At least according to Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two environmental and political strategists, who wrote “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” to encourage a rebirth of the movement.
“I felt that having lost all three branches of the government to anti-environmental extremists, having poured $15 million to beat Bush, (and) while having failed to achieve any national legislation on global warming, that we did not only have a right, we had a responsibility to challenge basic environmental assumptions about everything,” Shellenberger said.
While many disagree with this opinion — Internet searches yield volumes of debate — Shellenberger said the 30-page essay has received an encouraging amount of support.
“Young people especially have been really supportive. We see this as the next generation of progressive Americanism in our country,” Shellenberger said. “We’ve also been getting incredible support from those who grew up in the ’60s.”
In Whatcom County, younger, second-generation environmentalists, as well as veterans from the ’60s, see the movement as spread too thin and without a unifying direction to take on problems as intimidating as global climate change or overpopulation. Most say the movement is dead nationally but still vibrant in
its grass roots.
Bob Keller, a board member of the Whatcom Land Trust, has been an active environmentalist in the county for more than 50 years.
“I’m not sure how accurate it is to talk about the movement dying if it never was totally alive,” he said. “There never has been a national centralized leader, like King in the civil-rights movement.”
He described the environmental movement as a blanket term strung over independent clusters of people concerned about the Earth who work on a local level. Large-scale success, however, is contingent upon others doing the same across the globe, which is not happening, Keller said. This lack of organization, he said, limits public discussion of the movement’s national direction, siphoning its life away.
“Policies are not being framed in a way so that the public can sit back and say, ‘This is what that means to me,’ or ‘I know how this helps so I support that action.’ This understandably separates people that have good sense; they’re just not included,” said Dave Werntz, the science director for Bellingham’s Northwest Ecosystem Alliance.
The alliance has worked to keep the Northwest’s wild lands safe through forest conservation and endangered-species protection since 1988. Werntz said he has noticed a big change in the movement since the ’70s. He cited former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach’s speech, “The Death of Environmentalism,” to explain how the movement no longer conveys its vision of policy creation
to the public.
“What is dead within the movement is the insider gain game and holding dialogues on policy at a table with power brokers, while not communicating with the public about what these decisions mean,”
Werntz said.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus wrote about how a movement that started as a group of concerned citizens has become bureaucratic and something to which citizens cannot connect.
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| Dave Werntz is the science director for Bellingham's Northwest Ecosystem Alliance. Photo by Jamie Clark |
In effect, environmentalism is a movement that says “no” to certain sectors of the population. Local environmentalists agree this is not an enduring vision by itself. People are failing to
see the values backing these types of restrictive legislation, Werntz said.
For example, in 1990 Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev, nearly passed a fuel-economy standards bill, falling one vote shy in the Senate. Then in 2002 Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz, and John Kerry, D-Mass, tried again to raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and were shot down 62-38.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus wrote that the progression from one vote away to 22 votes away 12 years later hints at a poorly proposed bill with no core values as backing. Environmental bills will have no carrying effect without showing they are derived from conscientious and well-meaning ideals.
This stance of environmental legislation that excludes people and organizations is dead,
Shellenberger said.
“The environmental movement started with new ideas,” said Lynn Robbins, a Huxley College of
the Environment professor. “The atmosphere at the time made it evident that feminism, classism,
race, poverty and health rights were in mind with the environment; that is what we thought
environmentalism was.”
Robbins has been involved in civil and environmental rights since the ’60s. He said that special interest environmentalism left behind the other “isms” of that rebellious generation.
Robbins and Keller said they were proud of the worldwide awareness the movement generated. They said that amid political hardships in recent years for environmentalism, overall awareness around the globe is more hopeful than it was 50 years ago.
“People’s cultural concepts don’t change very fast,” Keller said. “Life in our society is predicated on the automobile. This is an example of how hard it is to change cultural concepts.”
Although many people’s cultural concepts are slow to change, Shellenberger said it is time to incorporate these people into a progressive vision and encourage cultural shifts.
“So really the problem around global warming is going to be solved in the same way as problems of poverty, economic opportunity and the freedom of women and young people,” Shellenberger said. “That (solution comes) from developing an American citizenry that is oriented towards progressive values and a progressive vision of the future.”
He wrote that this orientation does not describe global climate change as a problem of carbon, but of idealistic disagreement. The fresh vision sees the change as an opportunity to finally unite industry leaders, labor unions, civil and women’s rights activists and environmentalists toward an economic revolution — A New Clean Deal.
Seth Cool, a conservation associate at the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, said he was encouraged
when he read former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach’s speech titled “The Death
of Environ-mentalism.”
“Instead of talking about raising CAFE standards by X amount, we really should be explaining how much money the country will be saving through more economical cars and how security is increased in the same way,” Cool said.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus outlined in their essay how renovating America’s infrastructure with cleaner practices would reinvigorate a hurting automotive industry seeking to send its factories overseas. The plan involves improved health care, greener energy systems, a boost for job creation and most importantly, it sets an international example for the direction of modern development.
This vision is not a mirage. It is as solid as some of its supporters.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, is one of the founding members of the Apollo Alliance. The alliance is uniting labor unions, industry leaders, government representatives and national environmental organizations. Werbach, Shellenberger and Nordhaus also were part of its formation.
Apollo is not an environmental movement; it is an effort of industry and labor leaders to renovate America’s power sources.
The Washington State Labor Council, the AFL-CIO, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash, and the Seattle NAACP were some of the first to endorse Apollo’s ideals of job creation and economic revival through sustainable energy renovation in Washington state and the nation.
Apollo has partnered a 9-kilowatt photovoltaic solar-energy system in Renton. When completed, it will be the largest solar-power installation in the Northwest, training and employing local technicians
and electricians.
Werntz and Cool have been working on forest conservation but with an angle of including loggers and the U.S. Forest Service. Their efforts, which focus on including the communities of Packwood and Randall, exclude regulative policy.
“When litigation was being used as a last resort on Gifford Pinchot National Forest, everyone was losing,” Cool said. “People were still unemployed, and old growth was still at risk.”
A field tour with all interested parties led to cooperation that created jobs in logging, decommisioning road construction, stream-bed restoration and local mill operations, Werntz said.
“By going into these communities and talking to people directly, we’ve found a pretty broad set of values that we all agree upon, and as a result, Forest Services have not been planning cuts in old growth and we’re creating jobs,” Werntz said. “I think this is exactly what many of these death-related analyses are talking about; getting all of the people who have a stake in the issue and finding all the places where we can agree and move forward.”
RE Sources program director Robyn du Pré has worked with Bellingham and Seattle residents for several years on environmental issues. Her organization incorporates builders and contractors into a sustainable vision of development. She said she does not think the movement is dead, or should be.
“I think the words ‘environmental movement’ may be dead,” du Pré said. “Those words are so small
and limiting for where we need to go and do. It is about recasting our relationship with the land and
each other.”
Once people recognized the degree of environmental death in the ’60s, they fired up radical practices to fight against it, and Congress passed certain protections. Forty years later, some are realizing
environmentalism is not as effective as it could be, and they are
calling out radical suggestions for reform.