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| <back | home Life after death: Environmental activists look beyond the "demise" of environmentalism to shape a new vision for the future by Stacey Warde
Global warming has stirred debate among environmentalists and beyond unlike any other environmental issue. But few, in the United States, at least, can seem to get their minds around the issue. Otherwise, how do you explain, in the face of some of the worst weather-induced disasters ever recorded, the ongoing refusal to acknowledge the devastating impact of global climate change? And how do you account for the fact that Americans continue to go about their business as usual, as though fossil fuels were an unlimited resource, never needing to retool their industry and economy to prepare for the inevitable shift to renewable energy resources? The sheer enormity of the problem, defining exactly what global warming is and how it’s caused, and then sounding a sensible alarm (that doesn’t have the ring of junk science to it) has stumped us all. Enough so that several young, brassy and brilliant environmental leaders have claimed that environmentalism is dead. Adam Werbach: Environmentalism’s coroner Adam Werbach, for example, shocked family and friends in environmental circles during a speech he gave at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last December. He started by informing the audience, "I’m here to perform an autopsy." He was about to make headlines, as two young colleagues, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, had when they too sounded their own dirge in October, informing members of the Environmental Grantmakers Association that their favorite enterprise, environmentalism, was dead. Werbach took it a step further. He had already made headlines in 1996 after his selection as the youngest-ever president of the Sierra Club. He was 23. He’s since moved on and co-founded the Apollo Alliance (www.apolloalliance.org), which seeks to create a clean energy economy built upon a coalition of industrialists, policy makers and environmentalists. Now, only a few weeks after the 2004 election, and faced with the failure of the progressive movement in America to take back the reins from the hard right, it had become clear to Werbach that something had to change. He smelled a carcass. Something had definitely died. Shortly after the election, Werbach circulated a bulletin titled the November 3rd Theses (www.3nov.com), which scolds liberalism for its failure to shape a vision as powerful and compelling as the "family values" brand that conservatives had built to capture all three branches of government. "Conservatives," he wrote in the 19-point bulletin, "have spent the last 40 years getting clear about the values they represent." Meanwhile, he added, liberals, progressives and Democrats had become moribund. They "have spent the same period of time defining themselves against conservative values, even ‘morality’ in general." The time has come, Werbach urged in his theses, to shape a new vision. "The progressive vision must be a direct challenge to fundamentalism in all of its forms: political, religious and economic. It must appeal to the values of liberty, equality, community, justice, unconditional love, shared prosperity, and ecological restoration, among many others." Then, in support of an edict against the insanity of doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result, he warned: "If resources continue to flow to the same leaders who have failed to construct a new vision and have thus left the Democratic Party in ruins, then we can expect more of the same. And worse. "Those who resist the process to create a new vision will be left behind." Here were the seeds of the speech he was about to give on the lifeless state of environmentalism in the 21st century, where alarms on global warming sound almost daily with little or no impact on American industry or policy. It’s the most significant issue on which environmentalists have failed to make any real progress. Werbach, well aware of the political and cultural ramifications of the 2004 election, in which the ruling party has shown no regard for protecting the environment — and, in fact, did just the opposite — decided it was time to face the monster. "With fond memories, a heavy heart and a desire for progress, I say to you tonight that environmentalism is dead." Yes, he added, it’s dead, and we need to get over it, get past the denial, perform the burial and move on. It stirred fiery protest. "How could he say such a thing?" came the swift rebuke. "Of course environmentalism isn’t dead. Absolutely not." Others replied: "How could he not make such a claim? Of course, he’s right. Environmentalism died a long time ago." Again, the overriding issues in making such a claim were global warming, and the ongoing failure of liberal politics to put the environment at the top of its list of national priorities. The environment, in fact, barely registered a blip on the Democratic Party’s radar screen in the last election. And if anyone in the Party even noticed, it was hardly mentioned. For Werbach, enough was enough. Here, in the cauldron of neocon power grabs, their control over the three branches of government and other institutions, and in the shadow of the hard right’s iron grip on the nation’s conscience and its ability to manipulate consensus and the public mind, Werbach shaped his own dirge for environmentalism. "Our death is a symptom of the exhaustion of the liberal project. Having achieved its goals of basic economic rights, liberalism and its special interests now fail to speak to the modern need for fulfillment of the American people." Special interests had, in fact, been the major cause for the failure of liberal politics in general and of environmentalism in particular. They hadn’t come together in any significant way, as had the more unified right, to establish a compelling vision built on shared values. Instead, the split forces of the "liberal project," as Werbach put it, and environmentalism threw their divided energies against the monolithic beast of conservative values and suffered a humiliating defeat. In the aftermath, it was more-than-ever clear, Werbach observed, that environmentalism had died. He was tired of pretending otherwise. "My face and name have been used to project the rebirth of the environmental movement. It has not been reborn. "Since deciding to give this speech, I have been attacked as naive, arrogant and traitorous. I am done pretending. The challenges we face are too serious, the opportunities too great to miss. "I am done calling myself an environmentalist." If not an environmentalist, then what? Werbach was suggesting, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus, that it’s no longer feasible for environmentalists to isolate themselves through single-issue activism. It was time to move beyond the "confines of the environmental discourse to articulate a more expansive, more inclusive and more compelling vision for the future." When we do this, Werbach continued, we "cease being environmentalists and start becoming American progressives." Which might not be such a bad thing. The point Werbach attempted to drive home was that we had to broaden our effort to reach larger blocks of the population, bridging the chasm between left and right, finding points of agreement and shared values, particularly as they relate to the environment and the economy. But in the face of the imminent threat of global climate change, where daily reports warn of the dire consequences already being visited upon the planet, and some voices are already predicting that it’s too late, how much time do we really have to create a new vision? The LA Times, for example, recently reported that it took the hard right nearly 40 years to accomplish what Werbach’s proposing: Build a unifying vision, and move large blocks of people, industry and policy makers to make the difficult changes ahead. "The hard truth," Werbach responded in an email, "is that this is the era of the conservative, in the same way that the 1930s through the 1970s were the era of the liberal. We need to embrace our minority status and start building as if it will take twenty years to regain power." What other choice do we have? It will take a gargantuan effort, combining forces never previously aligned, Werbach acknowledges, to raise the consciousness of enough people to make the necessary shifts to save ourselves from disaster. Other countries are already doing it. "It’s not the rest of the world that I’m worried about," Werbach told Hope-Dance Magazine. "America is heading in the opposite direction of the rest of the post-industrial world. As India develops, it is providing more minority rights and a bigger safety net for its people. America is going the opposite direction; it’s unique in the world. As Michael Adams says, Americans got a good look at modernity in the 1970s and decided they didn’t want it." Moving beyond special interests Instead, Americans continue to live blindly, with little consciousness of how their choices affect the rest of the world or the environment, upon which their lives — and livelihood — depend. The progress for eliminating greenhouse gases has moved at a snail’s pace. Shellenberger, in an interview with The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard, explained that he and Nordhaus had spent years attempting to sell solutions offered by environmental groups, and eventually got weary of "promoting 10-point plans for emissions caps and fuel efficiency that may appeal to policy wonks but don’t engage the ordinary citizens you have to reach to effect real change." This was the impetus for their essay, which was presented in an October meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Nordhaus told Hertsgaard that never before has environmentalism confronted a problem as huge as global climate change. "The entire global economy has to be transformed." Not only are environmentalists faltering but labor, women’s and civil rights. All progressive organizations, they say, are "faltering now. They all need to think of themselves as part of a larger political movement, figure out what vision and values they share, and find ways to frame their messages and organize accordingly." Thus, as Werbach noted later in his speech at the Commonwealth Club, death brings new opportunities. It’s not as negative as the words may sound. "For many in the west, death signifies the end. But that notion is alien to most of the world’s native peoples. For many, death ... is a journey, not an end, one that demands wisdom and strength at the moment in which we are naked and vulnerable, just as we are at birth. It is as impossible to live without death ... as it is to exist outside of the environment. "We cannot evolve until we move beyond our denial of the death of environmentalism." Not dead yet, say critics. While most critics agree that environmentalism has its share of problems, few in the movement seem willing to go as far as to say it has died. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, for example, expressed anger and deep disappointment at the Shellenberger/Nordhaus paper, "The Death of Environmentalism." "I was one of the 25 people interviewed for this piece," he wrote in a response paper sent to environmental grant makers. "While I personally was treated fairly, I am still deeply disappointed and angered by it." Pope leveled his biggest grievance at the "flimsy foundation" they established to make their case, arguing that the controversial paper is seriously flawed from beginning to end, and serves little useful purpose. The arguments that Shellenberger and Nordhaus present make huge claims built on thin research. "Given that they wrote their piece in a few months after only 25 interviews, it may not be surprising that Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to adequately buttress such a far-reaching set of assertions. It is not clear what possessed them to try to build such an ambitious premise on such a flimsy foundation. Boldness and hubris are closely related. "Their case is not only flimsy, it is internally contradictory and misleading. I still think it is important to address their arguments because, unchallenged, they may distract us from a set of very real challenges which require extending and rethinking our approach to global warming advocacy, not junking modern environmentalism." Pope points out that 25 interviews don’t make a representative sampling of the environmental movement. "They utterly ignore such leaders as Wendell Berry, Paul Shepherd, Thomas Barry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Leopold. They interviewed 25 policy people, and then complain that they got only policy expertise from their interviews. Environmentalism has both poets and wonks; you don’t go to your legislative counsel for a sonnet, nor to your troubadour for a reply brief." Nonetheless, despite the poetic efforts of writers such as Wendell Berry (whose work is often featured in Orion Magazine and can be viewed at www.oriononline.org), Americans continue to live blindly, with little consciousness of how their choices affect the rest of the world. As the debate intensifies over whether environmentalism is really dead, one fact remains clear: There’s agreement across the board that a larger movement with a compelling vision is needed now more than ever to bring policy makers, industrialists and activists to the table, to shift the American economy to clean energy resources, and to reduce the threat of global warming. If we fail to do this, our blood is upon own heads. Stacey Warde, former managing editor for New Times, freelances from Cayucos and can be reached at swarde805@charter.net. <back | top^ |