Schwarzenegger: The Fake Environmental Hero

By Bill Walker, Environmental Working Group. Posted April 19, 2007.

California's governor, who was oiling his quads for the camera when Lois Gibbs was fighting a chemical catastrophe at Love Canal, is suddenly being hailed as an environmental hero.

He's the GOP's Al Gore. He's simultaneously on the covers of special green issues of Newsweek and Outside, with fawning articles and Q&As recounting how he gets policy tips from his cousin-in-law Bobby Kennedy Jr. and has one Hummer that runs on hydrogen, another on biodiesel.

He's a jet-setting green diplomat, signing global warming pacts with Canada and Britain. He's the keynote speaker at prestigious international climate change conferences.

Fine. To a point.

Arnold Schwarzenegger does seem to understand that the planet is in trouble. As a green Republican, he is a welcome contrast to the know-nothing, do-less attitude of President Bush. His movie star persona is perfect for delivering lines like "Arnold to Detroit: Get off your butt."

But when he says the problem with environmentalism is that it's not hip or sexy -- that the movement has been a failure because it's based on guilt and sacrifice, not optimism and fun -- I must respond with one of the more eloquent lines from his signature role as an android assassin:

Wrong

Here's what the governor said last week at Georgetown University:

"Pumping Iron" changed the image of body-building dramatically ... The perception of body-building began to change and it became more and more hip and more and more attractive ... It became mainstream. It became sexy, attractive. And this is exactly what has to happen with the environmental movement.

Like body-builders, environmentalists were thought of as, kind of, weird and fanatics also. You know, they're, kind of, serious tree-huggers. Environmentalists were no fun. They were like Prohibitionists at the fraternity party.

For too long, the environmental movement has been powered by guilt. But I believe that this is about the switch-over from being powered by guilt to being powered by something much more positive, something much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about major change ... I don't think that any movement has ever made it and has ever made much progress based on guilt. Guilt is passive, guilt is inhibiting and guilt is defensive.

You remember the commercials a number of years ago, the commercials specifically of a Native American who sees what we have done to the environment and then a tear runs down his cheek? You all remember that?

Well, let me tell you something. That approach didn't work because successful movements are built on passion; they're not built on guilt. They're built on passion, they're built on confidence and they're built on critical mass. And, often, they're built on an element of alarm that galvanizes action ... [T]he tipping point will be occurring when the environmental movement is no longer seen as a nag or as a scold, but as a positive force in people's lives.

(Disclosure: Schwarzenegger's chief speechwriter is a friend and former newspaper colleague of mine.)

Weird? Nags? Prohibitionists? Watch it, Governor, those are my people you're talking about.

I know a lot of sexy, optimistic, fun environmentalists. Some of us are not as sexy as we used to be, and decades of sounding the alarm in the deaf ears of politicians and the business community have tempered our optimism with cynicism. But we're still more fun than most people I've ever spent much time with. (Which includes politicians but not body builders and action-movie stars, so I don't know for sure how we stack up to Arnold's crowd. By all accounts, he was a real cut-up on the set.)

And passion? You haven't seen passion until you've seen kids, grownups and grandparents -- even some movie stars -- willingly go to jail for protesting nuclear weapons or toxic waste incinerators or clear-cutting.

See more stories tagged with: schwarzenegger, global warming, climate change

Bill is a native Texan in exile in California. He runs Environmental Working Group's West Coast office and writes for their Enviroblog.

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