Does Environmentalism Have a Future?
by John M. Meyer
There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary American environmentalism. On the one
hand, its organizations are generally larger, stronger, better funded, and more
knowledgeable than ever before. Membership has grown in recent years; there are now
more than eight million dues-paying members of the major national organizations-and
many more in local and statewide organizations-compared to about two million in 1980.
Moreover, polls consistently show very high levels of public support for environmental
protection, levels that would be the envy of many progressive movements.
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.
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.
The same polls that regularly show high levels of public support also reveal this support
to be quite shallow. The environment rarely rises to the upper levels of concern. 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.
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. In a thirteen-thousand-word white paper with the
provocative title "The Death of Environmentalism,"1 they contend that modern
environmentalism rests upon "unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and
exhausted strategies." Environmentalists have accrued their share of enemies over the
years, but these two are not among them. They have serious résumés in the movement.
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-one-time
environmental wunderkind who at age twenty-three was president of the Sierra Clubechoed Shellenberger and Nordhaus by proclaiming, "I am here to perform an autopsy."2
Outrage and accolades have followed. Clearly, these three have struck a nerve, and the
left's post-election malaise provides an opportune climate for heterodox voices.
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." Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that this has been done effectively by the
right, but largely ignored on the left. True enough. Yet to understand their critique, we
must first distinguish its two parts. 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." The first could be advanced against an array of groups or movements in
contemporary American politics, but the second is distinctive only to environmentalism.
To focus public attention on specific policies, one by one, is to turn interconnected
concerns into discrete issues. As Werbach puts it, "American environmentalism and its
sister ideology, liberalism" have stripped public concerns of "their context and their web
of connections. They are single 'issues,' each requiring its own movement and experts."
So widespread public concerns come to be conceived as narrow "special interests."
Similarly, say Shellenberger and Nordhaus, a focus on "short-term policy pay-off"
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 vision could enable the movement to win the political war even while losing
particular battles. In its absence, policies are merely technical proposals; they are
meaningful only if adopted; and they are salient only to those already in the know.
Wonkishness, here, is characterized as the predictable byproduct of the contemporary
politics of interest-group liberalism.
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."3 But the second part of their
argument remains distinctive. 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." The claim appears counterintuitive, if not simply wrong. After all, rhetorical
appeals to protect "the environment" are only slightly more controversial than those on
behalf of mom or apple pie, while even elementary-school ecological platitudes
emphasize the centrality of interconnectedness. 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. By setting up "the
environment" as something "out there" and apart from everyday life and concerns, it
excludes too much; deeply rooted connections to other public concerns disappear from
view. It is this, our critics argue, that helps explain why popular support for
environmentalism remains so 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. As
Shellenberger and Nordhaus put it, "most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce
what they have to worry about. Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it."
To those who have tracked the environmental movement and its theorists over the past
generation, many elements of this critique will be familiar. Although our present critics
do not offer any parallels with past arguments, there are many to be had.
One parallel can be seen in the emergence of radical, direct-action groups like Earth
First! 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. 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.
The critique of wonkish environmentalism also echoes several important books from the
mid-1990s. 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." 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." Yet both Dowie and Gottlieb
offer a very different source of hope than the Earth First!ers. They turn, instead, to an
emergent network of neighborhood activists resisting local environmental hazards in
order to protect the places where their families live, work, and play.
These activists describe themselves today as the environmental justice movement.
Leaders have been predominantly women and minorities from poor urban and rural
communities; 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. Their challenge is reflected in
both parts of the "Death" critique. They argued against a technocratic policy orientation
and in favor of more confrontational tactics. 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.
The critiques of mainstream environmentalism by both the Earth First! and
environmental justice activists have echoed and inspired a growing body of theoretical
work. 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. Other theorists focus on public constituencies for environmental
change, raising questions about the objects of protection as well. These disparate strains
and voices include Murray Bookchin's "social ecology"; feminists such as Val
Plumwood; democratic theorists like John Dryzek and Douglas Torgerson; and
environmental historians, pragmatists, and postmodern critics who have sought to
challenge the narrow conception of both environmentalism and "the environment."
The established environmental organizations have, indeed, changed in response to some
of these challenges. 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. Yet if the
critique isn't wholly original, it is powerful. 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. 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. This is all to the good. 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. That would be a mistake.
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 "vision," contra Bush père,
is not a "thing" to be had. 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. Here disagreement is long-standing and significant. 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. Although the three are certainly
related, it will help to consider each separately.
Breadth v. Depth
The term "deep ecology" is familiar in environmentalist circles, but the question of what
it opposes has been a provocative one. The originator of the term, Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess, drew the obvious linguistic contrast, labeling the alternative "shallow
ecology." 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." 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.
Because the "shallow" label seemed too antagonistic, many adherents of deep ecology
began describing "reform environmentalism" as the alternative to their position.
Whatever label is applied, the tradition that deep ecology was attacking is the same one
that Shellenberger and the others reject.
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. 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. The new continuum allows us to
focus upon this question of access and constituency. 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. Earth First! can readily
be located at the "deep" end of this continuum. The concerns and constituencies of the
environmental justice movement place it at the "broad" end. On this revised spectrum, the
mainstream U.S. environmental organizations-"reform environmentalists"-would all be
located somewhere in the middle. 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."
Thus, our critics clearly position themselves on the side of "breadth." 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. 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.
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. This contrast illuminates something important, but it may also confuse
matters. Those located toward the "breadth" end of the continuum often seek to link socalled post-materialists and materialists. 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. They are
at their most compelling when making this point, although their essay doesn't actually
describe the necessary vision.
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. Coalitions and alliances are
understood to be strategic and self-interested, hence shifting and unstable. 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. The adversarial model remains the normative ideal even-or perhaps
especially-when it fails to describe reality accurately.
One challenge to the normative appeal of the adversarial model comes from efforts to
promote collaboration around what Europeans term "ecological modernization." 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. The book Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken and Amory and
Hunter Lovins, presents this sanguine discourse in an Americanized idiom.
A second challenge comes from so-called "collaborative conservation" efforts-the most
well-known probably has been the "Quincy Library Group" in Northwestern California.
These have sprung up, primarily in rural communities, to address place-based
environmental concerns such as the protection of a watershed or the managing of timber
harvesting through deliberation among industry, workers, environmentalists, and
government officials. 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." 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.
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. 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. 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.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus are not wholly clear where they come down on this
continuum. 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." 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." Their lack
of clarity reflects ambiguity about the progressive politics to which they want to tie
environmentalism. As a part of the left, collaboration with workers, whether in an auto
factory or a logging community, seems a no-brainer. The same can be said of cross-race
alliances. But workers often ally themselves with the corporations that employ them to
produce sport-utility vehicles or cut old-growth forests. What, then, should be the stance
toward these corporations? Here is where the contradictory messages emerge. 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.
Populism v. Paternalism
If you look under the skin of many an environmentalist, you're likely to find a certain
authoritarian sensibility. And why not? 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? 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. Although explicitly authoritarian arguments are not
unknown among environmentalists, paternalism is a more accurate label for the broader
political tendency. We-the informed, far-sighted, public spirited-wish to help protect youthe uninformed, short-sighted, or self-interested-from the coming crisis.
Of course, it is not this simple. 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. 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.
It seems plausible to locate mainstream environmentalist groups somewhere in the
ambivalent middle of this paternalist-populist spectrum. 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. 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 disproportionate power of special interests.
Where does that place our critics? Certainly, their location on the first two continua
would encourage us to look for them at the populist end. And yet, there is a significant
caveat. 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. Werbach
acknowledges his presence in the audience for his speech. Shellenberger and Nordhaus
thank him for "teaching us how to identify category mistakes."
In Lakoff's work on framing political arguments, we can distinguish two levels of
analysis. The first is reflected in the emphasis we've seen on vision and values. The key
question we might ask at this level is how far down the "frame" goes. Treated
superficially, after all, framing is essentially "spin." 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. The Sierra Club's Pope, in a
blurb promoting Lakoff's book, suggests this sort of reading. 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. 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.
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.
The second level of Lakoff's analysis fills in the substance of these frames. For
conservatives, Lakoff argues, the dominant frame portrays government as a "strict
father." 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." 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. Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not explicitly draw upon
Lakoff's paternalistic frame in their essay. Yet in recent presentations they have
highlighted growing public support for the "strict father" frame as support for their thesis.
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.
Anyone who has lived through the past several years of American political life knows
that fear can be a highly effective political tool. Yet whether fear is likely to prompt
mobilization and action seems to depend upon its relation with hope or despair.
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." 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. Surely, though, many of us might also despair when we are told that
environmentalism is dead!
Fear vs. Re-imagination
Indeed, there is not only irony but danger in offering such a public jeremiad against
jeremiads. For one thing, it runs the risk of bolstering the claims of antienvironmentalists, who are keen to characterize the movement as elitist. 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.
Shellenberger, Nordhaus, and Werbach argue that environmentalism's failing is too
deeply rooted to be resolved by this sort of internal reform. 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. It is in this sense that
environmentalism is "dead." This is a powerful and important claim. Still, we have good
reason to be cautious. 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.
The progressive politics that our critics suggest as a new project does not now exist in
American politics-and may never have existed. 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. It is a
vision of transcending the fragmentation of interest-group politics, but decidedly not of
subsuming diverse concerns and identities. The latter, after all, would be as likely to
foster invisibility as centrality for environmental concerns. This new project is nothing
less than the reimagination and reconstruction of the democratic left itself. 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.
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. He is currently a visiting member at the School of Social Science,
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
The author wishes to thank Ethan Schoolman and Carolyn Benson for very constructive
suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.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?" 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.
www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/little-doe/
This article is from Dissent Magazine.
© 2005 Foundation for Study of Independent Ideas, Inc