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  Who You Calling Dead, White Man?

  I found this pair of missives curious.  Blain and Gelobter both seem to conflate the fact that first-generation environmental activism copied from the civil rights movement with the normative claim that people like Shellenberger or Nordhaus are somehow morally or factually misguided in their pronouncements on the "death" of that form of activism.  

  If anything, what the two prove in their stories about the EJ community is how fractured the "environmental movement" in America truly is.  I think that story is valid and one that more environmental progressives should be hearing these days.  When 70% of Americans respond in polling that they are "environmentalists"--given how politically divided the country is--that should tell us something: the term has many different meanings to many different constituencies.

  But, politically, the EJ community has very little claim to suburbia's environmental willingness to pay, if you could call it that.  Every community (whether it is an issue community or a geographic one) is looking to maximize its own environmental welfare.  Suburbia's environmental welfare is very different from that of poorer communities.  And it has long been justified by use of the patron saints of preservation and wilderness like Muir--as Rod Nash argued almost 40 years ago.  Poorer communities are often quite a bit less well-off and are seeking much more basic amenities like pollution reduction, public health enforcement, etc.  What these two communities seek from government, though, is just not the same thing.

  So when activists like Blain & Gelobter become indignant toward the Nordhaus and Shellenberger types, all I can think is that the balkanization among voters on the "left" in this country is complete.    On An environmental-justice advocate insists he's not dead yet posted 4 years, 5 months ago 7 Responses