " -isms " to

divide our world. I have come to believe that our

future successes will come not from our ability to

shock, but to inspire.

The mother of all environmentalists

 

Modern environmentalism was born in the early '60s in

the form of scientist and writer Rachel Carson. Carson

offered what was at the time an astounding thesis: The

chemicals that were supposed to be protecting us were

in fact threatening to kill us. Carson identified the

chemical pesticide DDT in weakened egg shells of

arctic birds, and used this evidence to promote

removing injurious chemicals from our world. Her

strategy was to awaken the public by contrasting a

dream of the present to a nightmare of the future, and

her solutions were framed in the negative--a world

without pesticides, without life-killing substances.

The proposals that followed were technical policy

fixes for regulating poisons and pollutants, but they

lacked an overarching narrative grounded in core

American values. This technical tradition, which was

powerfully successful in the early days of

environmentalism, formed the basis for modern

environmentalism.

 

Instead of supporting a broad-based movement that

employed the key lessons of ecology--that all things

are connected--environmentalists chose to define their

field of vision narrowly. Birds were an environmental

issue, air quality was an environmental issue, but

economic policy was not.

 

Environmentalists promoted a regulatory paradigm, not

a narrative for the country's success. While liberals

were defining themselves in opposition to the problems

that were besetting a modernizing America,

conservatives began to construct a movement that

envisioned an optimistic America that would appear

better and stronger than ever.

 

Unraveling the structural weaknesses of

environmentalism requires an understanding of the

language and categories that environmentalists, and

therefore the American people, use to describe the

environment. If environmentalism stresses

interdependence on the one hand and " things, " on the

other, there's little doubt that it's the things that

the American people have been taught to associate with

the words " the environment " : baby seals, redwoods,

Yellowstone and nuclear waste.

 

Some of the things they have been taught not to think

of when they think of the environment are AIDS in

Africa, taxes, highways, homeless people, asthma, good

jobs and the war in Iraq. Each of those

things-- " environmental " or not--are stripped by

American environmentalism of their native habitat,

their context and their web of connections. They are

single " issues, " each requiring its own movement, its

own experts and its own funding source.

 

All categories and words should be understood as

tools, not as symbols of real things. This was the

simple point made by Ferdinand de Saussure at the dawn

of the semiotics movement. Categories--indeed, all of

language--should be evaluated not for their timeless

ability to represent a truth that, like the fiction of

nature, is " out there, " but rather for their ability

to meet our present needs.

 

A reasonable case can be made that environmental

activists needed to put baby seals, redwoods,

Yellowstone and nuclear waste under the brand of

" environmentalism " in order to pass a raft of

environmental laws in the '70s. With the support of

the American people, the Congress and even Richard

Nixon, the environmental movement was able to pass the

Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species

Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, which

created the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

But for at least 25 years, and maybe longer, the basic

categorical assumptions that underlie environmentalism

have inhibited the movement's ability to consider

opportunities outside environmental boundaries that

would allow American progressives to compete more

effectively with conservatives.

 

Consider that the environmental movement achieved its

greatest successes before it had hundreds of

lobbyists, communications experts and policy wonks,

before organizations had paid memberships of millions

of people. The idea of cleaning the smoky skies and

cleaning the water was powerful, immediate and

achievable. In retrospect, the decision to fund sewage

systems in America's cities and to protect America's

rare wildlife seems obvious. But along with the

victories of the '70s, the environmental movement

learned lessons that it has failed to unlearn as the

political context changed over the years.

 

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus described the

process of environmental policy-making in the October

2004 paper, The Death of Environmentalism:

 

By the American bicentennial, this kind of

environmentalism had triumphed. Sweeping protections

were put in place, and the focus was now as much on

implementation through the courts as it was on new

legislation in Congress.

 

But while environmentalists turned their attention

toward the courts, the American people no longer

related to environmentalism's goals. Support for

environmental protection since the '70s has been

notoriously shallow. Although roughly three-quarters

of all Americans currently identify as

environmentalists, or pledge support for environmental

goals and laws, environmental issues rarely make it

into the top 10 list of things voters worry about the

most.

 

It's not surprising; the environmentalism that most

Americans understand--the protection of things like

clean air and bald eagles--has been absorbed by

American culture. In 1970, environmentalism was a

radical issue. Today, Exxon-Mobil touts their

protection of sea creatures, President Bush dons jeans

and a plaid shirt on Earth Day and recycling is taught

to children soon after potty training.

Environmentalism has failed to explain how recycling

and species protection are only the beginning of a new

mode of integrated thinking. The key lesson of

environmentalism, instead of the protection of things,

is the practice of ecology--the study of

interdependence. When the Sierra Club boycotted Shell

Oil because of its human rights record in Nigeria, not

because of its pollution, the organization

demonstrated this type of integrated thinking. When

environmentalists advocate immigration control as a

means of " protecting " America's environment, they

demonstrate their loyalty to " thing-oriented "

environmentalism. This type of environmentalism has

now run its course, and the American people have found

other issues to care about.

 

Environmental leaders freely acknowledge that their

" issue " --this thing we call " the environment " --is not

a major priority for Americans. When pressed to choose

between two candidates, environmental concerns are

rarely a deciding factor. This was especially apparent

in the campaign leading up to last November's

elections. Only a few environmental organizations even

entered the political arena.

 

The environmental groups that did enter the political

debate spent millions of dollars on TV ads and

grassroots mobilization. Yet they had little effect on

the outcome of the election. Why? They largely focused

on their " issues " rather than on techniques that would

have had a greater effect. The National Rifle

Association, on the other hand, ran ads in

pro-gun-control districts in Colorado on the issue of

taxes.

 

Despite these failures, the lesson many environmental

leaders are taking from the election is that we must

talk louder and fight harder--with the same words and

the same tools.

Competing identities and issues

 

Environmentalists aren't the only ones clinging to an

identity separate from progressivism. Each of

liberalism's special interests has its own experts,

its own professionals, its own lobbyists, its own

lawyers, its own funders, its own mailing lists and

its journalistic beat. The more that each fights to

establish itself as " above politics, " the more each

reinforces its special-interest status. In seeking to

distinguish the interest categories, each group looks

askance at the other, as though any association--any

interconnectedness--with other progressives would

diminish their special powers.

 

The picture for progressives, in this context, seems

grim. But if there's one lesson to learn from

conservatives, it's that moments of defeat are an

opportunity for a turnaround. Forty years ago, things

also looked grim for conservatives. Their debates over

conservatism foreshadowed our debates today over

liberalism. Should conservatives moderate their views

and become Democrat-lite? Should they embrace a

kinder, gentler New Deal? Or did they need to declare

the death of conservatism so they could build a

neo-conservative movement? Like liberals today,

conservatives wrung their hands over these debates,

fretting that the " circular firing squads " would lead

to permanent minority status.

 

It's been months since the elections, and there is

still no real debate among liberals and Democrats

about what went wrong, not just with Kerry's campaign,

but with liberalism and all of its sister-isms.

Liberals pulled out all of the stops in their election

efforts, yet it was not nearly enough to counter the

growing trend in America's conservative social values.

In order to start winning elections, we need to

construct an aspirational ideology as powerful as

liberalism once was, and as powerful as fundamentalism

is today. We need to accept that the needs of most

Americans have changed since the dawn of American

liberalism. Technological change, credit debt,

depression and time-stress are the modern American

plagues. Life is still not easy in America, and people

still suffer, but the optics have changed. We need to

construct a new progressive ideology that recognizes

that Americans yearn for an ideology that provides a

deeper fulfillment, instead of focusing solely on

enhancing our political tactics.

 

Many in our movements preach the value of free speech,

open dialogue and debate, yet as soon as somebody

challenges our most basic assumptions, or dares to

level a public criticism at the liberal

powers-that-be, they are barked down. When we're

simultaneously losing on nearly every one of our

so-called " issues " --abortion, civil rights, the

environment, the economy, foreign policy--questioning

everything should no longer be our right, it should be

our responsibility.

 

The problem is not that environmentalism and the moral

intellectual framework we call liberalism are dead.

The problem is that we have been in denial about it

for more than 20 years. The sooner we acknowledge

these deaths, the sooner we can give birth to

something more powerful and relevant.

 

Parts of this article were adapted from Werbach's

Commonwealth Club speech, " Is Environmentalism Dead? "