Environmentalism is <em>so</em> not dead! | Gristmill: The environmental news blog

Environmentalism is so not dead!

Carl Pope reviews Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

Posted by Grist at 3:42 PM on 18 Sep 2007

Read more about: books | politics | environmental movement

This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Two years ago, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's widely discussed essay "The Death of Environmentalism" predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath. The self-proclaimed "bad boy" authors must be embarrassed now. With their new book on the same theme about to land in bookstores, environmentalism is alive and perhaps prematurely giddy over progress made and even victories won in the fight against climate change.

But don't dismiss Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility just because its authors are lousy soothsayers. The book's secondary thesis -- that progressive politics, including environmentalism, is in dire need of optimistic grounding in 21st century reality -- is too important and intriguing to leave unexplored.

Progressive politics, the authors persuasively argue, is rooted in economic, social, and environmental nostalgia. Nostalgia for the New Deal era of solidarity driven by shared material scarcity; nostalgia for the post-war era of homogeneous and stable communities held together by neighborhood, workplace, and church; nostalgia for an American landscape not yet reshaped by industrial society. Stubbornly refusing to move beyond this nostalgia, progressives cling to an interest-based politics and an almost fundamentalist faith in rationality. When their efforts fail, they conclude that the problem is corporate money or media monopolies or human nature -- anything but their own politics.

I don't think these traits and behaviors are intrinsic to progressive politics or environmentalism. They are, however, ingrained, habitual, and potentially lethal to both. Before I join Shellenberger and Nordhaus in scrutinizing such failings, however, I'd like to disabuse them of their "essentialist" and misguided view of my chosen community as simply one among a cluster of ineffectual progressive "interest groups" defined by the policy issues it prioritizes.

To me, environmentalism is an ethic, the blending of scientific insights into a set of values: concern for the future, humility about our place in the complex web of life, and a commitment to look for and try to understand these connections. It's not, as some have argued, science as religion, but a marriage of science and values derived, for the most part, from the world's great religions. It's an ethic that captures an essential truth: there is only one biosphere, only one ozone layer, and shared dedication to protecting these commons -- the great collective inheritance of humanity -- should be everyone's concern.

Such an ethic can be embodied in many different political approaches. Environmentalism flowered between 1965 and 1975; it took on the era's emerging politics -- with all the problems Nordhaus and Shellenberger identify. In that decade, national environmental organizations chose to change things quickly but shallowly, rather than more slowly and in depth. We retreated from the challenge of creating a new and positive economy, confining ourselves to advocating incremental improvements in the old economy. Deep down, we probably knew that the way we were achieving our critically important successes would require revisiting -- but we had no idea how hard that would turn out to be.

Take, for example, environmentalists' compromise in the Clean Air Act that allowed older sources of air pollution to go uncontrolled until they were at the end of their useful life. We thought we could clean up these older sources quickly, but instead the provision created a generation of zombie coal-fired power plants. Thirty-five years later, they continue to belch mercury as they refuse to die.

Overlapping errors came from our excessive fear of new technology, which blinded us to the need to speed up rather than slow the replacement of old and destructive ways of doing business. And then there was environmentalism's serious miscalculation in becoming the first modern progressive movement in America to root its identity outside those American institutions with the strongest social contracts: unions with their ties of livelihood, and churches with their ethical ties.

The seriousness of this shortsightedness was for a long time concealed by the apparent availability of a third power base for social change: impartial expertise. Originally, 20th century progressives assumed that this expertise would be embodied in the federal bureaucracy; most of the early intellectual leadership of what became the environmental movement came from government scientists and land managers. (Aldo Leopold and Gifford Pinchot are probably the most famous examples, but even Rachel Carson started out as a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.) But as it became clear that government regulatory bureaucracies often became captives of the industries they had been intended to regulate, the progressive faith in expertise shifted to individual "public interest" advocates, with Ralph Nader serving as the prototype and mentor for the breed.

But this expertise-based model of social change assumed that political parties were ideologically incoherent, and that public officials were free-agent entrepreneurs, not party back-benchers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the modern Right began undermining this expertise-based advocacy with a more parliamentary model. By the time Karl Rove and Dick Cheney took control of the White House, the party leadership was running the show and few entrepreneurial bureaucrats or members of Congress were looking for expert policy advice at all.

This shift left environmentalism with a multi-billion-dollar investment in precisely the model of social change whose leverage had withered away, and by 2005, when Shellenberger and Nordhaus wrote their essay, the U.S. government was scoffing not just at the Kyoto agreement but the very notion of climate change; no major American institution had embraced serious global-warming-prevention strategies.

Environmental advocacy had lost its way. But it had far stronger survival skills than Shellenberger and Nordhaus imagined, and as the authors were expanding their thesis into book form, environmentalism found a new trail and revitalized itself. Now more than 600 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement; more than 20 states have renewable electricity standards; half of the North American auto market is now subject to tough CO2 emission standards; 13 of the most populous counties have signed the Sierra Club's "Cool Counties" pledge, committing to an 80 percent CO2 reduction by 2050; states from Florida to Hawaii, and California to New Jersey, have enacted their own long-term, binding, and ambitious limits on emissions of greenhouse gases; all of the major Democratic presidential candidates have committed to very serious attacks on global warming; and the nation's most popular Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has made the issue his signature.

Yes, many young activists call themselves climate-change activists, not environmentalists. A similar reidentification occurred in the 1970s when conservationists began declaring themselves environmentalists. But the fundamental value set did not change then, nor is it changing now. What has changed and will inspire environmental activism to again reinvent itself is the -- Shellenberger and Nordhaus don't like this word -- environment.

Three new realities confront those concerned about protecting the biosphere.

First, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world's people live in societies that have mastered the art of rapid, sustained economic growth.

Second, the world's oceans, lakes, rivers, frontier forests, and grasslands, the biological commons that humanity has always exploited to accommodate eras of rapid economic growth, are either fully spent or so badly mismanaged that they are producing less economic value with each passing year. There is no underutilized frontier to be seized by China or India as there was for Britain, America, or even Japan.

Third, climate change is happening, and humanity's most hard-wired mental map -- the link between a place and its climate -- is contingent and uncertain. None of us is capable of thinking clearly about this yet, but people are beginning to realize they must.

These three new realities strongly suggest to me that the task of environmentalism in the 21st century is utterly unlike that which it defined for itself in the 20th. For a hundred years, those who called themselves first conservationists and then environmentalists defined their task as being to constrain, and clean up after, an existing industrial order. For the next hundred years, our task is to shape, design, and accelerate the arrival of a new, sustainable economic order.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that the key to shaping the future is to embrace something they call "greatness," and to pursue it pragmatically, on the basis of a new social contract -- and with an eye to the future, not nostalgia for the past.

While I agree with their belief in the need for sweeping and forward-looking change, I have a hard time figuring out what they mean by "greatness." I suspect their use of the term reflects their discomfort with environmentalists' suspicion that Chernobyl, the Dust Bowl, and the pollution afflicting Chinese cities are the result of hubris. But Prometheus ends up with his liver being eaten away -- and prudence and caution are values that might have kept us out of Iraq and many other disasters.

So I'll offer my own pathway to the future, as a way of moving the dialogue along. For one thing, we need to make it easier to innovate so that the future can arrive quickly. New-generation wind turbines are environmentally preferable to older ones. Cellulosic ethanol will beat corn-based. Next year's refrigerator technology will be more efficient than this year's. Environmentalists need to wade into the thicket of rules and subsidies that sustain the carbon-based economy more aggressively, and quickly clear the path to an efficient, renewable energy future.

As we clear the way, however, we also need to steer this rapid innovation by insisting on adherence to two simple rules of market economics: Own what you sell. Pay for what you take. When a factory dumps waste into a river, it is taking clean water from those downstream, and it is not paying. When 80 percent of the mahogany coming into the U.S. from Peru has been illegally logged, we don't have global trade -- we have global crime rings. If we made sure that the rules of real markets governed natural resources, we would find that markets do, indeed, work very powerfully.

Finally, we need to recognize and help others see that the great expansions in human freedom and economic opportunity have been launched on the platform of newly available commons, not on spurts of privatization. These commons were sometimes natural, sometimes social. The cod banks of the North Atlantic spurred North European prosperity for generations. The greatest return on any investment made by the U.S. government in the last 30 years, for example, has clearly come from the money it sank into the internet. It is the job of societies -- of governments -- to protect, invest in, and guarantee universal access to such common resources.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that greatness requires progressives to embrace such investment strategies. I agree. But investments in what? Yes, new energy technologies -- but for whom? The authors were myopic in eulogizing environmentalism. They'd be smarter now to embrace the environmental ethic, with its solid grasp of humankind's one unifying need -- protecting our shared natural commons -- as the vanguard of the new progressive movement. The generation of activists who will power this green political machine are already pushing forward, not looking wistfully back.

For story: Environmentalism is so not dead!
14 Comments | Post a Comment

not a bad essay

It's good to see the major environmental groups converging around the idea that they should embrace markets rather than attack them.

I think there is more depth to the commons issue than Pope writes on.

Social commons, like the Internet, differ in several aspects from natural commons. For one, the Internet absolute capability to support human demands is growing daily; meanwhile natural resources are being depleted. Secondly, the Internet acts just as much as a framework for the free market of e-commerce as it does a common resource in the sense that we talk about natural resources.

Ownership isn't just the key to profit (owning what you sell) it's also the key to conservation. The issue over public resource vs private remains too ideological, on both sides. No one is getting into the grit and talking about how ownership institutions should operate, regardless of if ownership is public or private. The legal frameworks of these ownership schemes determine whether they benefit humans and the environment and cause problems.

Also, we too often ignore the distinction between a commons and a public good or resource. A commons has no owner, while public goods are theoretically owned by citizens, although the citizens generally allow governments to control and manage public goods on behalf of the citizens. Without mechanisms that allow citizens to employ their rights over public goods, we are essentially giving away these rights to the government -- a government doesn't always face incentives for proper management of public goods.

Community, neighborhood, and individual rights to a clean environment and other public goods must be defined and enforced.

by naturescene at 4:18 PM on 18 Sep 2007

The "E" label. Am I one?

This is a welcome breath of fresh air from an institution that could transform itself from an aging demographic and revitalize a generation of Americans.

Our members also show us that a whole generation of Americans concerned about climate change shudder to label themselves with the "E" word. And its pretty telling that many of them will tell you they want to help build the low carbon Economy.

And yet environment and economy are two words that I doubt have been used in many Sierra Club meetings.

Your vision is admirable, but how can we translate this into action at Sierra Club chapters nationwide? And how fast can a highly distributed semi-autonomous organization change? As far as I can tell, Sierra Club's day to day is anti cap-and-trade, anti offsets, anti-markets and most of all, concerned with perfection over progress. Or put differently, these are solutions oriented times and the Sierra Club organization is wired for activism and constricting times.

Carl, we need your help to put us on the pathway to a new economy that you are visualizing. Not everything will be perfect from the get go, but if we are going to harness the energy of Sierra Club, we'll need your sustained leadership to push your vision out into something that helps move the ball forward on our journey to a low carbon economy.

Tom Arnold Chief Environmental Officer TerraPass

by TerraPassTom at 7:35 PM on 18 Sep 2007

Great quote

from the essay:

the task of environmentalism in the 21st century is utterly unlike that which it defined for itself in the 20th. For a hundred years, those who called themselves first conservationists and then environmentalists defined their task as being to constrain, and clean up after, an existing industrial order. For the next hundred years, our task is to shape, design, and accelerate the arrival of a new, sustainable economic order.

However, I'm not sure if the Sierra Club and other large enviros should be the organizations that build this new world; perhaps they should join to create a different vehicle. They are very good at what they are designed to do: protect the environment. Maybe a new set of organizations is needed -- with their help -- because as Nordhaus and Schellenberger point out, or at least i think they point out, we need to expand the umbrella beyond protecting the environment. We need to link up with other proressive forces, or at least what's left of the unions and progressive religious groups, with the African-American, Latino, Gay communities, women's groups, peace groups -- for instance, nowarnowarming.org is trying to link peace and global warming activism -- and it seems to me that the Sierra club et al would be important as part of a coalition, because an entire new political formation will be required for the vast task of moving toward a sustainable and necessarily more just world.

by Jon Rynn at 10:04 PM on 18 Sep 2007

The consultants of yesteryear

I dunno... seems like a lot of brainpower (Carl Pope and Bill McKibben) to be spent on very little substance.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem more like consultants who have found a shtick, rather than intellectual heavyweights. I haven't found anything of interest in their first essay or in their ideas as expressed in reviews of their book.

Lomborg even more so - a predictable lapdog. Worse than being wrong, he's boring.

I really don't think they represent the future. The glory of markets is a strange thing to be trumpeting as the housing markets implode and a recession is looming. There are some promising ideas about markets and the commons floating around, but I think they are only a small part of the picture.

I think it's much more important to look at the big trends. Awareness of global warming is gathering momentum. Especially as the effects become apparent, there will be political shockwaves. We can get a hint of that from the UK as the Conservatives (the party of Maggie Thatcher) issue a report that wins plaudits from environmentalists. Or the August demonstration against the expansion of Heathrow airport. (Might be time for the Sierra Club to back away from its programs involving air travel.)

Another storm on the horizon is peak oil. At a conference this week in Cork, Ireland, James Schlesinger said that the concept of peak oil has been accepted by industry executives and many politicians as well. (Schlesinger was the ultimate insider - Secretary of Defense under Nixon and Ford, the first Secretary of Energy under Carter.) How peak oil will affect environmentalism is a big topic, but one thing is for sure - it will change the political landscape.

Trends like these are what we need to pay attention to. not the consultants of yesteryear.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

by Bart Anderson at 10:52 PM on 18 Sep 2007

They push public investment...

...if you look at their New Republic article, as well as other recent writings, they make the very good point that people will support public investment, that is, investment by the government; for instance, building mass transit (at least, that's my example). The enviromental community tends to be more interested in general policies, such as cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, which often rub people the wrong way, while according to their polling, people are more accepting of large public projects.

However, in their New Republic piece, they sort of shoot themselves in the foot by advocating, of all things, a new military-industrial-research complex that will allegedly develop new energy technologies. The problem (among others) is that much of the wealth that could be used for the public investment is currently being wasted in defense budgets.

by Jon Rynn at 7:27 AM on 19 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

Triangulation vs original thought

Thanks for the pointer to the TNR article, Jon. So, it's boondoggle capitalism they are pushing!

The real problem I have with S&N is that there isn't much original thought there. It's triangulating among other people's positions and labeling it a "Manifesto." That sort of strategy can work well when things aren't changing very much, such as the last few decades. But when big changes are coming, one needs to pay attention to the underlying trends.

And then there is the opportunism - telling people what they want to hear, rather than the truth. For example, it is true that spending more on alternative energy sources is probably a good idea. But... as you say, we are spending $$$ on military adventures. Even worse from an economic standpoint, the tax cuts for the rich have made the surpluses evaporate. It may be difficult for Americans to realize, but we may not be able to afford the huge World War II-style investments.

Also (with a tip of the hat to conservatives) you may not be able to solve the energy problem by throwing money at it. Corn ethanol is the poster child for this dysfunction. But many other alternative energy sources as well look like dead-ends or hype.

The truth is - and energy experts will admit it - efficiency and conservation are BY FAR the best investment.

Unpalatable as it may be, the deep truth is that energy use will decline. It's already happening in many Third World countries which have been hit by rises in the price of fuel.

How do we deal with making the transition to a low-energy future? That's a challenge which will call for creative thought and solutions. S&N are still stuck in the past.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

by Bart Anderson at 9:07 AM on 19 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

Conservation needs to become 'cool' again

We really do need to change our whole way of thinking; it's not enough to throw money at alternative energy.

First, we must look at how to use less but have more when it comes to our standard of living. For example, a solar-heated house can cost about the same to build, yet can cost much less (obviously) to heat and cool. It can also be far more comfortable to live in (because of the thick walls that hold heat) and can hold its value much better (because if you build a house out of cob rather than 2x6s, it can easily last 500 years or more).

Every decision must take into account how to live in harmony with the environment, and progressives must stop being 'protestors' and instead become leaders. There are countless examples around the world of better ways to do things - we must show and tell how we can implement those ways in our country as part of a 'new green economy,' as I've been calling it.

* Inconvenient Truth presenter * Green Party of Canada candidate

by elasticsoul at 2:48 PM on 19 Sep 2007

Pluses, minuses

Thinking more about S&N. On the plus side:

They are thinking about how to connect with the public, about a strategy that could be politically successful. They are thinking about developing alliances.
They have identified energy as a key issue that underlies many other problems.
They attempt to put their discussion in an historical context.

Their position seems similar to that of many in the Democratic Party, and potentially some Republicans. That's fine, as far as it goes, but I just don't see much new there.

What seems to set S&N apart is the aggressive language towards environmentalism and the idea of limits. They seem to be playing up to the anti-environmentalist attitudes fomented by industry and the right wing.

Weaknesses of their approach:

Energy issues are more complicated and require more thought than the easy-to-sell policies that S&N offer. Gar and many others here at Gristmill are struggling with these issues.
Uncertainty about their principles. Do they really want to be on the side that attacks environmentalism? Are they environmentalists or not? In the long run, one needs principles to be credible.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

by Bart Anderson at 3:07 PM on 19 Sep 2007

Squatting on the biosphere's commons

Dear Tom,

In September 2005 our grass-roots leadership -- the leaders of our distributed, semi-autonomous organization -- met in San Francisco after four months of local deliberation, and voted for change -- among the changes they called for was for us to shift our focus towards "visionary solutions." They told us that after 115 years of stopping bad ideas -- at which we have become, we think, very adept -- we needed to emphasize making good things happen, because climate change would not be curbed by resistance alone.

Yes, change is hard, but sometimes getting others to notice change is even harder. We are explicitly and vigourously in favor of one version of cap-and-trade, which we call, "cap and auction", because we believe that in real markets, people pay for what they take, and that giving away or allocating permits to emit carbon dioxide, as the EU mistakenly did, is a license to steal and a reward for polluting. We were, I think, the first large national environmental group to make the "pay for what you take" principle central to our view of cap-and-trade. We have struggled with the reality that no form of energy production is environmentally benign, and that most communities have grown accustomed to externalizing and exporting the costs of their energy consumption to places like Appalachia, New Mexico, Wyoming or the Persian Gulf. So we are resisting our tendency to say, "not here" -- we have set a very high bar for our local entities if they want to oppose wind or solar, for example -- and supported both Cape and Delaware Wind. (No, we don't think geothermal belongs at Old Faithful. But we think a wind turbine might improve the National Observatory where Dick Cheney lives.)

As for markets, we believe in them, ferociously -- but we do wonder whether most businesses do. (So did Adam Smith.) After all, it is not a market if I go into the Safeway and walk out with a gallon of milk without paying -- it's shop-lifting. But the US Chamber of Commerce seems fine with trade agreements that allow the continued reliance on the importation of mahogany from Peru, 90% of which was logged without paying for it. (Pay for what you take.) And if I go into your back yard and dig up the plants and sell them off a pick-up-truck, it's fencing. (Own what you sell.) But Exxon-Mobil seems quite willing to sell you CO2 in a gas tank that will flood the Maldives -- even though I am reasonably sure that the corporate vaults in Irving, Texas, do not include a deed to that nation.

Gettting real markets in natural resources will be very hard, because global capital has become used to squatter's rights on the biosphere's commons -- are you ready to join us in calling the sheriff to kick them off?

Carl Pope

by Josh Dorner at 10:22 AM on 20 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

Carl --

(just to show that you can't please all of the people all of the time), what has me flabbergasted about the Sierra Club and other environmental groups is not their attitude about the market, but their attitude about the government, specifically, and to hopefully pick up on a positive point of Schellenberger and Nordhaus, government investment, and even more specifically, government investment in public transit -- high speed rail, light rail, even freight rail (much more efficient than long-haul trucks), subways, buses -- things that will actually take cars or at least vehicle-miles off the road and lead us toward a more sustainable future. I don't see how the global warming (and peak oil) problem is solved without a well-thought-out, well-financed, massive public transit system. Will Sierra Clug help move that vision along?

by Jon Rynn at 11:28 AM on 20 Sep 2007
[ Parent ]

A great essay...

... raises more questions than it answers.

This one got me thinking.

by pcarbo at 2:10 PM on 20 Sep 2007

Comments on Pope, Nordhaus, Shellenberger

The comments on Nordhaus and Shellenberger appall me, being little more than purely technological and materialistic approaches to global warming. It is as if thinkers and philosophers like Dave Brower, David Ehrenfeld, Kirkpatrick Sale, George Sessions, Dave Foreman and David Suzuki never existed. It is as if global warming's heat were the only problem, rather than the impact on the rest of the earth's species and systems. It is as if the biodiversity crisis did not exist. What is glaringly absent is any reverence for the eons-long evolutionary history which brought our own species into existence as well as those species and natural systems on which we depend . Truly, the lack of an ecological, ethical and philosophical grounding for the debate on global warming is in the full sense of the word blasphemous, in that by stressing a purely instrumental attitude towards environmental problems it ignores the methodical shredding of the earth's systems and the web of life which evolution so magnificantly wove.

Lorna Salzman

by lorna salzman at 5:22 PM on 20 Sep 2007

I Agree

Carl:

Yes, I agree -- its greatly preferable if allowances are auctioned instead of given away. In fact, maybe TerraPass can get in line and retire some of those allowances, making it an even lower cap!

Personally, I'd trade a firmer cap over a lighter one with allowances, but maybe that's a policy discussion best had at Berkeley Bowl (my treat).

As to the vision and substance of your original essay, I think what you're saying is great, and in just reviewing your site and blog, I am noticing the change. We're on the same side, and I do think that if Sierra Club follows the solutions oriented path you have outlined, I have great hopes about what we can accomplish together.

As personal aside, I am not a Sierra Club member, but I am marrying one on Saturday. So here's to one step closer to working together...

Cheers,

Tom

Tom Arnold Chief Environmental Officer TerraPass

by TerraPassTom at 5:51 PM on 27 Sep 2007

Carl Leads Off On the Wrong Foot

At the very outset of his lengthy review/criticism/response to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Carl Pope commits an error that epitomizes much of the mis-read of the so-called Bad Boys of Environmentalism.

Carl writes that the authors "predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath." No, importantly, the Bad Boys didn't say it would die, but that it should die.

But what should die? They suggest that fundamental aspects of the political philosophy that underlie the movement and a whole series of tactics must die so that, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, a more expansive and effective movement can continue to emerge.

Clearly the way they frame their argument is designed to provoke. Yet, I think the point of the provocation isn't to denigrate the movement, but to provide a jarring hook that: A. captures attention and causes us to hear their deeper arguments and B. creates a shock to the system that unfreezes our thinking and causes us to question taken for granted assumptions that inform how we think about and carry out our work.

by Marcos at 9:20 PM on 24 Oct 2007

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