Dead movement walking?

Roiled by harsh internal criticism and confronting four more years of Bush, environmentalists face a dark night of the soul.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Jan 14, 2005 | If you want to get someone's attention, tell him that the movement he's dedicated his life and career to is dead.

If you really want him to take notice, declare that his own strategies and tactics dealt the fatal blows, but he's too blind to see that he's still beating a corpse.

And if your aim is actually to force him to stand up and fight, announce all this publicly to the very generous folks whose grants fund his programs and paycheck.

In the self-published paper "Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World," released at the Environmental Grantmakers Association meeting in Hawaii in early October, Michael Shellenberger, a political strategist, and Ted Nordhaus, a political pollster, argued that "modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis." Their wide-ranging 36-page indictment charges that the country's largest environmental organizations have spent 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars fighting global warming but have "strikingly little to show for it."

It's a heartfelt, sweeping, even anguished J'accuse, urging a dark night of the soul for environmentalists, challenging them to reckon with both how bad and how urgent their predicament really is. It laments that the environmental establishment's current approach to fighting global warming is hopelessly wonky, mired in technical policy fixes, like raising CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) emission standards on cars or mandating cap-and-trade schemes on CO2-emitting power plants. The organizations suffer from pigheaded "policy literalism," refusing to recognize that they're in the middle of a culture war that won't be won by "appealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-interest."

The paper suggests that if environmentalists want Americans to join them wholeheartedly in the struggle to save the world, an ambitious, perhaps utopian, strategy is required: nothing less than an inspiring vision of an environmentally sustainable future that Americans will actually want to live in.

The attack struck a nerve. In early December 2004, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope fired back with a 6,500-word response. Addressing grantmakers who might have received the paper, he called it "unclear, unfair and divisive" and "self-serving." But even as he enumerated what he saw as the essay's multiple factual errors and misinterpretations, he conceded that they made "one extremely compelling point."

He even quoted it: "Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about." But Pope argued that a similar case can be made about the left in general. And for him that's a "case for modernizing the left not killing environmentalism."

Adding fuel to this political funeral pyre, former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach inserted his own "autopsy" into the mix with a speech -- titled "Is Environmentalism Dead?" -- that he delivered to a sold-out crowd of 250 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in early December.

Werbach, who became the 46th president of the organization at age 23, and used his youth to sell the middle-aged movement to a new generation, said that in doing so, "I was like a hospice worker trying to make the last days of environmentalism as painless as possible."

With self-mythologizing flair, he declared, "I will not longer call myself an environmentalist," in working to build a broader progressive movement. "Environmentalism is dead in no small part because it could never match the right's power to narrate a compelling vision of America's future," he eulogized.

Werbach, whose talk grew out of conversations with Shellenberger and Nordhaus, was even more radical, arguing that environmentalists should simply come out as progressives, unafraid to alienate whatever conservative allies they might have in the process.

All this public mourning of environmentalism might puzzle the many green groups that have seen their membership rolls swell under the Earth-last rule of President George W. Bush. Not to mention the countless activists and small grass-roots groups that do the local-yokel heavy lifting on green issues. As the Bush administration continues its rollback of 30 years of environmental protections, though, one thing is indisputable: Whatever environmentalists are doing isn't enough.

But the question of what to do about this sad state of affairs is by no means answered by the critics. It's easy enough to declare that a movement has failed to achieve its most urgent goals and to call for a compelling new vision that will invigorate activists, persuade the mainstream, and motivate politicians. It's much, much harder to come up with the goods.

Next Page: Victory in defeat? Or just defeat?

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