Jeremy Carl’s Posts

• Developing world governments can't save endangered species

  Market mechanisms are the last best hope for many of the world's most threatened animals. 3

  Posted 4 years, 4 months ago

  In a few days, I will be off for a week of exploring/fact-finding in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. While I normally don't consider my personal travels to be newsworthy, I share this with Gristmill readers because Chhattisgarh is a classic example of why environmental governance in countries like India is so difficult -- and why government statistics about the environment in developing countries can rarely be relied on.

  Chhattisgarh is one of the forgotten parts of India. Despite representing almost 1/10th of India's landmass and containing 22 million people, it might as well be… Read More

• GMOs: A plea for balance

  GMOs have their upsides and downsides; a little balance is in order. 10

  Posted 4 years, 4 months agoIn my previous post, I noted some of the things we've done right as a movement. But as those who read my first two posts know, I think we're doing a lot of things wrong as well.

  For example, lets take GMOs -- I want to build on Andy's excellent post from yesterday.

  GMOs have been been a "Great Satan" of the environmental movement for some time now. And its not the goal of this post to say that GMOs are by any means universally necessary or desireable. But I do want to talk about the… Read More

• More thoughts on environmentalism

  The many things the movement has done well. 22

  Posted 4 years, 4 months agoWell, I'm glad that I was able to start a spirited (and occasionally even polite) discussion with my previous posts on enviroliberalism (here and here).

  However, despite my repeated denials, some posters seemed to think that I was blaming environmentalism for a variety of ills or hostile to the environmental movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just don't think that it is particularly useful or interesting for us to sit here "talking" about how wonderful we all are and how misguided/foolish/evil everyone else is. Nor do I think it is useful to pursue a general… Read More

• The death of enviroliberalism (part 2)

  Environmentalism and liberalism shouldn't be joined at the hip. 61

  Posted 4 years, 5 months ago

  A couple of quick prefatory remarks -- several readers interpreted my earlier posting as an attack on liberalism. That was not my intent at all: While I am not a liberal, as the saying goes, "Some/most of my best friends are liberals." The only goal of the previous posting, and the one that follows, is to suggest the harm that comes from automatically coupling liberalism with environmentalism.

  In my previous post, I discussed our movement's international problems. But back in America, we're not doing much better. When the American environmental movement began, Lake Erie was on fire, the bald… Read More

• The death of enviroliberalism?

  Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. 23

  Posted 4 years, 5 months ago

  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… Read More

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Jeremy Carl’s Recent Comments

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  The Author Responds. . . .

  OK, I appreciate all of the comments--particularly the supportive ones (and the respectful critics)--I'll chime in with a few thoughts of my own here.

  First, I'm not suggesting the environmental movement has been universally wrong (far from it, else I would not be an environmentalist) nor that the Democratic party is bad.  . I'm just starting with a premise, talking to a Grist audience, that I don't need to remind everyone of our successes.  We know what they are.  I'm interesting in fixing the ways we fall short.

  I'm fascinated with the Manichean nature of some of the more hostile postings.  There is more complexity to the world than forces of light vs. forces of darkness.   Just as silly is the notion, that I am a Republican plant or spy or something similar.  All of this Karl Rove and "neo-con" stuff--It's just absurd, and I hope it sounds ridiculous to the majority of Grist readers as it does to me.  

  I've said nothing about my politics in any of my posts other than that they are not liberal and that I am libertarian-leaning (but not a libertarian).  The notion that Karl Rove is getting on a plane to New Delhi to hold secret meetings with me whenever I'm putting a flowerpot out on my windowsill is laughable.

  I approached Grist under no one's initiative but my own and for no other reason than that I wanted to get some ideas out in the public space that I thought were important.  And I thought Grist, which has always seemed more thoughtful to me than a lot of other environmental publications out there, was an ideal place.  And frankly, I also don't need lectures about how immoral or greedy I must be.  My wife, who was an extremely well-paid physician, and I, who have a lot of excellent professional experience and could have chosen to work for a very comfortable salary stateside, decided on our own to come to India and to work essentially for free.

  As for Jeff's posts in response to both of my articles I think we just have a genuine disagreement on principle about many aspects of the society we'd like to see.  I'm fine with having disagreements on principle, but I suspect that, for better or worse, few people would want to embrace the pre-agricultural lifestyles that you have advocated in your postings.

  Odograph, I am thrilled that you brought up Adam Werbach, because he is exactly the sort of person I am talking about.  Breathtakingly arrogant enough to think he was qualified to run the Sierra Club at age 23 and to write "Act Now, Apologize Later." He's followed this up with overheated rhetoric like the paragraph excerpted in your posting.  It's enviroliberalism at its worst.

  To the posters writing Re: Tora Bora, point duly noted and correct with respect to specifics but an utterly irrelevant concerning the underlying point, which is totally valid. And since I've been challenged on the particular point, yes, I have a friend who was heading one of the teams searching for Bin Laden.  His priest gave him last rites before each mission.  So I understand that war is no joke.

  Bart, your post is thoughtful, and your quote from Watson fairly well summarizes my own philosophy, but again, you are making unwarranted assumptions about me and my politics.  Trust me, working at an environmental think tank in India that is run by R.K. Pachauri, who is head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I am most certainly not surrounded by conservative ideologues.  Quite the opposite:  In dealing with the government and NGO sector here, I am surrounded by liberal ideologues, many of whom have influenced the government to pursue policies that have been, in my view, unbelievably destructive and damaging to the Indian people.  

  But I was most interested in Bart's post below:

  "At a certain point, an honest conservative idealist realizes the truth that the (conservative) Italian economist/philosopher Pareto enunciated, that in any political system, power tends to concentrate among the "ruthless and the efficient." When you discover how you are being used, how your ideals are merely window dressing for the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power, how will you react?"  

  Though I believe you had the opposite intention, I'm not sure I could have argued my own point any better.  I've had the opportunity to work with and around a fair number of powerful people and I can assure you that regardless of their professed ideology, they were usually fairly unpleasant human beings whose ideals were mere covers for their own pursuit of "wealth and/or power"

  It seems to me that conservatism (or a strand of it at least) fundamentally understands this which is why it opposes the encroachment of the state on people's pocketbooks, freedoms, and lives whereas liberalism wants to hand more power over to the state, and further concentrate it in the hands of the "ruthless and efficient" whose rule you correctly decry.

  To close, I am pro-wilderness, anti-global warming, for clean water, clean air and sustainable lifestyles.  I also balance these concerns with concerns about human needs that spring directly from spending time in India and other desperately poor developing countries where you learn that much basic development has an environmental cost.  I'm also not a doomsayer who thinks we need to move backwards toward some fictional and idealized age of low-resource-use life. And I'm not comfortable in trusting my environmental future to the dishonest and venal people whom, regardless of professed ideology, run most governments.

  That's why I'm an environmentalist, but not an enviroliberal.
  On Environmentalism and liberalism shouldn't be joined at the hip. posted 4 years, 4 months ago 61 Responses

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  In response to the previous posters

  OK, there's a lot to chew on here, but I will hit the main points.

  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. :-)On Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses