Adam Werbach: Is Environmentalism Dead?

[cprise]

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
-- Walter Benjamin

...

Instead of starting the focus groups by asking people what they thought of global warming, our pollster Ted Nordhaus simply asked them how things were going. This open-ended question led, invariably, to focus group participants describing the collapse of the local economy. They would list, in depressing detail, the shutting of Hoover Vacuum and Timken Ball-bearing factories; gone to Mexico. They explained that the jobs that had been created in their wake -- mostly service sector jobs in places like Wal-Mart -- paid half as much and offered no health care or retirement benefits. Many said they were working two jobs to make ends meet.

We then asked them what they thought of the idea of a major federal investment program to accelerate America's transition to the clean energy economy of the future: research and development, manufacturing of wind turbines and solar, energy efficiency. We didn't have to prove to them that such a program would pay for itself; they knew it would intuitively. Hadn't a similar program succeeded in the post-war period? Of course it had.

What had been a roomful of tired and semi-depressed working folks transformed itself into a roomful of excited, optimistic Americans in a period of just 20 minutes. The energy emanating from the room was palpable.

And then something extraordinary happened. Nearly every single person in the room started to sound like Sierra Club members. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. They waxed poetic about solar panels. They spoke of their children's future -- their future -- and the planet's future. They remembered episodes from the area's local history -- like when thousands of jobs were created to retrofit smokestacks after the passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment -- things that James Watt and Rush Limbaugh want them to forget. But more than that, Apollo tells a narrative about American greatness, our history of shared investment and prosperity, of our ingenuity, and how we build a better future.

MORE http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/werbach-reprint/


This is a long, emotional article. But it is worthwhile and also has some interesting words concerning the 2004 Kerry campaign.

[justinsb]

1. It's growing here

in the last election the green party went from 1.5% of the vote to 5% without a single 'big name' canidate or a dollar in federal funding.

[ramapo]

2. Where is here?

5% is nice but for practical purposes is meaningless. I just read Werbach's article and I having watched the rise and fall of the environmental movement can say that he has written an excellent analysis.

One of the great disappointments of my life has been seeing the success and hope of the 1970s environmental movement basically fall apart almost immediately thereafter with the Reagan presidency.

On most fronts it has been all downhill since. For the most part, Clinton/Gore did little to brake the fall and in some aspects made things worse.

I hate to say it but things will have to get a lot worse before they get better.

[IrateCitizen]

4. Did you even read the article?

Judging by your response, I'd guess the answer is "no", because you failed completely to address any of the meaningful points it made.

Read it first, then respond. It's long, but well worth the time to look it over and absorb it.

[IrateCitizen]

3. Well, I just took the time to read the whole thing over...

... and I have to say that I find a good deal of merit in just about everything that Mr. Werbach says.

I used to be very involved in my local Sierra Club. But I'm not now -- to the point of canceling my monthly donation. Why? Well, for one thing, my local group was pretty much overwhelmed with NIMBY-ism. They are all older, affluent, and simply don't want things coming in and affecting THEM in an adverse manner.

But upon reading this piece, I was struck by how much Werbach hits the nail on the head in that we fail to offer anything even approaching a comprehensive vision for the future. The entire focus within both the environmental movement and Democratic Party politics seems to be about dealing with the PRESENT, and this in turn leads to compartmentalizing everything into its nice, neat category -- the economy, the environment, reproductive choice, etc. The thing that is totally missing from what the Democrats put out, along with what every single special-interest group puts out there, is anything that links these issues together into a comprehensive vision for the future.

And I think that Werbach's comments on dealing with the advisors of the Kerry campaign highlight this terrifically (or is it terribly?). The "Apollo project" had to be placed in the nice, neat box of energy independence -- it couldn't be mentioned in the economy, it couldn't be mentioned in anything else other than that nice, neat category. The end result of such an approach was, of course, a bunch of stances on various issues -- but nothing approaching a unifying theme that bound it all together. It was as if the Democrats repeated the same mistakes of 2002 in 2004, as Werbach charges in relation to the claim of Nancy Pelosi following 2002 that people will never again wonder what the Democrats stand for.

I'm very active in United for Peace and Justice through one of the member groups, and this frustrates me with them as well. They're good at saying we're against the war, we're against occupation, we're against torture -- all of which are good things by themselves. But they fail to express what we are FOR, what alternative vision we have for the future, and how we propose to get there. It can often feel like addressing these kinds of questions takes you away from the issue at hand, but as Werbach points out, you can't begin to address the issue at hand comprehensively until you can paint a good picture of where you ultimately want to go.

Those of us on the left have failed fantastically at this. It's high time we start making the FUTURE the unifying point of everything we do at the PRESENT.

[IrateCitizen]

5. This is an important piece! I can't believe only 3 people have commented.

:kick:

[ramapo]

7. Exactly

This is precisely why things will have to get a lot worse before people start to give more than lip service to environmental issues.

Environmental degradation is the "black sheep" in the family that nobody really wants to talk about and especially don't want to address the causes. Everybody has their reasons; it's too depressing, there's nothing you can do about it, it's not really a problem, or, and this is so typical, the planet is ours to use.

There are dozens of environmental groups, far too many imho. Each has their own little niche and surrounding kingdom. There isn't much coordination between all these groups. I wonder if the movement would be better served with fewer, larger groups.

Much of the environmental activity is nimby-based, no more sprawl, no nuke waste facility, no nukes, no windmills, no this, no that.

But what has gotten us to this point? Fifty-plus years of incredible growth (1950-2005) with no forethought of the consequences and little attempt to limit the damage. There was the brief interlude of environmental awareness during the 1970s but this was quickly pummeled into submission, chiefly by the conservatives in the Republican Party.

Americans went along with the murder of environmentalism because it was easy to go along with it. We could continue to mindlessly build, throw CAFE standards under the wheels of our SUVs and generally continue to rape and pillage the environment. Environmentalism was successfully equated to loss of jobs, living standards, and even freedom.

So take a look at the results of our lifestyles. Nothing really traumatically bad has happened. Some will say the animals are even winning out as we share our yards with deer and bear. Of course nobody much considers that the deer and bear were here first. And anybody who looks into what has happened to our planet during the past half century should be appalled.

But there have been no major air pollution problems except for the hidden and ignored health cost of burning coal. No burning rivers. It's not like people dropping dead in the streets. There have been no obviously discernible, harmful effects that have altered the daily life of Americans.

There is only one way that the environment can have a chance to recover and that is we all change our lifestyles to reduce the load. Now who believes that there is any chance of a widespread change taking place without a major precipitating event? It doesn't have to mean giving up cars and air-conditioning although that is always the knee-jerk "conservative" reaction.

Unfortunately there will be no "Apollo" program for energy independence or conservation. Why? Because there hasn't been one initiated during the past 25 years. Not that there haven't been many calls for one or that it would make perfect sense or that it would even perhaps create a lot of jobs.

If there is one thing that most people are good at it is apathy. It runs wide and deep. The excuse is that people are too busy with their lives to get involved. It is more like the great opiates of the people, television and now to an increasing degree computers, suck up incredible amounts of peoples' time and divert their minds. I am sorry to say that it this apathy is present in my own family despite my best efforts.

I believe Nature has a fantastic ability to heal itself. Just visit an abandoned parking lot. It doesn't take many years before plants take it back. But humans have an amazing capacity to destroy and rationalize their destructive actions as being good or at least not harmful to themselves.

Not so long ago, Earth's population passed three billion, the United States' 200 million. If memory serves we're at about five billion and 300 million respectively. It is difficult to imagine what the next 50 years will bring, especially as China, India, and other second and third world nations rush to copy our mistakes.

Eventually there will be a tipping point. Just like Peak Oil. I don't know that we have the discipline to avoid it but at some point Nature will impose sanctions. Perhaps that will bring Conservationists and Environmentalists some respect.

[IrateCitizen]

9. Tipping point and nature-imposed sanctions

Have you looked at any of the Millenial Assessment of the world's ecosystems yet? It's quite scary -- by their estimates, we have used up a full 60% of the planet's ecological capital. At the very moment that we have vastly overshot the earth's carrying capacity (we're over 6 billion now), we are finding that we don't necessarily have enough ecological principle to maintain what the population was BEFORE industrialization.

Here's a link to a good summary of the Millenial Assessment: http://www.greenfacts.org/ecosystems/

There are dozens of environmental groups, far too many imho. Each has their own little niche and surrounding kingdom. There isn't much coordination between all these groups.

Much of the environmental activity is nimby-based, no more sprawl, no nuke waste facility, no nukes, no windmills, no this, no that.

That's precisely why I stopped being active within my local Sierra Club. Pure NIMBY-ism from a group of older, affluent white folks who lived lifestyles that consumed significant amounts of fossil fuels and created the accompanying pollution.

If there is one thing that most people are good at it is apathy.

While I certainly agree, I think a bigger problem is that we're still operating with old brain-wiring. Our brains are still configured only to deal with immediate crises to our survival, and until you start seeing the Midwest turn into a giant dustbowl, aquifers in the Southwest disappear, and severe storms wreck the FL coast at least twice per year -- you're not going to get anything from most people other than apathy. The reason is that they're simply not predisposed to advocate doing anything about it until the effects are visible. The one thing about environmental issues is that the ecosystem usually doesn't show that there is a real problem until it is far past time to act to avert that problem.

[ramapo]

11. Denial is so easy

You're right we do have old brain-wiring. Denial is also a powerful factor that I didn't mention.

I do not agree that the various ecosystems haven't shown for quite some time the effects of our society.

Going back to the 1960s, there were many visible effects. Burning rivers, raw sewerage floating in our rivers, serious air pollution problems. Many of the more obvious problems were corrected but replaced with less obvious but more easily ignored problems.

Now we have chemical pollution of our water resulting from everything from illegal dumping to runoff from our lawns, roads, etc. The air is still bad but we don't get the deadly inversions that caused death rates to rise. The problem is more widespread and insidious.

The problems are well known and have been documented for decades. Politics, power, and most of all money and a love for dumb consumption has gotten us into this mess. I firmly believe had our society taken a more thoughtful path in 1980 that we'd all be much better off.

I'm going to check out that link now...

We've come a long way in the past 25 years and now the problems are going to be much more difficult to overcome once the era of fantasy and delusion ends.

[thegreatwildebeest]

24. I think...

Much of the environmental activity is nimby-based, no more sprawl, no nuke waste facility, no nukes, no windmills, no this, no that.

That's precisely why I stopped being active within my local Sierra Club. Pure NIMBY-ism from a group of older, affluent white folks who lived lifestyles that consumed significant amounts of fossil fuels and created the accompanying pollution.

I think thats why the more radical groups (Rainforest Action Network, Amazon Watch, Earth First) have been essentially chaffing under the selling out of the larger "conservation" groups. Now you even have an animal rights type response (ELF) and the environmental justice movement that combines both social justice and ecology. Then you have the primitivist and deep ecology members who advocate lifeway changes in order to accomplish things etc.

I really don't think many people, environmentalists and otherwise, have seriously challenged themselves on their actual life habits. I really don't think they do. If half the people who say they care for the environment actually sat down, and systematically reviewed all the things they do in a day, and analyzed them to see where they could minimize their impact, I think you would have a massive change in whats going on around here.

[IrateCitizen]

25. You bring up an excellent point.

I really don't think many people, environmentalists and otherwise, have seriously challenged themselves on their actual life habits. I really don't think they do. If half the people who say they care for the environment actually sat down, and systematically reviewed all the things they do in a day, and analyzed them to see where they could minimize their impact, I think you would have a massive change in whats going on around here.

This was one of the biggest gripes I had against the other members of my local Sierra Club -- that they professed to care for the environment, yet they all lived in oversized single-family houses (while retired with the kids long gone) in areas where they literally had to drive for EVERYTHING.

I recall a recent conversation I had with my parents while they were visiting us on this very subject, and my mother said to me, "But don't you give those people credit for actually doing something?" I responded by saying, "No, actually I give them less credit -- because they should know better about all of these things, and yet they still continue living this way. They're hypocrites. And if there's one thing I detest in both my own life and the lives of others, it's hypocrisy."

Myself -- I'm a hypocrite in many areas and I know it. But I'm trying like hell to change, one little bit at a time. This year, it was starting a small garden in the backyard and pledging to walk/bike more for local errands. My wife and I now walk for just about anything under a 1.5 mile trip around town. We're also trying to cut back on the amount of meat we eat, to use more beans instead for protein.

[thegreatwildebeest]

26. I don't think its hypocritical...

...for you to still have ecological hang ups, as you're clearly trying. I used to beat up myself alot over not "Doing enough" while watching other "Conservationists" pat themselves on the back for writing a huge check and driving away in an Explorer. I stopped lambasting myself and instead took pride in my options to live a more ecologically sound lifestyle, and have tried to extoll the virtues to others (and not just in a pessimistic 'We're all going to die! approach...it really IS more fun to bike places).

I think another thing to realize is the ripple effect works BOTH ways. People who are ecologically minded have a tendency to think of the negative only as exponential. For instance, car emissions hurt the air, poison the water, increase global warming, destroy environments where its extracted, etc etc, until we all sit in stark horror, paralyzed in despair. I know I've felt that sinking feeling that everything is just unstoppable. But the simple fact is that it isn't. The cop inside your head telling you its unstoppable is much more powerful than the reality of the situation, which is they all have a very tenous grip on keeping people in line. To quote Raoul Vaneigem, from The Revolution of Everyday Life on this "...in the pathetic search for friendship and love , a single and inspiring reason not to despair over present 'reality'. Everything conspires to keep secret the positive character of such experiences...despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life".

I recommend The Revolution of Everyday Life to anyone politically involved, and even though Raoul was a council marxist (and the ideas he espoused have been picked up by the anarchist mileu) I think its relevent for anyone who even contemplates politics. It can be found online for free, though it is admittedly dense reading, and you might need a book version. His line of thinking was also eventually adopted into the insurrectionary anarchist thinking spawned in the late 70's by Alfredo Bonnano, of which his writings can be found online for free as well, as well as good discussion from the guys at Killing King Abacus.

But back to the issue at hand. When you choose to not drive a car to do an errand, you are not just saving emissions, your robbing oil companies of profits, your keeping yourself healthier, your an example of doing things in an ecologically sound way to all your friends and neighbors. I think thats pretty damn good by all estimations.

[cprise]

12. Subject field must not be blank

There is only one way that the environment can have a chance to recover and that is we all change our lifestyles to reduce the load. Now who believes that there is any chance of a widespread change taking place without a major precipitating event?

Seeing as how we have been trying to replace the biosphere with "economic growth", I think the precipitating event you speak of may have to be economic. Even something like Kyoto treaty could be a precursor to a sort of economic war involving sanctions.

Unfortunately there will be no "Apollo" program for energy independence or conservation. Why? Because there hasn't been one initiated during the past 25 years.

It just won't come from the United States, that's all.

NIMBYism is merely a recasting of conservative upper-class planning priorities. The difference is that today the middle class are getting uppity about their BackYard along with the wealthy. Consider this the conservative side of environmentalism.

As for energy independance, I think its an unfortunate meme that most environmentalists have latched onto. Americans LOVE energy dependance because thus far it has translated into a high consumption lifestyle for us, not to mention an excuse to ring the planet with our military bases. But dependance isn't so bad that it trumps the importance of climate change. Political expediancy has left us with advocates who neglect the latter in favor of the former, or at best give us mixed messages. The environment is more important, yet even here the message becomes muddled with patriotic, almost isolationist baloney about independance. Real energy independance would also make other countries independant of the US, hence it is unpopular in Wash. DC. The idea is also closely associated with decentralized energy production (like PVs) implying independance on yet another level... so it is REALLY unpopular in DC. Why has the environmental movement mired itself in the subtext of energy isolation vs empire while arguing for BOTH sides???

On top of this, you have a public and media that aren't willing to discern and prioritize these seperate but related aspects of power generation.

Those who advocate alternative energy from the environmental-interdependance and nationalist-independance standpoints should PICK ONE, clarify their values and overall message and let their policy choices converge. Better communication, with a two-pronged approach.

[phantom power]

8. What do you say, at a funeral?

[IrateCitizen]

10. Good point. (nt)

[phantom power]

6. And so it came to pass

Who among us hasn't hated all of humanity, at one time or another? Who hasn't wanted to smash the radio of one's loud and drunk neighbors while camping out in what we desperately had hoped would be "pristine wilderness"? Who hasn't longed for a time machine to experience life before telemarketers?

Within environmentalists and environmentalism reside both a love for and a hatred of humanity. Because misanthropy at a political level is suicidal, it merits remaining private. But over the years, ordinary Americans have sensed it, the media has magnified it, and during the springtime of the environmental movement, the keenest conservatives saw an opportunity to exploit it. Ayn Rand, for one, saw environmentalists' "ultimate motive hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life."

Two movements were born in reaction to modernity: conservationists rebelled saying we need more nature, and conservatives rebelled and said we need more market.

And so it came to pass. An ideology born from efforts to see man in nature, and nature in man, came to pit nature against man. Conservatives were more than happy to participate in this effort. An ideology focused on the inter-relationship of all things came to be an ideology of things, for conservationists and all Americans.

[cprise]

13. This passage floored me.

As a humanist who has called-out the misanthropic tendencies of others on DU but especially in person, there are also days when I wonder if I can keep my faith in humanity.

But the misanthropy rarely comes from learned, disciplined people IMHO. Mostly you hear it from hipsters carrying on about the "end of the word" and such (the MTV / E! crowd is just as fascinated with apocalypse as the religious right, in their own way).

OTOH, the right wing is steeped in denigration of human nature. To them, its a founding principle.



Tilting the axis here a bit... There are two sides to the coin of materialism: Ecology is on one side, markets on the other.

[phantom power]

14. I sometimes wonder...

if people who wish for the end of the world (or the end of the world as we know it) lack the imagination to visualize what that would actually be like. Or, maybe they don't really consider it a serious possibility. These days, I wish I could stop imagining it.

I suppose those who believe in an eternal afterlife might not consider it in the same light, since anything that happens in this life is literally 0% of whatever is awaiting us in the next life. Being an atheist, that brand of comfort isn't available to me.

[cprise]

18. They could also be bored.

Let apocalypse add some spice to your life!

[phantom power]

19. true, peace and prosperity have been a real yawner.

[IrateCitizen]

16. I have to address your "tilting the axis" comment...

Because this is something I try to make people realize -- that the words ecology and economy are from the same root, eco or ecos, which if my memory serves me correctly is Greek for "from the earth".

There is a very definite link between economy and ecology, yet this link is largely ignored by classical economics. For an economy to be sustainable, it must recognize its link with ecology at all steps of the process.

[cprise]

17. I was thinking along those lines.

...but I did not want to use "economy" and have it evoke "efficiency" in any way.

What worries me about the dynamic you point out, is that on occassions when the link is recognized there is a tendency to imply a custodian relationship with nature within the context of biotech advancement. Hence we are destined to "manage" the biosphere to make it "work".

[Viking12]

20. Eco from Oikos (House or place where one lives)

eco-logy (oikologos) refers to the study of X = the study of the “House” in which we live.

eco-nomy (oikonomos) refers to sytem of rules, laws, customs = "steward of a household"

[IrateCitizen]

21. Thanks for the correction. (nt)

:D

[Viking12]

22. I just wanted to use that graduate Greek course...

...once :)

[phantom power]

15. About that Walter Benjamin quote.

I love it. Reading it raised the hair on my neck. But I gotta say, I looked up the painting he's referring to, and I don't understand how in the hell he got all that from this image:



Maybe I'm just tone-deaf to art. But where is the storm? The vast graveyard, piling higher and higher? How does he tell the angle can no longer close his wings? How does he even know the angel is looking backward?

I'm just a cave-man. I run in fear from your magic "abstract art"

[Blue_Tires]

23. ttt n/t