The Death of Environmentalism

My consistent disappointment with the environmental movement and progressive politics in general is a lack of coherent vision and an apparent reliance on merely deconstructing the right. Here are my favorite bits and pieces of a fascinating article that touches on these points.

Via Grist Magazine

“As individuals, environmental leaders are anything but stupid. Many hold multiple advanced degrees in science, engineering, and law from the best schools in the country. But as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by “the environment” — a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate “thing” and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the “natural world.”

The concepts of “nature” and “environment” have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large. If one understands the notion of the “environment” to include humans, then the way the environmental community designates certain problems as environmental and others as not is completely arbitrary.

Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like global warming — which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century — considered “environmental”? Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is? What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem — and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to “environmentalists”?
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The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis2 — the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal “truth to power.” Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care. “If you want people to act on global warming” stressed Becker, “you need to convince them that action is needed on global warming and not on some ulterior goal.”
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It is our contention that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its vision for the future and the values it carries within it than on its technical policy specifications.”