Does Environmentalism Have a Future?

...In its absence, policies are merely technical proposals...

...The key question we might ask at this level is how far down the "frame" goes...

...Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that this has been done effectively by the right, but largely ignored on the left...

...He is currently a visiting member at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton...

...Because the "shallow" label seemed too antagonistic, many adherents of deep ecology began describing "reform environmentalism" as the alternative to their position...

...Yet if the critique isn't wholly original, it is powerful...

...They have serious résumés in the movement...

...Although some level of accommodation to industry interests seems built in to this model, the animating value is respect for the tenuous position of workers and communities...

...Rather than viewing this disagreement as a matter of either-or, I want to argue that there are three continua along which an environmentalist vision might be located...

...As Shellenberger and Nordhaus put it, "most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce what they have to worry about...

...This new project is nothing less than the reimagination and reconstruction of the democratic left itself...

...The book Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins, presents this sanguine discourse in an Americanized idiom...

...As Werbach puts it, "American environmentalism and its sister ideology, liberalism" have stripped public concerns of "their context and their web of connections...

...To focus public attention on specific poliDISSENT / Spring 2005 69 ENVIRONMENTALISM cies, one by one, is to turn interconnected concerns into discrete issues...

...The progressive politics that our critics suggest as a new project does not now exist in American politics—and may never have existed...

...T0 THOSE WHO have tracked the environmental movement and its theorists over the past generation, many elements of this critique will be familiar...

...www.grist.orglnews/ maindish/2005/01/13/little-doe/ DISSENT / Spring 2005 75...

...Where this vision is not consistent with the actual practices of these organizations, they are criticized for failing to fight hard enough, being corrupted by the modest trappings of power or privilege available even to NGOs or otherwise out of touch with their mission and constituency...

...By contrast, if the frame goes all the way down, so to speak, then it can serve not just to improve the language but to reconceptualize concerns such as climate change...

...On the other hand, they frequently call for greater public participation in the decision-making processes, by arguing that the popular will—the public interest— is being thwarted by the disproportionDISSENT / Spring 2005 73 ENVIRONMENTALISM ate power of special interests...

...So widespread public concerns come to be conceived as narrow "special interests...

...The latter, after all, would be as likely to foster invisibility as centrality for environmental concerns...

...The first is an attack on the myopia of technocratic policy wonkism, while the second is a critique of the narrow construction of "the environment...

...It is evident in this analogy from parent to government that Lakoff does not challenge the idea that paternalism is the proper role for government...

...Robert Gottlieb's historical analysis in Forcing the Spring led him to conclude that environmentalism had become "less a movement than an adjunct to the policy process...

...If a group of lemmings is rushing toward the edge of a cliff, surely one should head them off, whether or not they can be persuaded to rethink their direction . . . right...

...Of course, it is not this simple...

...Although our present critics do not offer any parallels with past arguments, there are many to be had...

...One challenge to the normative appeal of the adversarial model comes from efforts to promote collaboration around what Europeans term "ecological modernization...

...Environmentalists have accrued their share of enemies over the years, but these two are not among them...

...A second challenge comes from so-called "collaborative conservation" efforts—the most well-known probably has been the "Quincy Library Group" in Northwestern California...

...The author wishes to thank Ethan Schoolman and Carolyn Benson for very constructive suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay...

...Membership has grown in recent years...

...Leaders have been predominantly women and minorities from poor urban and rural communities...

...can readily be located at the "deep" end of this continuum...

...With expertise in campaign strategy and public opinion polling, both have served as consultants to and directors of environmental organizations...

...In early December of last year, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Adam Werbach—onetime environmental wunderkind who at age twenty-three was president of the Sierra Club—echoed Shellenberger and Nordhaus by proclaiming, "I am here to perform an autopsy...

...For although some leaders are willing to acknowledge that their organizations are deeply inadequate to the challenges we face, the alternative will require something different from—and harder than—replacing personnel or reframing agendas...

...It is in this sense that environmentalism is "dead...

...They suggest that the limits on the centrality of environmental concerns to political action lie not in what environmental organizations do, but in what they are...

...In part this is because it comes from people on the inside...

...Even more, it is because many of their charges still stick even after the changes Pope describes...

...Shellenberger, Nordhaus, and Werbach argue that environmentalism's failing is too deeply rooted to be resolved by this sort of internal reform...

...The new continuum allows us to focus upon this question of access and constituency...

...The meaningful debate is about what sort of vision and values ought to guide those who care deeply about effecting change and how these are communicated...

...feminists such as Val Plumwood...

...The concerns and constituencies of the environmental justice movement place it at the "broad" end...

...The adversarial model remains the normative ideal even—or perhaps especially—when it fails to describe reality accurately...

...Over the past generation, many empirical researchers have challenged the generality of Hardin's "tragedy" thesis by highlighting the many and diverse ways in which communities have created informal institutions to ensure that the commons are sustained...

...For another, it may undermine the initiatives among organizations in recent years that move them, not insignificantly, in the direction that these critics urge us to go...

...Still, we have good reason to be cautious...

...Leaders such as the Sierra Club's Carl Pope have defended the movement against the "Death" thesis, arguing that, far from "dying," environmentalists have embraced many of the ideas that their new critics use to hammer them...

...By characterizing environmental concerns—especially abstract ones like climate change—as threatening crises, while inadequately linking this with a vision of reconstruction and opportunity, many sympathizers may be left with a sense of despair...

...This vision could enable the movement to win the political war even while losing particular battles...

...They argued against a technocratic policy orientation and in favor of more confrontational tactics...

...Shellenberger and Nordhaus are not wholly clear where they come down on this continuum...

...Another contrast might be addressed through this continuum: between the "postmaterialist" environmentalism of the industrialized world, attending to quality-of-life issues of primary interest to those who have already satisfied more basic material needs and the "materialism" of the environmental justice movement, rooted in concern for life and livelihood...

...Moreover, Shellenberger and Nordhaus contend that this link can't be based upon appeals to material self-interest alone, but must be framed in terms of a distinctly nonmaterialist vision of the good to be achieved...

...The established environmental organizations have, indeed, changed in response to some of these challenges...

...Those located toward the "breadth" end of the continuum often seek to link so-called postmaterialists and materialists...

...democratic theorists like John Dryzek and Douglas Torgerson...

...The claim appears counterintuitive, if not simply wrong...

...But workers often ally themselves with the corporations that employ them to produce sport-utility vehicles or cut old-growth forests...

...they are meaningful only if adopted...

...Werbach acknowledges his presence in the audience for his speech...

...The implication, especially by later American adherents, was that the embrace of a "deep" view of ecology would transform one's worldview and consequently lead to a transformed social order...

...The critique of wonkish environmentalism also echoes several important books from the mid-1990s...

...Yet whether fear is likely to prompt mobilization and action seems to depend upon its relation with hope or despair...

...Certainly, their location on the first two continua would encourage us to look for them at the populist end...

...The first is reflected in the emphasis we've seen on vision and values...

...One parallel can be seen in the emergence of radical, direct-action groups like Earth First...

...Yet in recent presentations they have highlighted growing public support for the "strict father" frame as support for their thesis...

...Populism v. Paternalism If you look under the skin of many an environmentalist, you're likely to find a certain authoritarian sensibility...

...Anyone who has lived through the past several years of American political life knows that fear can be a highly effective political tool...

...They are single 'issues,' each requiring its own movement and experts...

...This contrast illuminates something important, but it may also confuse matters...

...Yet to understand their critique, we must first distinguish its two parts...

...Properly understood, their goal is not merely the remaking of environmentalism, but the remaking of the social formation in which a new "environmentalism" (or whatever it may be called) could participate...

...Garrett Hardin's famous essay on "the tragedy of the commons" officially advocates "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" to avoid the destruction of the commons, but Hardin leaves little doubt that even if agreement cannot be reached, coercion is necessary...

...In contrast to deep ecology's focus, a broad environmentalism can be conceived as one that emphasizes interconnectedness as a way to integrate concerns about global warming, biodiversity, toxic pollution, and so forth, into other policy areas—urban, economic, and international...

...And yet, there is a significant caveat...

...and environmental justice activists have echoed and inspired a growing body of theoretical work...

...Here is where the contradictory messages emerge...

...Democratic theorists have also delineated ways that local knowledge and firsthand experience with environmental impacts can contribute to the resolution of environmental problems, when popular participation and deliberation are facilitated...

...Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not explicitly draw upon Lakoff's paternalistic frame in their essay...

...The same polls that regularly show high levels of public support also reveal this support to be quite shallow...

...The public is sympathetic, but so long as environmental protection is construed as peripheral to our everyday lives, it will lack salience in spite—or perhaps even because—of ambitious public education campaigns...

...In Lakoff's work on framing political arguments, we can distinguish two levels of analysis...

...Frustrated with such insincere Republican frames as the "healthy forests" and "clear skies" initiatives, Pope praises Lakoff for demonstrating the power of such frames while enabling progressives to fight them...

...Their challenge is reflected in both parts of the "Death" critique...

...environmental organizations— "reform environmentalists"—would all be located somewhere in the middle...

...Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it...

...The title of his most recent and widely-read book, Don't Think of an Elephant, is meant to illustrate his argument that by trying to negate a frame, one necessarily reinforces it...

...So, one may be surprised to find that the frame Lakoff promotes as the progressive alternative is government as a "nurturant parent...

...By fostering environmentalist cooperation with industry and government, and by developing economic carrots rather than regulatory sticks, this position maintains, we can identify sources of innovation and efficiency that will benefit both the environment and the corporate bottom line...

...Other theorists focus on public constituencies for environmental change, raising questions about the objects of protection as well...

...Some of these theorists, including the "deep ecologists" and ethicists seeking a foundation for intrinsic-value claims in nature, call for an environmentalism rooted in fundamental value change, rejecting the sort of technocratic tinkering that also troubles our present critics...

...This may help explain why, despite the gulf between George W. Bush's and John Kerry's policy proposals, environmental issues generated almost no attention during the presidential campaign...

...By advocating an embrace of "vision" and "values" the critics at times imply that one might choose between having these and not having them...

...Yet both Dowie and Gottlieb offer a very different source of hope than the Earth First!ers...

...For conservatives, Lakoff argues, the dominant frame portrays government as a "strict father...

...In a thirteen-thousand-word white paper with the provocative title "The Death of Environmentalism,"' they contend that modern environmentalism rests upon "unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies...

...In Losing Ground, Mark Dowie argues that "at the heart of the mainstream movement's folly is an abiding faith that legislation backed up by litigation will adequately protect the environmental health of the nation...

...Moreover, polls consistently show very high levels of public support for environmental protection, levels that would be the envy of many progressive movements...

...Although the three are certainly related, it will help to consider each separately...

...and environmental historians, pragmatists, and postmodern critics who have sought to challenge the narrow conception of both environmentalism and "the environment...

...But the second part of their argument remains distinctive...

...What, then, should be the stance toward these corporations...

...Breadth v. Depth The term "deep ecology" is familiar in environmentalist circles, but the question of what it opposes has been a provocative one...

...Yet even with "death" at the center of these critical arguments, it's possible that the scope of what is at stake will be underestimated...

...Shellenberger and Nordhaus make this point rhetorically, asking us to reimagine the impact of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s celebrated speech if it had described his "nightmare" rather than his "dream...

...Because "deep ecology" promotes a vision of the self in communion with nature, it is a position rooted in notions of purity and authenticity likely to be accessible to few people...

...On the one hand, they typically place much emphasis on the need to educate people and make them aware of the problem that we already understand...

...The rhetoric of "death" is meant to position our authors squarely in this latter camp, which is also consistent with a footnote in which they explicitly reject the first interpretation of Lakoff's work...

...JOHN M. MEYER is associate professor of government and politics at Humboldt State University and the author of Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought...

...They turn, instead, to an emergent network of neighborhood activists resisting local environ70 DISSENT / Spring 2005 ENVIRONMENTALISM mental hazards in order to protect the places where their families live, work, and play...

...For one thing, it runs the risk of bolstering the claims of anti-environmentalists, who are keen to characterize the movement as elitist...

...Outrage and accolades have followed...

...Their lack of clarity reflects ambiguity about the progressive politics to which they want to tie environmentalism...

...But this contrast doesn't do justice to the range of positions in play, which is why I propose to replace the "shallow" or "reform" end of the continuum with the very different notion of an expansive or "broad" environmentalism...

...Dave Foreman, a former lobbyist with the Wilderness Society and board member of the Sierra Club, broke away from the mainstream to found this group in 1980...

...While I applaud Shellenberger, Nordhaus, and Werbach for the courage to point us toward this vital goal, neither they— nor we—ought to underestimate its magnitude or its challenges...

...On the other hand, in explaining the failure of Congress to pass legislation to increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards, they argue that environmentalists "failed to find a solution that also worked for industry and labor" and argue that the right way to win would be to frame the bill "as a way to save the American auto industry...

...It is a vision of transcending the fragmentation of interestgroup politics, but decidedly not of subsuming diverse concerns and identities...

...To overcome these contradictions may require the (re-)invention of the progressive movement that these authors propose to join, a point to which I return in my conclusion...

...Where the latter was identified with a technocratic approach and an anthropocentric fight against "pollution and resource depletion," the former was described in a manner that came to be called "ecocentric," with a focus upon ecological interdependence and what Naess termed "biospherical egalitarianism...

...Shellenberger and Nordhaus thank him for "teaching us how to identify category mistakes...

...In an interview, Shellenberger observed that "a critique similar to the one we've made on environmentalism could be made of many other single-issue movements—women's rights, abortion rights, anti-war, criminal justice, labor, and so on...

...Here disagreement is long-standing and significant...

...Indeed, there is not only irony but danger in offering such a public jeremiad against jeremiads...

...These have sprung up, primarily in rural communities, to address place-based environmen72 DISSENT / Spring 2005 ENVIRONMENTALISM tal concerns such as the protection of a watershed or the managing of timber harvesting through deliberation among industry, workers, environmentalists, and government officials...

...It is this, our critics argue, that helps explain why popular support for environmentalism remains so shallow...

...On the one hand, they urge "getting back on the offensive," scold environmental leaders for their hesitation to "attack industry" and criticize Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins for their promotion of "technical policy solutions as though politics didn't matter...

...These activists describe themselves today as the environmental justice movement...

...As will be clear to readers who have followed the recent debate among progressive Americans, the emphasis among these critics upon the importance of framing issues in terms of underlying vision and values derives from the increasingly popular analysis of cognitive linguist and "frame-theory" guru George Lakoff...

...The uncompromising passion that Foreman and his compatriots brought to their fight to protect "the wilderness" provides an explicit contrast with the technocratic policy orientation that he and others found endemic in the big national organizations...

...Similarly, say Shellenberger and Nordhaus, a focus on "short-term policy payoff" neglects the "crafting [of] political proposals that, through the alternative vision and values they introduce, create the context for electoral and legislative victories down the road...

...This is all to the good...

...We—the informed, far-sighted, public spirited—wish to help protect you—the uninformed, shortsighted, or self-interested—from the coming crisis...

...These disparate strains and voices include Murray Bookchin's "social ecology...

...Collaborative v. Adversarial Approaches The pluralist account of interest-group politics suggests that environmental organizations play an adversarial role, taking on all those who oppose the policies they advocate and pressuring decision makers to adopt their positions...

...many came together in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, with a challenge both to corporate and governmental leaders and to the established environmental community...

...And yet: environmentalists find themselves playing defense far more than offense, devoting time and resources to fighting proposals such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rather than forging new responses to crises such as climate change...

...On this interpretation, the admonition to frame environmental arguments in terms of an encompassing progressive vision sounds like old wine in new bottles—paternalistic, indeed...

...As with ecological modernizers, the emphasis here is said to be on "win-win" solutions, rather than the "win-lose" outcomes of the adversarial model...

...Yet these authors argue that "environmentalism today is more about protecting a supposed `thing'—'the environment'— than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir who nearly a century ago observed, 'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.'" This reification of "the environment" both undermines Muir's ecological insight and reinforces the single-issue frame for environmental politics...

...The environment rarely rises to the upper levels of concern...

...The critiques of mainstream environmentalism by both the Earth First...

...And why not...

...After all, rhetorical appeals to protect "the environment" are only slightly more controversial than those on behalf of mom or apple pie, while even elementaryschool ecological platitudes emphasize the centrality of interconnectedness...

...The second level of Lakoff's analysis fills in the substance of these frames...

...Treated superficially, after all, framing is essentially "spin...

...By setting up "the environment" as something "out there" and apart from everyday life and concerns, it excludes too much...

...True enough...

...As a part of the left, collaboration with workers, whether in an auto factory or a logging community, seems a nobrainer...

...Yet Werbach still seems convincing when, in comparing the successful strategic approach of the conservative right to the environmentalists, he concludes "they chose to go broad, we chose to go narrow...

...It seems plausible to locate mainstream environmentalist groups somewhere in the ambivalent middle of this paternalist-populist spectrum...

...www.3nov.com/images/awerbach_ied_final.pdf 3. Amanda Griscom Little, "Death Wish: An Interview with Authors of the Controversial Essay The Death of Environmentalism'," Grist, 13 January 2005...

...The originator of the term, Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, drew the obvious linguistic contrast, labeling the alternative "shallow ecology...

...WHERE DOES that place our critics...

...The distinctive challenge, here, is to ground the otherwise abstract crisis of climate change in the same sort of quotidian concerns with life and livelihood as environmental justice advocates have done with more material and localized problems, such as exposure to toxic wastes...

...Clearly, these three have struck a nerve, and the left's post-election malaise provides an opportune climate for heterodox voices...

...there are now more than eight million duespaying members of the major national organizations— and many more in local and statewide organizations—compared to about two million in 1980...

...The same can be said of cross-race alliances...

...Articles in the Nation and Salon last January and a special series in the edgy online environmental journal Grist (www.grist.org) have opened the debate about the future of environmentalism to a wider audience...

...They offer examples like the new Apollo Alliance, an initiative that expands the constituency in favor of combating climate change by connecting it to clean energy, community reinvestment, and jobs...

...On the one hand, its organizations are generally larger, stronger, better funded, and more knowledgeable than ever before...

...Thus, our critics clearly position themselves on the side of "breadth...

...and they are salient only to those already in the know...

...There is also an obvious tension between their argument that public opinion is turning in the "wrong" direction and an embrace of populism, which should raise questions about their populist commitments...

...These efforts are often touted as examples of the breakthroughs that can be achieved in a deliberative democratic context, by respecting local knowledge and promoting solutions that represent a new "radical centrism...

...Here, Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim that "the environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of 'the environment' has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming...

...But though the advocates of adversary politics sometimes seem to value loud posturing over quiet effectiveness, the collaborators tend to underestimate the centrality of unequal power relationships to the outcomes they promote...

...Earth First...

...Focusing upon imminent concerns with life, health, and livelihood in their neighborhoods, they also challenged more narrow characterizations of environmentalism and "the environment" through both their activism and their identity...

...Whatever label is applied, the tradition that deep ecology was attacking is the same one that DISSENT / Spring 2005 71 ENVIRONMENTALISM Shellenberger and the others reject...

...They are at their most compelling when making this point, although their essay doesn't actually describe the necessary vision...

...Although explicitly authoritarian arguments are not unknown among environmentalists, paternalism is a more accurate label for the broader political tendency...

...This is a pow74 DISSENT / Spring 2005 ENVIRONMENTALISM erful and important claim...

...Toward the end of that campaign season, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus attended the annual national gathering of environmental grant makers—the people who allocate the foundation money that keeps most nongovernmental organizations afloat—and fired a broadside against the movement...

...1. www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_ Environ mentalism.pdf 2. The speech was delivered with the title "The Death of Environmentalism and the Birth of the Commons Movement," although the print version is titled "Is Environmentalism Dead...

...Although supporters acknowledge that the attractiveness of this model is not always manifest in actual cases, it embodies a normative ideal that is increasingly attracting environmental adherents...

...Wonkishness, here, is characterized as the predictable byproduct of the contemporary politics of interest-group liberalism...

...That would be a mistake...

...Coalitions and alliances are understood to be strategic and self-interested, hence shifting and unstable...

...On this revised spectrum, the mainstream U.S...

...The Sierra Club's Pope, in a blurb promoting Lakoff's book, suggests this sort of reading...

...deeply rooted connections to other public concerns disappear from view...

...Surely, though, many of us might also despair when we are told that environmentalism is dead...

...Yet "vision," contra Bush pere, is not a "thing" to be had...

...At the most general level, they argue that environmentalists must persuasively connect their concerns with a narrative about "our core values as Americans and . . . our vision for the future...

...The first could be advanced against an array of groups or movements in contemporary American politics, but the second is distinctive only to environmentalism...

...Indeed, nothing that these large and expert organizations accomplished during the Clinton-Gore years— to say nothing of the present Bush years—compares to such landmark victories as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, which a much more inchoate movement won a generation ago...