When I was in college in the 80's everyone was talking about how the student movement was dead.  I think some of them wished it was dead and worked to convince us students that it was.  Maybe Shellenberger et al are just wishing to convince us to stop working for the environment and give up. As Noam Chomsky would say, they are manufacturing consent.

If we environmentalists are so sure we're right, then what's so scary about a few soul searching questions? Where are we, as a movement, when the head of Greenpeace, an organization that regularly chases down whalers with megaphones, calls a civilized report "in your face" and "over the top" ? And the author of "Die Another Day" clearly doesn't understand the history of abolitionism, suffrage, civil rights or even temperence as opposed to modern environmentalism.  Those earlier movements unabashedly drew the strength of their arguements from moral values.  Modern environmentalists and progressives, while certain that they have moral values that are radically different from those of the right, consistently flee from expressing them.  That's a big part of why I and many others voted against Al Gore (for Nader) in 2000. Because he, or his wonks, fled screaming from taking a moral stand on progressive issues.

Despite Martin Kaplan's fulsome objection (in Winners Never Quit) to holding our environmental leaders and strategies accountable for the disastrous outcome on ANWR, I see in the ANWR defeat convincing proof that a major over-haul is desperately needed. Had the Sierra Club and Carl Pope (for instance) resisted the safe path of `environmental niche framing` back in 2003, and instead sought to rally the SC in opposition to the Bush legend of patriotism and homeland-insecurity, today's landscape and tomorrows ANWR could probably look a whole lot different. I really believe this. What Pope DID do in 2003, at the time of pivotal crisis - instead of engaging at the level of our underlying our cultural pathology - was assign his energy and column inches to the problem of soil contamination on US military bases. This to me constituted a total failure of leadership, the latest victim of which is now ANWR. Very sorry you didn't see this coming.  If the defeat in ANWR becomes the referendum on leadership and strategy I think it should, Pope should go, and Kaplan along with him. And as for Kaplan's `tipping point paradigm', it's absurd to suggest that environmentalism is in the middle of an effective long-term campaign. If anything, we are the one's who have been `tipped'.

I am wondering why so many people are afraid/angered by this essay.  What does that say about us if we as a group cannot withstand a little constructive criticism?  Personally I think they are right.  Environmentalism should not be just one issue.  I am tired of being told I care about the owls and the trees and not people.  I care about the environment because I want to have a safe and health place to live for my family, and every other living creature.  Why do people who care about the environment need to be left wing Democrats?  But the way the issues are currently being framed it comes out, as a liberal issue and not an issue the general public will stand behind.  It is time to start reexamining who we are and how we are going to get the job done.  What is that saying "politics makes strange bedfellows"?   It is time to start building coalitions not burning them.  
So my advice, keep an open mind....read the essay for what it is - constructive criticism,  and use it as a tool, not a mission statement, to take environmentalism to the next step.