Is the Environmental Movement on the Wrong Track?

By David Morris, AlterNet. Posted December 3, 2007.

Editor's Note: Below is a review by David Morris of the book, Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. In the spirit of debate, following the review is a response from the authors and a rebuttal from Morris.

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger tossed a stink bomb into the normally collegial annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association in the form of a jeremiad against the premises and strategies of the environmental movement, The Death of Environmentalism. The succeeding months witnessed a spirited and often heated back and forth between the authors and environmental leaders.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger's new book, Breakthrough (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), offers up the same thesis in much greater detail and broadens its condemnation to liberals in general. The title implies a radically new way of thinking and acting. Yet the thesis and the supporting arguments have been championed for decades by conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and Hudson Institute.

Let me summarize their points. The rapid economic growth from 1950 to 1970 satisfied Americans' material needs, allowing us to move up the Maslowian hierarchy and pursue more psychological and aesthetic needs. Environmental activism did not bring us environmental legislation. Prosperity did. Environmental activism won't bring the poor here or abroad into the environmental fold. They have more pressing needs. Developing countries cannot pursue environmental objectives until they have become prosperous.

Thus economic growth should be environmentalists' and liberals' (the authors appear to view both with equal disdain) No. 1, and perhaps No. 2 and No. 3, concern. "Muscular investment" is the key to successfully confronting the qualitatively new issue of global warming rather than environmentalists' traditional reliance on "pollution and regulation." Muscular private investment depends on muscular public investment. The authors propose a 10-year, $300 billion public investment strategy. Such a strategy would enable environmentalists to build politically effective coalitions with business and labor. It is this last point, the need for massive public investment, that would lead conservatives to part company with the authors.

Is the politics of hope hopeful?

I'll take on the authors' arguments head on a bit later, but let me offer a few impressions upfront. The book declares that it is a message of hope and optimism, compared to the environmentalists' drearily and often counterproductive pessimism. Nordhaus and Shellenberger are certainly right to criticize environmentalists for their emphasis on the negative. But to me the authors' key assumptions are at least as sobering.

They espouse that activism is not the key to social or economic change. Regulation, at least in addressing climate change, is ineffective. The very idea of protecting nature is itself not useful: "Nature can neither instruct our actions nor punish them," they write. Science cannot guide us to the truth. Strong communities are not advantageous. Place-based strategies are wrongheaded.

Indeed, the authors seem to rule out as unhelpful or counterproductive any strategy other than massively bribing the private sector to do the right thing. They call this a paradigm shift. I call it business as usual.

Sometimes the authors seem to go out of their way to provoke. Their style of naming names and taking no prisoners is probably what led to the widespread comment on their original brief. This book is littered with statements that seem, at best, defiant, and at worst, downright bizarre. Here's a sampling.

• 1. Cities "are as organic and natural as forests."(their emphasis)
• 2. "And throughout the animal kingdom there was murder and gang rape -- even among the much beloved and anthropomorphized dolphins -- activities that hardly qualify as harmonious."
• 3. "Saving the redwoods and banning DDT were no less acts of controlling nature than were logging ancient forest and spraying toxic pesticides."
• 4. "'Medicare for all' might have made good sense to Americans in the l950s and l960s, when Medicare was first established, but it holds far less allure today."
• 5. Brazil "simply doesn't have the resources to eliminate slavery."
• 6. "To declare oneself as pro-globalization or as a free trader is as meaningless as declaring oneself anti-globalization, anti-corporate, or in favor of fair trade."
• 7. "... Darwin showed humans to be as much a part of the earth as a redwood tree, or a hurricane ..."

Five arguments, five responses

And now, to the authors' key points.

1. "Nothing is more central to this book than our contention that, for any politics to succeed, it must swim with, not against, the currents of changing social values."

Given the arc of politics and society in the United States from 1970 to 2007, this is a perplexing assertion. Conservatives have been wildly successful with a strategy that directly contradicts the authors' proposition, that is, a strategy running against the currents of changing social values. As William Buckley Jr., himself, leader of the emerging conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s and a major architect of their narrative, proudly declares, "A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'" Of course, conservatives didn't, and couldn't, stop history. They have, however, effectively reversed, a number of historical trends.

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David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn.

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