Hi ... my name is Jeremy Carl, and I'll be guest-blogging here for the next couple of weeks.
I'm currently a Visiting Fellow in resource and development economics at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, India. I spent several years in the private sector and then a few more working with various environmental organizations in the states before moving here, where I spend my time researching and writing about various aspects of the enormous environment/development conundrum in India and China. In the fall, I'm leaving India to head off to Stanford to do a doctorate, continuing the work I have begun here.
For now, I'm going to use my bully pulpit to talk a little bit about my frustrations with our movement, where I think we are going wrong, and hopefully, what we can do to get back on the right track. I imagine I may tread on some toes -- but I hope we can have a spirited and respectful discussion.
I think modern American environmentalism commits two deadly sins: First, we are way too focused on domestic problems (thinking only locally and acting only locally). And second, I think environmentalism is far too monolithically liberal, which both hurts us politically and also impedes our ability to come up with good policy solutions. I'll focus on the first problem today and the second in a follow-up tomorrow.
What most interested me about the "Death" debate was how much of it took place within a set of agreed-upon assumptions, both stated and implicit. I'd like to challenge some of those assumptions.
It's not global environmentalism that needs to die -- it's American enviroliberalism We need an environmentalism that is global in outlook, non-partisan, and inclusive, welcoming participants with a wide variety of political views. We need our romantics and visionaries, but our dreamers can't treat the facts as an unwelcome inconvenience.
If American environmentalism ignores the problems of most of the world and the views of more than half the political spectrum, I can promise you it will die, and even those of us who love nature and want to preserve it will not be crying at the wake.
Our lack of global perspective is reflected in the projects undertaken by American environmental groups. Sadly, most concentrate on fundable NIMBAC (not in my backcountry) projects, an ignoring far greater crises abroad that are not as likely to attract funding dollars. I once worked at Environmental Defense, one of America's most prominent green groups, and while we did a lot of important work, international projects were a very small part of our portfolio -- partly, I suspect, because funders weren't all that interested in them.
Here in India, when people stop to think about the environment, they worry about local problems that get short shrift from American environmental NGOs. The main reason I came here to work is that India has environmental (and economic) problems orders of magnitude more serious than those we face in the U.S. My first several months living in Delhi, I coughed almost continuously due to the extreme air pollution, estimated to kill upwards of 10,000 Delhiites each year.
When American green NGOs do turn their attention to countries like India, they often supporting the wrong people. Take Vandana Shiva, India's best-known environmentalist, regularly feted by green groups and universities in the U.S. Shiva has crusaded tirelessly against the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased crop yields and kept millions of Indians from starvation, in the process saving millions of acres of Indian wilderness from the plow. She continually makes reckless accusations and vents against the "capitalist patriarchy." And despite the obvious benefits most Indians believe globalization has brought, she has been a leading anti-globalization activist. She continually argues for "local" solutions, which, while sometimes appropriate, are often far more environmentally destructive than global best practices (such as her advocacy of planting local rice strains that have lower yields and require more water than non-Indian varieties).
As one critic of Shiva's noted, "Maybe those actually raising crops and feeding their families know something about agriculture that Shiva and her fellow activists don't." In the eyes of many Indians, Shiva is a direct contributor to increased poverty. With friends like that, our movement doesn't need enemies.
Shiva, while herself a (wealthy) Indian, typifies all too many American environmentalists' patronizing and romanticized attitudes towards the global poor, who, rest assured, are overwhelmingly eager to leave their "authentic" and "simple" low-technology lives for a world of air conditioners, automobiles, and other resource-consuming conveniences that make life in the West so comfortable.
Comments
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jdhlax Posted 10:09 am
12 Jun 2005
It is NON-HUMANS who have it really bad due to humans, and I've always fought for those I perceived to be in the most need of help. Also, Vanda Shiva is extremely wise and is a hero, and I would choose women like her, Helen Caldicott, and Caroline Casey to run the planet, to the extent that anyone should be doing so. What you fail to recognize or acknowledge is that what people like us are against is any type of human-caused ecoystem destruction, including killing anything we don't eat or creating any pollution, even if doing so benefits some people.
Your priorities are obviously human health concerns, even though humans as a whole are thriving, as evidenced by their gross overpopulation (which, by the way, is the biggest problem in India, and which India totally refuses to acknowledge).
So, how do we linguistically differentiate between us? People like us are not going away, nor are we going to change into the type of environmentalists that you would like us to be. Instead of your constant illegitimate complaints, perhaps we should just realize that we're such different types of environmentalists that we're often on opposite sides of the issues?
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odograph Posted 10:43 am
12 Jun 2005
If I'm here for the windmills, for an increase in automobile mileage standards, or for healthier salmon ... do you really need to who I backed in the '76 Presidential elections?
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Andy Brett Posted 11:55 am
12 Jun 2005
While I agree with odograph that the nice thing, maybe even the best thing, about the web is that you don't need to roll many issues into one unified party line, I think that the difference between jdhlax and Jeremy here is a fundamental one. While I have a clear picture of what both groups stand for, I myself don't really have any suggestions for terms to label each with.
While we are on the subject of definitions, though, (and I'm sorry to bring in a comment from a different thread) a few minutes ago jdhlax said:
"In fact, I advocate a return to a hunter-gatherer lifesytle, as agriculture is not natural and is extremely ecologically destructive."
I mean this with all due respect, and it is out of sheer curiosity that I ask, but what do you mean by "natural?" It's a word that gets thrown around a lot but to me it seems like it can mean very different things to different people. Is anything that human civilization makes or produces "unnatural?"
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Bart Anderson Posted 2:28 pm
12 Jun 2005
The Sierra Club membership
Vandana Shiva, India's best known environmentalist (you quote an anonymous source approvingly that she is a "direct contributor to increased poverty.")
You offer us honeyed words: "We need an environmentalism that is global in outlook, non-partisan, and inclusive, welcoming participants with a wide variety of political views."
And yet in your first post, you make no effort to give an even-handed picture of issues such as the Green Revolution and globalization. You ask your readers to give YOU the benefit of a tolerant outlook, while you deny it to others.
As an example, consider your assessment of the Green Revolution. There are serious questions about how the capital required to participate in the Green Revolution has favored larger farmers and driven smaller farmers off the land. As well, because the Green Revolution varieties require more inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), the Green Revolution may prove to be a suicidal strategy as petroleum becomes much more expensive. Even the father of the Indian Green Revolution, Professor M.S. Swaminathan "is now convinced that the sustainable solution to staving off hunger lies in the new, more gentle formula of 'eco-development'." It is a complex issue, not the slam dunk you claim it to be.
My jaw dropped when I read, "And despite the obvious benefits most Indians believe globalization has brought, [Vandana Shiva] has been a leading anti-globalization activist." As you know, India is an extraordinarily diverse society and to make such a statement is unbelievable! In my very limited understanding, the urban middle classes have been the main beneficiaries of globalization, whereas the masses of rural India have probably suffered from it. In any event, the latest elections drove out the ruling party (the nationalist BJP) and were widely interpreted as a vote against globalization.
I looked on the Web for more of your writings and was pleased to find some that seemed more thoughtful, such as the essays in favor of Indian subways or against power subsidies for Indian farmers. If you are libertarian or pro-corporation, so be it. There are some things we can agree on, and others that we will disagree on.
A first step in a respectful discussion is to identify your point of view, and respect those who have a different one. That means listening to their arguments, and presenting the pros and cons.
As for identifying myself, I am one of those enviroliberals you rail against!
Best wishes, Bart
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loshloshlahoi Posted 3:54 pm
12 Jun 2005
This post has me really questioning if the author is right for Grist. This post is the sort of thing that the Internet is full of, and I can find it in many locations. I'm bored with journaloid robots endlessly repeating the need for liberalism to die, especially when the term is being once again bandied about without any tangible connection to reality.
It seems odd to attack Vandana Shiva without addressing her main point, that the "miracle" solutions offered by IMF/World Bank -backed projects are more focused on short-term benefit for financiers and corporations than long-term benefit for the people of the countries they seek to "help". How can one refute Vandana Shiva without mentioning Monsanto or even quoting a reliable source?
But what is really upsetting about this post is how poorly researched it is. I followed the references cited by the author in an effort to see if there really was some terrible "enviro-liberalist" group or if there were some know-nothing knee-jerkers who were treating contrarian views as an "unwelcome inconvenience"-- upon checking these references, I found I had wasted my time.
The link proving the "enviro-liberalist" cartel was destroying environmentalism actually showed me that the Sierra Club members are 12% Republican, 33% Independent and 44% Democratic. That's actually pretty balanced for an advocacy group-- do you think the Club For Growth or Focus on the Family sweat the fact that their members are mostly Republican?
The link proving the "unwelcome inconvenience" was to a book review discussing health hazard scares like Alar-- yawn. How does this prove that American environmentalists treat facts as enemies, not friends?
The link to illustrate the benighted American enviro-liberal's ignorance to "far greater crises" showed me that the author is fond of the sort of strawman argument that is often used to change the subject in political discussion. Should we ignore global warming, air pollution, species extinction or chemical industry byproduct hazards because millions of children die in developing nations due to preventable public health deficiencies? Moreover, it's quite arguable whether problems with obvious public health solutions are "greater" than the sort of long-term worries environmentalism addresses, or if they are really even related.
In sum, if a Grist editor or moderator is reading, please contact the author and ask that he raise the level of his discourse. Because if this is where Grist is going, I'm sure your readers will start looking for something better.
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Jeremy Carl Posted 11:40 pm
12 Jun 2005
First, the point of my piece is not to attack liberalism. If liberals want to be environmentalists, that's great. I would like everyone to be environmentalists. I don't want environmentalism to die and I don't
necessarily even want liberalism to die, even though I'm certainly not a liberal. What I want is the inextricable, and in my view, illogical, link between environmentalism and liberalism to die. My point (which I will expand on at much greater length in my next post) is that there is nothing that should intrinsically align liberalism on a whole variety of social or economic issues with the environmental movement. Why should't conservatives be for conservation?
A more valid critique was the one differentiating between types of
environmentalists (i.e. human health, water quality, etc. vs. preserving wild spaces.) However, in my case, I actually fall into both camps, though I only wrote about the first in my posting. I've actually served on the board of Wildaid, an excellent wildlife conservation organization and I've been involved with open space and park protection movements as well.
I also very much agree with Andrew's comments concerning what is
"natural". I mean, if you think an organic corn plant, is "natural" then you don't know very much about the history of agriculture. Like virtually all human food crops, corn has been genetically modified thousands of times by humans through crossbreeding to achieve decidedly unnatural but a far more productive food source. That's not defending or attacking current GMO research and implementation, about which intelligent people can reasonably differ it's just stating a fact about the evolution of our food.
Bart raises some interesting points in his post concerning my ignoring the downsides of globalization and the green revolution. It's a somewhat fair point, but I guess I feel like I don't need to do that for a Grist audience.
Environmentalists usually take the lead in discussing the downsides of these phenomena. I assert that in general, they are overwhelmingly positive (And I can certainly guarantee you that if you did an opinion poll in India, both the green revolution and globalization would get very high (though certainly not universal) approval ratings. Bart is also correct in ascertaining that I have pro-market Libertarian tendencies (though I am neither blindly pro-market nor am I Libertarian). I general, I'd like to see environmental quality, which everyone agrees has value, have that value internalized much more into our market systems.
As for the post questioning my research, I am honestly confronted with
the dilemma here--a lot of the sources I would like to cite are just not
going to be considered credible by many Grist readers because they come from conservative or Libertarian sources. Also I don't want readers to think that I agree with an author's viewpoint just because I think he or she has some interesting facts to bring to the discussion, for example, this article discussing Vandana Shiva and this one discussing in more dramatic terms, the liberal biases of environmental activists. In an effort to be credible to an audience that may not share your viewpoint, it sometimes means using less "exciting" sources.
In a broader sense though the comment by Loshloshlahoi who would obviously like me to go elsewhere, is emblematic of the intolerant attitude I am talking about. I care about environmental protection. I'm a Prius-driving, pro-market environmentalist.
Deal with it. :-)
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loshloshlahoi Posted 4:01 am
13 Jun 2005
Can you find real experts that support your points rather than relying on the conservative noise machine? It's hard enough to find science that isn't compromised by funding sources, why waste time reading political material dressed up as academia? You are haemorrhaging credibility for both you and Grist.
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jdhlax Posted 4:56 am
13 Jun 2005
Jeremy: "[T]here is nothing that should intrinsically align liberalism ... with the environmental movement." Maybe you just don't understand us, though I'm not conservative enough to be a liberal. The common link is that we feel that the good of the whole is far more important than the good of certain individuals. Both environmentalism and leftism advocate individual sacrifices in order to protect the environment or the entire society, respectively.
"I'm a ... pro-market environmentalist." This is an oxymoron, because being an environmentalist means giving priorty to the environment, which cannot be done while advocating for unnecessary consumption, which is one of the two roots of environmental problems (the other is overpopulation).
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jdhlax Posted 4:57 am
13 Jun 2005
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bhurley Posted 5:19 am
13 Jun 2005
I don't think being "pro-market" in this sense equates to advocating unnecessary consumption. Rather, I think Jeremy is saying that he's for putting market forces to use in protecting the environment. For example, controlling air pollution through regulation alone means that industries will reduce their emissions only to the extent required by law. But when you combine emissions limits with market-based incentives, industries now have a financially justifiable reason to reduce their emissions even further....theoretically all the way to zero. Regulations almost inevitably get watered down for political reasons, so we end up with emissions limits that aren't really protective of the environment. If you use market forces to complement regulation, you may be able to prevent a lot more pollution (or wildlife habitat destruction, or whatever you're concerned about) than by regulation alone.
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Andy Brett Posted 9:27 am
13 Jun 2005
Let's say you consider yourself an enviroliberal who really doesn't like what Jeremy has to say, and you don't think anything coming out of his mouth or the AEI's mouth is worth the paper (disk space?) it's written on. I would say "keep your friends close and your enemies closer." If your way of thinking is truly correct, there's no chance that your correct views will be changed by reading AEI or people who cite it, provided that your views really are the correct ones. If nothing else, it will help you to combat the arguments of the "other side."
I really don't like that approach myself though. I really, really, really dislike the whole two-party, liberal vs. conservative dichotomy. There are so many issues that are important, and if you find yourself with views of one party on some things, but the other party on the other, what is there to do? Like I said before, I think that the Internet, and blogs in particular, are the way to really hash out what the truth is on a whole range of issues, not to divide everything into black and white. One of the most powerful features of blogs is the fact that everything gets immediately cited, as we've already noted in this discussion. As a result, lots of "think tanks" get cited, and I find myself following a lot of those links. I usually find myself doing a google search to find out whether the think tank whose paper I just read is considered "liberal" or "conservative" out of sheer curiosity. Part of that may be ignorance; part of it may be that I agree with Jeremy's other post that it doesn't make sense to automatically wed environmentalism (or any other issue) to American "liberalism," but rather to just take arguments for what they are and not put them in either camp.
That's enough of the "meta" stuff. More soon in a separate comment on why I agree with Jeremy on a number of his points.
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loshloshlahoi Posted 11:23 am
13 Jun 2005
I'm not sure why my posts have been used as a foil to this silly fact-free anti-enviro-liberalism meta-argument. I have just been complaining about the lack of factual or reliable information in this series of posts-- I don't see how I've said anything that's particularly "liberal" in the Rush Limbaugh sense that it seems to be used on this thread. To say the AEI sucks is not necessarily "liberal" or dichotomatic-- it could just be that you think AEI's "experts" are hacks who abuse science and statistics to arrive at the conclusions they believe or are paid to believe.
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eagleeye Posted 11:55 am
13 Jun 2005
Please join in discussion on cutting edge conservation
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Andy Brett Posted 1:21 pm
13 Jun 2005
I think that the big reason that I agree with Jeremy boils down to the fact that human health concerns are a priority (as jdhlax points out) for me as well. I would disagree that "humans are thriving" when so many still live in poverty.
We are getting close to being out of the woods as far as that goes, and I'm hopeful that we will be there in my lifetime. But for the time being, I think that some concerns have to take a back seat. It's not reasonable to expect someone who is still living the nasty, brutish, and short life and who is breaking his back to eke out a subsistence lifestyle to really care about, say, global warming or the impacts he is having on the environment. If wildlife are going to die and the land be marred in order to keep people alive, I don't think there's really a choice there. I am a vegetarian myself, and someone once asked me the hypothetical question of whether I would eat meat temporarily if my life depended on it. I think the answer here is clear as well.
I also love wildlife and wilderness areas. But protecting them can't come at a cost of human life. In addition, when it comes to protecting and preserving those things, there's more than one way to go about it.
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callisto Posted 2:35 pm
13 Jun 2005
Second caring about global warming (a meta issue if you will) does not mean that one does not care about public health issues.
As a nurse I care deeply about clean water and food for people - does that mean that I want to turn a blind eye to carbon emissions in the meantime? No! We can, and must, multi task with the issues out there. Seeing that policy makers are grown-ups, not 3 year olds, I think they can handle it.
It's really simple math - we, those who live on the Earth, cannot continue to consume the way that we do. Our goal should not be to have every human on this planet consume the resources that a U.S. citizen currently does. Instead we need to drastically reduce the resources used by those in industrial nations and strive to have a more equitable distribution across both developed and developing nations.
Look - we need to think farther ahead than just our generation. I want a beautiful house in the middle of pristine wilderness but then it screws it up for everyone after me. Why not save the pristine wilderness so that countless people (not to mention animals, plants, etc) can enjoy it and thrive in it for generations to come?
Environmentalism has both local and global components. I think it makes more sense for me to advocate on behalf of salmon in Washington, for example, than someone in India and I think someone in India would have a better understanding of their own local environmental concerns and how to address them. But expecting U.S. environmentalists to take on the particular problems of every other country is hubristic and unworkable. The truly international and global environmental concerns are necessarily large and long-ranging, such as global warming, because they are the problems we all share.
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jdhlax Posted 2:43 pm
13 Jun 2005
By commenting that you think that humans are not thriving, it's obvious why you think that the health concerns of a grossly overpopulated species is more important than protecting wilderness and wildlife: you are anthropocentric and don't respect other forms of life. Protecting wildlife and wilderness, which are greatly diminishing, can't come at the cost of individual lives of a species that is grossly overpopulated? Anthropocentrism is highly illogical.
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Andy Brett Posted 10:05 pm
13 Jun 2005
"Global warming affects us all." Absolutely. I'm not saying that I or anybody else who lives in the developed world should ignore global warming. We must multitask, as you nicely put it. I also agree that some of the people who are most impacted by global warming are those who are living subsistence lifestyles. But I think that the fact that there are people who are living subsistence lifestyles in the first place is problematic, with or without the added impetus of the perils they face because of global warming.
This leads into the next issue I want to clarify. While I think it's problematic that some people are still living subsistence lifestyles, just because I want nobody on earth to have to live week to week doesn't necessarily mean that I want us all to consume like Americans. Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't equate those two situations. I agree that it is simple math; when we say that the world cannot all consume as much as Americans, it's a literal cannot. The reason I don't equate the two situations is that I think there's a growing difference between consumption in the GDP sense of the word and consumption in the natural resources sense (which I tried to elaborate on here, but looking back I don't think I did as well as I would have liked).
Living a sustenance lifestyle is fine until you get a bad crop cycle. Maybe it would be a better, more nuanced way to put it if I said that I think we need to get everyone in the world up to a certain level of certainty that they are most likely to die of "natural causes" and not disease or malnutrition before we can ask them to care about issues like global warming.
"We need to look farther ahead than just our generation." Again, absolutely. My response here is similar to what I said in the first paragraph. I think that the best way to do this is to ensure that everyone has an adequate standard of living that they be assured that they will live out their own lives and then they can be asked to care about future generations.
"Environmentalism has both local and global components." Very true. I don't think anyone disagrees that there is plenty of work to be done. I think it's a personal choice as to what area you choose to focus on. After all, you've got to do what you love.
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joankark Posted 11:22 am
14 Jun 2005
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jdhlax Posted 5:28 pm
14 Jun 2005
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EZEnos Posted 6:18 am
15 Jun 2005
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Andy Brett Posted 1:31 pm
15 Jun 2005
Not bad, for an opening act.
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acrossthepond Posted 10:38 pm
15 Jun 2005
On both sides of the Atlantic, the environmental movement is broad and diverse, ranging from well-funded, corporate-suit organisations to anarchical local groups. We should celebrate and encourage our diversity - otherwise, we fall into the trap laid by our opponents, that we are the "anti-" camp (anti-progress, anti-development, anti-poor, anti-freedom, anti-etc.).
Jeremy's call to be more serious about thinking globally is certainly welcome. At the same time, we shouldn't lose sight of acting locally. This is especially true in the United States, which is for better or worse, the center of the world these days. The the "American" lifestyle is the role model for so many people in countries seeking to develop and consume.
Finally, a note on Dr. Shiva. While a reflection on how other Indian environmentalists see her is certainly useful, I certainly think her work against "biopiracy" - specifically first world patenting of traditional plants and medicines - is important. For example, she worked with European campaigners to overturn an EU patent for a product from the Indian tree Neem (Grist covered the original case but didn't catch the second, appeal victory). Of course, the US company still holds its US patent.
This case reminds us that the environmental "movement" (if that's still a good word for all of us) still needs people who fight the efforts to patent traditional products, drain and pave wetlands, and countless other thoughtless actions.
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CowsEatGrass Posted 9:35 am
16 Jun 2005
What will we make clothes out of? How about paper?
In fact how would we walk around without killing bugs underfoot? We can't breath without killing microorganisms with the heat of our breath.
Would you like us to stop killing viral infections? Cancer cells?
What about killing out of Mercy?
The point here is that you can't make universal statements that stand up in all cases. As soon as you try to apply them to the actual messiness we experience, they fall apart.
This is why extremism in any form cannot be sucessful--life is not universally extreme. In fact it is mostly moderate if you take the time to pay attention. Try it.
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