WHY IS ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ALMOST universally seen as a left-wing issue? A lively debate within the “environmental community” makes one reason clear. Many professional environmentalists want it that way. Sound evidence–and the actual needs of environmental protection–come second to that agenda.
This debate began with the release last fall of an essay called “The Death of Environmentalism” by two long-time environmental activists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. Later published with periodic follow-on comments in the online magazine Grist, the piece has become must reading among environmental types. It attempts to explain what the authors see as the 30-year decline in the political influence of their cause.
According to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, during the 1960s and 1970s environmentalists and other “progressive” forces won landmark victories, but failed to build a permanent social transformation on these gains. This left them unable to resist effectively when right-wing advocacy groups targeted them in a decades-long and largely successful ideological offensive apparently claiming (though the essay is vague here) that environmental protection causes unemployment. In consequence, it is said, the government for 15 years has ignored the proven imminence of “the greatest calamity in modern history”–namely, global warming–despite the expenditure of “hundreds of millions of dollars” by environmental groups urging action, and has failed to embrace the program of total economic and social transformation that would be needed to address it.
The authors leave the nature of this transformation undefined. Apparently it would rest on a multibillion dollar program of government-directed investment in alternative energy sources. However, they are by no means vague about where support for that transformation should be found. Shellenberger and Nordhaus explain that “most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right’s values” that they have “assiduously avoided examining [their] own in a serious way” in response to the conservative challenge.
Such a reexamination, Shellenberger and Nordhaus conclude, would reveal that future success in environmental protection depends on making common cause with such other “progressive” groups as people of color, gays, feminists, peace advocates, and labor unions. Virtually all of the subsequent comments in Grist have agreed.
This self-centered and self-important narrative rests almost entirely on historical and scientific fantasies. The keystone environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s, far from being achievements of the left, arose from a broad social consensus and were supported and signed essentially without exception by Republican presidents. Attributing these laws to professional environmentalists is like giving the surfer credit for the wave. Levels of all regulated pollutants are lower today than in 1970 and are projected to go still lower, while once imperiled predators like wolves and mountain lions are returning to areas from which they had long been exterminated. Even on global warming, there is a broadening consensus that more can and should be done despite scientific uncertainties.
But Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s underlying political analysis is far worse. One might expect a movement taking stock of its political assets to reexamine the strength of its core appeal, and to identify new groups that might be persuaded to support it. Shellenberger and Nordhaus do neither.
On the contrary, they contend that since “everything is connected to everything else,” and since all our perceptual categories are somewhat arbitrary, the term “environment” is simply a mental construct. They therefore counsel against any revitalized effort to dramatize the beauty and wonder of the natural world, or to explain why more action is needed to protect such beloved features as mountain meadows in the Rockies or maple forests in New England. Instead, they claim, “environment” needs to be viewed in a larger context to have meaning. That larger context must be provided by “progressive” causes in general. No reason is offered why this larger construct should necessarily be “progressive,” and none suggests itself.
One might think that environmentalists in a conservative country would seek conservative support. Indeed, one might think that environmentalists could recognize natural allies in those who find pleasure and fulfillment in pursuit of wild animals in their habitat, or who have become convinced that God commands them to protect the full abundance of His creation, or who believe that their great country’s uncurbed appetite for energy puts it at risk in a dangerous world. By contrast, there is no reason to think–and none is offered–why people of color, feminists, gays, or peace advocates–let alone union members–should be more environmentalist than the public at large. Yet reaching out to hunters and fishers, evangelical Christians, or “geo-green” conservatives is barely mentioned in this debate. Evidently support from those who might have endorsed the war in Iraq, or might oppose gay marriage, or, it seems, might not have voted enthusiastically for Howard Dean will not be welcome in addressing “the greatest calamity in modern history.”
Certainly cheap shots against “environmental extremists” have long characterized the rhetoric of conservative publicists and politicians. But a mature political judgment should look beyond the cheap shots on all sides to assess, and make use of, the more fundamental forces at work. It should also examine the widespread distrust of environmentalists among outdoorsmen and evangelicals with no apparent reason for striking poses on this issue.
If, as may well be true, the goal of this debate is not to revitalize environmental protection as such, but to invest its appeal in a generic revival of “progressive” politics, then these criticisms are beside the point. But to the extent that protecting the environment is still a goal of the environmental movement, one may hope that as the reassessment continues, it will include a deeper look in the mirror.
William F. Pedersen practices law in Washington, D.C. He last wrote for The Weekly Standard on global warming.
