Christina Larson -- who occasionally contributes to this very blog -- has an important piece in Washington Monthly called "The Emerging Environmental Majority." While it's a great article and an important contribution to the discussion about where environmentalism's heading, I think a couple of crucial points are, at the very least, tenuous, and deserve further defense or elucidation.
Larson tells, in condensed form, the history of the environmental movement. It began in the 19th century as conservationism -- an effort to protect open land and wilderness, mainly backed by gentlemen sportsmen and hunters. Through ebbs and flows, it retained that basic character up through the early 1960s, when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring crystallized a new urban environmentalism, concerned with the toxic effects of industrialization on human health and urban air and water.
For a brief, shining moment in the '70s, these two strains of environmental consciousness united in a broad social movement and won a series of landmark victories. Those victories gave birth to the professional environmental class, a set of groups that set up camp in D.C. to ride herd on the feds to enforce the new laws. A new distance between the "movement" and the ruralites who gave it birth left it highly vulnerable.
Which brings us to my first point of contention. Larson puts this first:
But with the emergence of the animal-rights movement, a growing number of urban and suburban Americans, with little experience of farms or slaughterhouses, came to view hunting as backward or barbaric. Local chapters of some green groups, including the Sierra Club, campaigned to prevent or curtail state hunting seasons. This put greens and hunters directly at odds.
And this second:
The seeds of the modern anti-environmental backlash were sown in the late 1970s, when conservative leaders came to see environmentalism, together with Nader's consumer-safety movement, as threats to commercial enterprise. ...
... Former logging-industry consultant Ron Arnold and his business partner Alan Gottlieb realized that "industry can't stand alone," as Arnold told journalist David Helvarg. "It needs a grassroots movement to fight for its goals." Thus was born the "wise-use" movement, a loose network of new organizations with names like People for the West! formed to undercut support for environmental crusades. Vilifying greens proved easier than vilifying green policies, which the public largely supported. In lectures, books, and media appearances, wise-use advocates hammered home the image of environmentalists as out-of-touch, tree-hugging, people-hating, dope-smoking elitists. In one 1984 presentation to chemical manufacturers, Arnold advised, "I would strongly suggest that you do everything possible to associate the word anti-pesticide with the word marijuana."
Perhaps it's not a huge point, but my own feeling is that the first trend ( urban and suburban lefties turning on conservationists and enacting restrictions on hunting) is far less significant than the latter (a coordinated effort by industry to demonize environmentalism). Citing them in the order Larson does implies the first caused or, more charitably, enabled the latter. But the latter was inevitable; it smacks of blaming the victim to say otherwise.
The second point on which I'm somewhat skeptical is this: Larson makes the case that the two strands of environmentalism are in the process of reuniting after decades of hostility. She bases this on their two common enemies.
The first is the disappearance of open land in the West, a combination of drill-friendly Bush policy and rampant development. Now, it's true that enviros and the hook-and-bullet crowd are making common cause on this issue, but it's not clear to me whether they're working together, forming coalitions, or just working on the same issues (side by side, as it were). This may be a case of moving in the same direction for a while rather than uniting in any substantive sense.
The second is global warming, which one quoted activist says will be "the glue that brings everyone together."
Maybe. But it all rides on this crucial point, from the final 'graph:
Conservatives may try to counter the emergence of this new environmental majority with greener rhetoric or by scaling back on favors to extractive industries. But it is hard to fathom how today's conservative elected officials could bring themselves to champion aggressive regulations on carbon emissions and other ambitious measures to control global warming, which would require a direct hit on the very industries that hold up the roof of the current Republican Party.
But what's required of conservatives to retain the loyalty of those in its coalition concerned about global warming is not "aggressive regulations on carbon emissions." What's required is just that they do something about global warming. Could they do something about it without losing the industries that "hold up the roof"?
Why yes, they could. They could shovel subsidies at biofuels, which will enrich their huge agribusiness and oil company friends (who else will grow the corn and sell the ethanol?). They could shovel subsidies at "clean coal," thus enriching the coal industry. They could shovel subsidies at nuclear power.
Today's conservative elected officials have proven virtuosos at channeling public concern into "solutions" that mainly serve to enrich their friends (see: Medicare drug benefit).
That's the game they play, and they've gotten away with it over and over again. I don't see any reason they couldn't do it again. Indeed, they're doing it as we speak. Environmentalists are still getting demonized as economy-destroyers (and terrorists). Sportsmen and hunters are still being pandered to with fake solutions.
Maybe this time, on this issue, they'll fall on their faces. But I'm not as sanguine as Larson.
Calling all radicals: Unite for Kerry-Boxer
Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair
Comments
View as Flat
Stentor Posted 12:43 pm
18 Apr 2006
But isn't saying that sportsmen were duped by industry into working against their own interests also blaming the victim (and insulting to boot)? I don't agree with the way she singles out the animal rights movement as the sole cause, but I do agree that one important cause of the backlash was that mainstream environmentalism took on an elitist, authoritarian, nature-fetishizing aspect. This both alienated its natural grassroots among sportsmen and people of color, and was substantively wrong. Yes, the Wise Use ideology unfairly demonized environmentalists -- but there was also a grain of truth to it. Just as we're trying to do with the environmental justice community, environmentalists need to take to heart sportsmen's concerns as well as asking them to take up our agenda.
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mtuckr Posted 3:44 pm
18 Apr 2006
http://posthastetaste.com/archives/128#comments
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amazingdrx Posted 10:04 pm
18 Apr 2006
"The billionaire Koch brothers, overseers of numerous oil refineries and chemical companies, founded the Cato Institute and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which support privatizing federal lands"
Thanks for highlighting this article Dave.
The effect of animal rights advocacy in breaking up the coalition between hunting and fishing groups and environmentalists against corporate exploitation of public lands, is most illuminating.
Compare a corporate farm feedlot meat or dairy "farm" or egg factory to even a psychopath-disguised-as-sportsman like Cheney killing 75 quail in one outing.
A few bad actors like "wolf killer" Cheney do not even compare to the everyday degradation of routine corporate agriculture that the vast majority depend upon for food.
I guess it's better to let the sportsmen and women themselves police these kinds of idiots than diss the whole hunting and fishing community.
That's how I handled my last run in with some teens killing for the sheer joy of sadism near my favorite bike/ski trail. Shame them from the sportsman point of view, that works.
This article is a REAL eye opener on the coaltion of diverse interests to protect wilderness.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Tom Philpott Posted 3:04 am
19 Apr 2006
In this excellent post, you ask "who else [besides agribiz and big oil] will grow the corn and sell the ethanol?"
It's important to remember that agribiz does very little actual growing. There's a passage in Richard Manning's Against the Grain that puts it well:
A farm scholar once asked an abribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.
As a farmer, that passage never fails to elicit an audible gulp from me. Agriculture is too full of risk and uncertainty for serious corporate interest. Corporations are willing to buy low and sell high, however.
The direct-payment subsidy system that's in place is insidious precisely because the payouts don't go to ADM, Cargill, et al. They go straight to farmers, encouraging overproduction and lowering the price of commodities. Thus opponents of subsidies, rather than railing against ADM, find themselves working against "the family farm."
So, my "small point" is that you should have said "who else will process the corn and sell the ethanol."
Cheers,
Tom
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David Roberts Posted 3:16 am
19 Apr 2006
www.grist.org
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mkray Posted 6:46 am
19 Apr 2006
I call myself an environmentalist and don't think animals have rights the ways humans do. But there is no shame either in wanting animals treated respectfully, with compassion and dignity. No one should feel like they have to leave their heart at the door to have a place at the discussion table. (I also notice that on other topics like factory farming where animals are treated horrifically, the enviromental damage is also pretty horrific- animal rights and environmental protection often go together.)
It is very easy for hunters to wear the "conservaion" cloak when what they really want protecting are their own self interests and not the common good- their permission to kill and not wildlife and habitat for its own sake.
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caniscandida Posted 8:15 am
19 Apr 2006
Consider the Disney classic movie "Bambi," one of the most environmentally pernicious works of art of all time. Is there any greater reason why, in the latter half of the 20th century, in the wolfless Northeast, the white-tailed deer has become a trash species, ruining healthy forests and destroying the habitat of birds? Now, the sentimentality of Bambi-lovers is hardly the same as a thoughtful animal-rights ethics. Still, one sees how they might be confused. Wherever such a simple anti-hunter animosity comes from, it often creates environmental problems.
By the same token, where are those Northeastern wolves? Here too, discrimination is in order. There are hunters and there are hunters. The anti-predator prejudice, which you refer to, runs strong in Europeans and their American descendants. An environmentalist does not have to be a supporter of animal rights to understand that the wholesale slaughter of great American predators -- wolves in the first place, but also grizzlies, cougars, eagles, lynxes, and a few others -- was not at all a good thing.
As both a supporter of animal rights and an environmentalist, I have not too much of a problem with cultivating the friendship of those serious hunters who kill their couple of deer or elk each season, and are satisfied. We can work well enough with their interest in "conservation." On the other hand, the Cheney-ish, Scalia-ish "sportsmen" who like to murder birds, are beyond consideration.
Two final complications: First, why is it so hard to get hunters to stop using lead shot? Lead shot left in unretrieved carcasses can be lethal to scavengers, such as the endangered California condor. And secondly, it is, needless to say, very very difficult to fight the influence of the NRA, who have infiltrated all the hunters' organizations, setting them in resolute unfriendliness toward environmentalist advances. And why? To make sure that the hunters will not be seduced by us liberals from voting as a bloc for the GOP?
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bookerly Posted 8:36 am
19 Apr 2006
Great post. There are two issues, one is the split between "sportsmen/women" and environmentalists, and the other is the conservative response to the whole thing.
One reason for the split may be due to a fundamentally different view of relations between humans and nature. Many (NOT ALL!) hunters still come from the view of nature as something they need to conquer and subdue (this includes those who want to kill all predators). They tend to see humans and nature as enemies, and we must triumph over and control nature.
The environmental movement (parts of it anyway) has begun to tend towards the view of humans as part of nature, seeing a need to live in harmoney with other species, and see ourselves as one part of the grand mosaic that is nature.
These two views clash, and not in a minor way. It is not clear to me that they can ever resolve and unite (but they hopefully can find common ground from time to time) into anything that might be called a movement.
The other issue is the ability of the existing conservative movement to distract and confuse issues. I think this is a significant problem, and we need to focus more attention on it (I have no solutions, look forward to other people's ideas).
Soon we will see green gasoline and green SUV's and green suburbs (with 40,000 square foot green mansions) and green nuclear weapons as well....
It may all be seen by them as a matter of marketing, not changing anything..
Patrick
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birdboy Posted 10:57 am
19 Apr 2006
I totally agree about the different views of our relationship with Nature- being a part of the whole, existing in harmony VS being at war with 'bad animals' and 'bad weather'. I think most hunters understand the balance required in Nature- predators and prey (not so sure about 'sportsmen'). The 'war' perspective is much more pervasive- I suspect that a majority of our population sees humanity fighting against Nature instead of working with Her.
I blame the contracting out of all responsibility to corporations and industry. We don't grow our own food, so we're not responsible for how it's done. We don't make our own clothes or generate our own energy, so it's someone else's job to do it right. But if we dare to tell them how to do it, they threaten us with higher prices, reduced supply, and fewer jobs. So now it is the consumer's fault that animals and the Earth suffer. Most Americans have NO relationship with Nature- only with their hired hands. When responsibility is diffused, the worst things happen, and nothing changes.
Only solution I see is to get small and localize. When communities provide most of what they need for themselves, when the impact of how we treat the Earth is felt locally, personally, then people will have working, positive relationships with Nature.
a liberal in redsville
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amazingdrx Posted 8:42 pm
19 Apr 2006
National Rifle manufacturer's Asociation.
It's all about corporatism, not about our rights. The bribes flow freely to keep those cheap saturday night specials churning off the assembley lines, most of those factory jobs moving to China.
Around our neck of the woods, in northern Wisconsin, all the small predators are on the rise. That makes the bird populations go on a waning cycle, but then it will reverse again.
Wolves, bear, and cougars even are recovering in a big way. Eagles can be seen 10 to a deer carcass along the highways. A huge deer population explosion from human feeding and clear cutting is not being controlled by current gunting or the increase in the numbers of predators.
Hunting seasons need to be expanded and special hunts in suburban areas with lots of deer feeding and where deer feed heavily on fatm crops are needed. I think commercial deer hunting ought to be considered.
Now that fur prices have dropped, the small predators and beaver and muskrat populations are too high. To control over feeding by beavers homeowners here have to pay trappers a premium.
Life out of balance.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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cfrkeepr Posted 10:53 pm
19 Apr 2006
Bouty Baldridge
Wilmington, NC
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