Grist Feed: Death Of Environmentalism

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Why race and class matter to the environmental movement

Michel Gelobter, et al — Fri, 27 May 2005 17:49:48 -0700

by Michel Gelobter, et al
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

This piece is excerpted from the essay "The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering Transformational Politics in the 21st Century." The full essay can be found here.

Elvis was a hero to most,
but he never meant shit to me ...
-- Public Enemy, 1989

Activists of color may
not want to stand on
John Muir's shoulders.

Environmentalism in the United States has always been as diverse as our country itself. In the 19th century, for example, African-American abolitionists fought slavery as well as the use of arsenic in tobacco fields. Later, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. were only two of thousands of people of color whose movements for justice set the template for Earth Day. These leaders are part of our soul as environmentalists. The rebirth of the movement depends on being clear about that lineage.

The authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" begin by invoking their ancestors. "Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us," they write. They cite John Muir and David Brower -- and Martin Luther King Jr., too. They quote from interviews they did with 25 senior executives at mainstream environmental groups. History seems duly respected. But we need to stop the music here and make two big points before we leave the subject of ancestry.

First, many environmentalists would rather not stand on the shoulders of certain early conservation heroes. Muir developed his conservation ethic during the Civil War and the expropriation of Native American lands, the two great racial struggles of the 19th century. He pretty much ignored both of them, according to Carl Anthony, a historian and urban planner. After dodging the Civil War draft by going to Canada, Muir walked the occupied lands of the West and the South and saw nothing more sinister than "forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden." Before we sanctify Muir, we need to understand how his racial attitudes affected his commitments to conservation. If the environmental movement is ever going to revive, it must first confront the many ways in which the U.S. has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites.

John Muir's racism is about more than just history. It's about building a new frame for a bigger environmental movement. There are better shoulders for us to stand on. In 1849, Henry Thoreau explained that he was refusing to pay taxes to a government "which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate-house." In 1914, Louis Marshall made the critical argument that saved the Adirondack wilderness, despite the fact that he was a Jew and many of his neighbors in the North Country were rabid anti-Semites. In the 1930s, Marshall's son Robert founded the modern wilderness protection movement. Around the same time, Zora Neale Hurston documented multiethnic America in her many books about people and nature. In the 1960s, Henry Dumas wrote of the healing role of nature in even the most viciously segregated rural areas of the South.

"The Death of Environmentalism" refers often to America's "core values" and cites surveys that show how those values have changed in the last decade. But when people talk about their core values, their words don't always match their meaning. For much of American history, the values of "freedom" and "progress" have been code words for a system that profits by oppressing the poor and communities of color. U.S. rhetoric is taking this charade to new heights globally while masking an agenda that actually celebrates authoritarian control and the decay of civic life.

Denying the racial content of the "values" debate in the U.S. today only deepens the predicament of environmentalism. The work of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson explores how the idea of freedom has been intertwined with the practice of slavery. From ancient Greece to the United States of 1776, he says, cultures that have theorized and celebrated "freedom" have simultaneously excluded huge swaths of their populations from any shred of it. At the same time, nations through history that profess to love "freedom" have been relentless in promoting heartless geopolitical agendas outside their borders.

Freedom is an important value, and its meaning is an important debate. Denying the links between "freedom" and oppression makes it harder for progressives to articulate a broader vision. The death of this denial is liberating because it links us more fully to our rough and glorious pasts. It also points the way to new choices and a more hopeful future.

Giving a nod to your ancestors when you start talking is a good oratorical trick. It establishes that your ancestors are dead, so you're in charge now. But the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" completely ignore a second set of ancestors who need to be included in our deliberations. We're talking about the people who brought you the civil-rights movement.

Modern environmentalism was, after all, the Elvis of '60s activism. It was a radical and innovative departure from the conservation movement that preceded it. And in almost every way, the politics and innovations of the early environmental movement derived directly from the same era's fight for black power and racial justice.

Norm Collins, the Ford Foundation program officer who first funded the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, and others, wrote in his decision memos that what was needed was "an NAACP for the environment." National legislative victories for the environment depended heavily on a rejiggering of states' rights. This strategy copied one that had already been used successfully by the civil-rights movement. A critical factor in the passage of the Clean Air Act, for example, was to unify and to supersede the patchwork of existing air-quality standards that states had promulgated on their own. And mass mobilizations for the environment depend heavily on nonviolent civil disobedience as popularized by African-American advocates in the 1960s.

Just as the courts were fertile ground for black liberation, environmental organizations sought standing for nature and human health in ways that deeply challenged business as usual. As historian Roderick Nash pointed out in The Rights of Nature, environmental activists attempted to extend the 1960s legal focus on the rights of oppressed individuals to nature and to people facing environmental risks. Boycotts, consumer campaigns, and labor-environment alliances -- where would these be without the models established by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers?

The environmental-justice movement emerged in the 1980s as a way to revitalize the grassroots activism started by the civil-rights movement. It also offered a home for activists who weren't comfortable separating their concern over the state of the planet from their concerns about social justice. Twenty years later, the mainstream environmental movement has been unable to racially integrate its senior staff, not because of overt discrimination but because of differences in vision. Many environmentalists of color admire the mainstream movement's goals, but they also know firsthand that social justice is routinely ignored in the mainstream movement's decision making.

Despite its limitations, environmentalism as we know it today wasn't just the marriage of liberalism and conservation. It was committed activists, engaged in struggle and riffing on every tool they could see around them. Like Elvis, the environmental movement had soul -- and soul is one thing you can't kill.

The Soul of Environmentalism

An Introduction to the "Soul" of Movements

Someday I hope you get the chance,
To live like you were dyin'
-- Tim McGraw, 2004

In 1991, Dana Gioia, the poet who now heads the National Endowment for the Arts, published a magazine article proclaiming the death of poetry. He looked at a multitude of small-circulation 'zines and academic reviews that published nothing but verse and said, "The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage." A few months later, another writer argued that poetry had become irrelevant and attacked "preening" work by an anonymous, but ethnically specified, "Hawaiian of Japanese ancestry."

Poetry as a movement was afloat, vital, and most definitely not dead. Immigration and ethnicity aside, Rap was Def by 1991. Today, the live club performance series "Def Poetry Jam" attracts television viewers "in the upper millions," according to co-founder Bruce George. Def means "death" in the lingo of the Rap genre, and its blossoming was just one symptom of the life that words in rhyme have to this day.

We thought of "Def Poetry" while reading "The Death of Environmentalism," an essay released by two activist communications consultants last fall. The furious debate that erupted around that essay is a sign that the environmental movement is still alive and kicking. And just as in the debate over poetry, we should thank the medical examiners for their premature autopsies. Their first incisions have jolted the still body to new life. The lively corpse is now reacting thoughtfully and with vigor.

We have discussed "The Death of Environmentalism" with environmental justice and sustainability activists, leaders from the reproductive and gay rights movements, members of the faith community, labor organizers, philanthropists, business executives, and people in the military. Like us, they have saluted the essay for jump-starting a debate over our shared strategic challenges. Leaders of the environmental justice movement welcome the essay because it echoes concerns they've been working on for well over two decades.

We want to be sure that the crux of the critique stays at the fore and moves forward. We want to be sure that environmentalism's true strengths, as embodied in Environmental Justice, Sustainability, and a number of other movements, increase to scale. We are also writing to bring the broader perspectives we've encountered into the debate. We have a few myths to bust about contemporary activism and a few points to add about the environmental movement's true heritage.

In the '90s, the declaration that "poetry is dead" was an attempt to deny and to marginalize a rich array of new anti-establishment forms of poetry. Back then, the writers ignored rap, performance art, and poetry slams. The debate over "The Death of Environmentalism" feels like a similar exercise in its omissions.

This reaction follows from a point Wendell Berry made in a 1970 essay titled "The Hidden Wound": "The crucial difference, I think, between our society and others that have been divided, by class if not by race, is that in our self-protective silence up to now about the whole problem, we have not developed the language by which to recognize the extent or the implications of the division, and we have not developed either the language or the necessary social forms by which to recognize across the division our common interest and our common humanity."

Environmentalism and other progressive movements in the United States are not dead, but they are crippled by denial. Right-wing extremists are not any closer to the truth than progressives, but their political agenda thrives to the extent racial and class inequality is denied. "The Death of Environmentalism" does an admirable job of starting a debate over how environmental organizations should change their strategies. But what we really need is a death of denial.

Environmentalism, like poetry, has a soul deeper and more eternal than the one described by its examiners. It's a soul tied deeply to human rights and social justice, and this tie has been nurtured by the Environmental Justice and Sustainability movements for the past 20 years. We are writing to explore this soul, to break the unwritten gag rule about race and class, and to examine the intermingled roots of social change movements. These roots, these rules, and this soul together hold the key to environmentalism's new life.

I got two white horses following me,
waiting on my burying ground
-- Blind Lemon Jefferson, 1927

As we move through George W. Bush's second term, it might seem as though progressive and liberal ideas are almost wholly out of fashion. War and security dominated the Democratic Party's agenda in 2004, even as it tried to win the election on health care and the economy. Right after the election, the Bush Administration freed publicly funded clinics from the obligation to provide abortion services, and no one seemed to pay much attention.

It is fashionable to explain Bush's strength by saying that "frames trump facts." George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, has gained some notoriety by pointing out that ideas have physical, cultural, and political manifestations, called "frames," that rarely depend on the facts. You can't necessarily change someone's frame of reference simply by stating a new one, even if your frame wins on the facts.

Frames can trump facts, but UC Berkeley sociologist Tom Medvetz points out that Lakoff's cognitive science is limited to analyzing what goes on in people's brains. What's happening to environmentalism has a lot to do also with history and with institutions, and a singular focus on framing can also be a form of denial.

Frames emerge from history, and they are connected with institutions. To win, we must take on all of it -- the frames, the history, and the institutions. We must have the courage to name what is right and plot a course that connects to everyday lives and transforms them. If we do this, we can re-frame our movements in ways that astonish, delight, and liberate. The debate surrounding "The Death of Environmentalism" is really an opening to re-examine modern political strategy in general, and environmentalism in particular. In the next few pages, we're going to widen that opening and blaze a trail through it.

Why Race and Class Matter to the Environmental Movement

El costo de la vida sube otra vez. El peso que baja ya ni se ve,
Y las habichuelas, no se pueden comer, ni una libra de arroz, ni una cuarta de café.
A nadie le importa que piensa usted. Será porque aquí
No hablamos ingles
-- Juan Luis Guerra, 1996

Environmentalism in the United States has always been as diverse as our country itself. In the 19th century, for example, African American abolitionists fought slavery as well as the use of arsenic in tobacco fields. Later, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr., were only two of thousands of people of color whose movements for justice set the template for Earth Day. These leaders are part of our soul as environmentalists. The rebirth of the movement depends on being clear about that lineage.

The authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" begin by invoking their ancestors. "Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us," they write. They cite John Muir and David Brower -- and Martin Luther King, too. They quote from interviews they did with 25 senior executives at mainstream environmental groups. History seems duly respected. But we need to stop the music here and make two big points before we leave the subject of ancestry.

First, many environmentalists would rather not stand on the shoulders of certain early conservation heroes. Muir developed his conservation ethic during the Civil War and the expropriation of Native American lands, the two great racial struggles of the 19th century. He pretty much ignored both of them, according to Carl Anthony, an historian and urban planner. After dodging the Civil War draft by going to Canada, Muir walked the occupied lands of the West and the South and saw nothing more sinister than "forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden." Before we sanctify Muir, we need to understand how his racial attitudes affected his commitments to conservation. If the environmental movement is ever going to revive, it must first confront the many ways in which the U.S. has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites.

"The Death of Environmentalism" refers often to America's "core values" and cites surveys that show how those values have changed in the last decade. But when people talk about their core values their words don't always match their meaning. For much of American history, the values of "freedom" and "progress" have been code words for a system that profits by oppressing the poor and communities of color. U.S. rhetoric is taking this charade to new heights globally while masking an agenda that actually celebrates authoritarian control and the decay of civic life.

Denying the racial content of the "values" debate in the U.S. today only deepens the predicament of environmentalism. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson reminds us how the idea of freedom has been intertwined with the practice of slavery. From ancient Greece to the United States of 1776, he says, cultures that have theorized and celebrated "freedom" have simultaneously excluded huge swaths of their populations from any shred of it. At the same time, nations through history that profess to love "freedom" have been relentless in promoting heartless geopolitical agendas outside their borders.

Elvis was a hero to most,
but he never meant shit to me ...
-- Public Enemy, 1989

Modern environmentalism was, after all, the Elvis of Sixties activism. It was a radical and innovative departure from the conservation movement that preceded it. And in almost every way, the politics and innovations of the early environmental movement derived directly from the same era's fight for black power and racial justice.

Norm Collins, the Ford Foundation program officer who first funded the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, and others, wrote in his decision memos that what was needed was "an NAACP for the environment." National legislative victories for the environment depended heavily on a re-jiggering of states' rights. This strategy copied one that had already been used successfully by the Civil Rights Movement. A critical factor in the passage of the Clean Air Act, for example, was to unify and to supersede the patchwork of existing air quality standards that states had promulgated on their own. And mass mobilizations for the environment depend heavily on nonviolent civil disobedience as popularized by African American advocates in the 1960s.

The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s as a way to revitalize the grassroots activism started by the Civil Rights Movement. It also offered a home for activists who weren't comfortable separating their concern over the state of the planet from their concerns about social justice. Twenty years later, the mainstream environmental movement has been unable to racially integrate its senior staff, not because of overt discrimination but because of differences in vision. Many environmentalists of color admire the mainstream movement's goals, but they also know firsthand that social justice is routinely ignored in the mainstream movement's decision-making.

The Lessons We Haven't Learned from the Struggles for Civil Rights

Don't nobody know my troubles but God.
-- Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall, 1937

Millions of us went into the 1960s burning for the right to eat, drink, ride, work, play, and pray anywhere we wanted to. We sought a right to a job, to due process, to health care, to a good education, to fair housing, to live in the suburbs, to play in parks, and to love whom we chose. Among the rights we sought, we left the 1970s with rights to clean air, clean water, and our day in court on questions of environmental impacts. The Civil Rights Movement didn't fare as well. After an astonishing string of successes in the 1960s, it lost steam. The Civil Rights Movement wasn't dead by 1979, but the techniques it had deployed -- mass mobilization, litigation, policy advocacy, and moral appeals -- had started to run dry. That ought to sound familiar.

So what knocked Civil Rights off the track?

Me/We
-- Muhammad Ali, 1987

Two leaders who have commented on "The Death of Environmentalism" have described the problems facing their movement in terms that also describe a central problem of the Civil Rights Movement. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, acknowledged our failure to build a case for problems that are "intangible, global, and future oriented." He added that "rational collective self-interest is an inadequate approach" (emphasis in original). Former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach, in a recent speech, emphasizes integration and interdependence. He says that we haven't found a way to make those principles part of environmentalism.

The Civil Rights Movement tried to overcome this same challenge. Remember the "join hands" section of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963? King had a dream of an Alabama "where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers." As it turned out, King's phrasing captured both the promise and the shortcomings of the Civil Rights strategy. The image in context portrays integration and interdependence. It paints a picture of a better, tangible, and global future.

In this speech, King yanked America out of fragmentation and segregation and redefined community.

For a while, our country heard this call. The Civil Rights Act and other congressional actions of 1965 eliminated many systemic barriers to global community, such as blanket restrictions on immigration from non-European countries. Forty years later, 80% of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles are foreign born. Banks, colleges, and healthcare providers face heavy fines if they judge people by the color of their skin. The environmental movement followed suit, focusing on whole systems with compelling images of rivers on fire and poisoned air. Barry Commoner put it best when he wrote about a closing circle between humanity and nature.

Over the next fifteen years, the metaphor of whites and blacks joining hands came to be interpreted more literally, and more in terms of the lives of individual people. U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the early 1970s steadily chipped the idea of communities and groups out of civil rights. The key legal questions became whether specific African American medical students were entitled to hold hands with specific white medical students, or whether specific applicants for jobs were discriminated against by specific entities. And as the lawyers fought, communities were left out of the discussion.

From the very outset, the Supreme Court steadily rolled back the idea that Civil Rights had anything to do with groups or communities. They dragged the dominant frame back across the wall to the picture they wanted, as if to say, "This country is all about granting rights to individuals!" The equivalent for the environment would be, to paraphrase a line from California's 2005 State of the State message, "What's all this about cars being bad for people and the planet? California is about driving a motorcycle down Highway 1!"

The problems facing environmentalism today are eerily similar to those faced by the Civil Rights Movement two decades ago. Any debate over the death of environmentalism should acknowledge this. Both movements started out as social uprisings that were visionary and community- and systems-oriented. Both lost popular support as time went by. Both narrowed their advocacy increasingly to legal interventions. Both shifted from winning broad mandates to fighting specific political, regulatory, and legal battles.

Environmentalism has much to learn from understanding why the Civil Rights Movement made the choices it did and what the consequences were. The central debate in the Critical Race Theory field for many years now has been whether King and, by association, the entire Civil Rights Movement, made a mistake by framing our struggle in terms of individual rights at all. By seeking greater rights for African American individuals, some argue, the movement played into the country's very strong ideological bias towards the individual and away from community.

Others highlight the subversive nature of the movement's strategy. Kimberlé Crenshaw, in a seminal 1988 Harvard Law Review article, showed how, by playing on the rights of the individual, the Civil Rights Movement found a way to bring communitarian values into the mainstream. In this view, King and others were using the contradiction between the United States' values of equality (for individuals) and the reality of racism to challenge fundamental institutions.

Was there another, less risky way to go for Civil Rights or environmental leaders of yore? We stand on their shoulders right now to even ask this question. The important problem is to figure out why, despite brilliant leadership and mass support, progress on Civil Rights was all but over by the late 1970s -- and why the soul of environmentalism is adrift today.

Who's the Man with the Master Plan?
-- House of Pain, 1994

We can think of a few good reasons why environmentalists and civil rights activists are currently in this tough spot. First of all, in case anyone forgot, key leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were assassinated. A few environmental leaders were also killed, and many were harassed so severely that it became impossible for them to continue their work.

Tom Medvetz looked recently at why the Heritage Foundation has so outpaced its progressive counterpart, the Institute for Policy Studies. Both of them were founded in the mid-1960s by the same type of people, but IPS's budget today is the same as it was in 1982. Peering back into the archives, Medvetz was stunned to find how much money and time was spent from the outset fighting IRS audits, FBI wiretaps, and even COINTELPRO activity.

The Civil Rights and Environmental movements both played along, allowing legal action and technical advocacy to dominate their activism and funding. Whenever a movement spends more energy and money on winning in court than it does on winning in the streets, it speeds its own demise. And, as mentioned above, the highest courts of our land are happy to oblige.

Another reason why both movements have stumbled is the essentially conservative nature of philanthropy. Today some funders have adopted progressive values, but they have lagged behind the rest of society by at least a generation. The Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, were founded by one of the right wing's most venerable funders, J. Howard Pew. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it: many great philanthropies arose from great individual fortunes, so U.S. foundations to this day emphasize individual-rights approaches far more than communitarian rights and systemic models of change. They also seem tuned to individual achievement more than community change. David Callahan and Francis Kunreuther of the think tank Demos are among those who have shown how strategic philanthropy has been fundamentally conservative or supportive of incremental change.

Our country's dominant institutions don't go quietly. Whenever significant challenges to individualistic ideology crop up, a wide flank of judicial, governmental, corporate, and quasi-military forces swing into action to dampen and ultimately defeat the impulse for a more communitarian society.

(love loves gonna get you) ya know a lot of people believe that that word Love is real soft, but when you use it in your vocabulary like you're addicted to it it sneaks right up and takes you right out. out. out. out. out.

So, for future reference remember it's alright to like or want a material item, but when you fall in love with it and you start scheming and carrying on for it, just remember, it's gonna get'cha
-- KRS-ONE, 1990

Our ancestors fought a war of ideas in the streets for the environment and civil rights. They wanted to make us realize how connected we were to each other and to the Earth. They wanted to change our institutions to reflect that insight. The opposition came in the form of state power: the courts, the FBI, and the barrels of fire hoses and guns.

Antonio Gramsci thought a lot about the struggle between ideas and state power while sitting in a jail cell in early 20th century Italy. In any struggle, he wrote, those with legal and physical power engage in "the war of position." Those without power can only resort to "the war of maneuver." This is the battle for the hearts and minds of enough people who will eventually generate enough power to defeat the war of position. Ideas are the key tool of the powerless in such battles. And this is the rub for us today.

Just as progressive movements like environmentalism and civil rights were being beaten back by institutional power, the country's economic base was shifting towards the production of ideas. The service sector had dominated the U.S. economy since the 1930s. By the early 1970s we had moved fully into an economy where the real engine is information and the production of ideas.

Before we environmentalists waste any more time worrying about how pitiful our frames are, we should realize this: In the 1960s, General Motors was really good at making cars. Today, they are really good at selling the idea of a car; and a war for the idea of equality or the environment is a lot harder to fight when Americans increasingly spend their lives in a war of ideas over which brand of fleece sweater they should buy.

The movement waiting to be born must be stronger than the one that's dying because the challenges we face now are even more difficult than the ones we tackled in the 1970s. When the pundits on commercial television say, "we live in the information age," what they mean is that ideas have become much more than just instruments of social change. Ideas have also become the most powerful instruments of commerce. This means that "the marketplace of ideas" is controlled more by commercial forces than by politicians, and the two are growing closer every day. It was no accident that the Bush campaign's successful strategy in 2004 relied more on market research than on voter rolls to target its message.

The average trip to a supermarket in the U.S. today lasts 55 minutes, or 3,300 seconds, and is a carefully choreographed encounter with 3,600 brands, each of which is competing to identify with our most cherished values. For progressives to win, we must enter the cycle that constrains the debate over values in the marketplace and break it. We have to reach people in their souls.

What Winning Looks Like: Ideas and Actions for Transformational Politics

Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul
-- Tracy Chapman, 1989

The United States is a country at war. We are world leaders in the profligate use of fossil fuel, incarceration, private and public debt, and the gap between rich and poor. We are an ideologically divided country -- we have the closest elections and one of the lowest rates of democratic participation. In America today, we are all Romans or slaves in the most powerful empire the world has ever known.

In the face of unprecedented challenges, great movements cannot choose ideas and actions by convenience. We must choose those that confront and overcome the great problems.

This chapter shows how ideas and actions must combine to build movements and then victories for environmentalism and beyond. Like Lakoff, we argue for new frames. But the ideas that drive them must emerge from a deep encounter between our values, our experience, and the giant social challenges we face. We also argue for a focus on action: investing in ideas that foster deep change, and transforming our leadership and our politics to overcome the threats that the last three chapters have identified.

How ya gonna win if you're not right within
-- Lauryn Hill, 1995

There is a short list of solutions to the conditions described at the beginning of this chapter. It includes the idea of community responsibility and what we owe our children. It includes the personal responsibility to vote and control our destiny politically, socially, and in our choices of whom to love. It includes how we carve up our land, and what residential apartheid is doing to our planet and our politics. It includes making "be all that you can be" a term attributable more to Nobel Prizewinning economist Amartya Sen than to the U.S. Army. It includes a different definition of what it means to be rich on this earth and in the hereafter.

Somewhere in that last paragraph, or a couple more you can write in a few minutes, are ideas big enough to challenge the "get-it-while-you-can/ I-wish-I-had-this-freeway-to-myself/ I-can't-believe-I'm-voting-for-this-jerk/ Operation-Iraqi-Freedom/ wonder-if-I-have-room-for-another-extra-dozen-rolls-of-paper-towels-that -are-so-cheap-I've-got-to-stock-up" frame that is kicking our asses so hard right now. So take out your pens ... and then, when you're finished writing, compare notes. The goal is to identify the big fights. The discussion we need to have will identify the crucial intersections in progressive politics that will allow us to come together in radically new ways.

Table 1 shows the notes we came up with when we tried to list the big fights and what's at stake for our country.

Table 1
The Big Fights: Cross-cutting Issues and What's at Stake

* = framing often used by environmental advocates

The top row of our table reflects the bottom line of government -- the budget. Conservative leader Grover Norquist would like a government "so small it can be drowned in a bathtub." Right-wingers continue to pass deep tax cuts that create huge deficits, and then ratchet up the pressure to cut government spending. The only way for parents, healthcare advocates, labor, reproductive rights, anti-deficit, and environmental groups to turn this strategy around is to unite against it and to come out swinging with a new vision for our government's priorities.

The environmental movement actually holds the key to winning this big fight. Two of the most important fixes to structural budget deficits lie in our hands: pollution charges and deep property tax reform. Each holds the promise of raising up to $300 billion a year in new revenue while growing our jobs and economy. They do this simply by breaking our national addictions to fossil fuels and destroying land, and redirecting resources to more productive parts of the economy.

Another big fight is to grow the battle to protect wilderness and open space while reflecting all the challenges embedded in it. Land conservation traces its roots in U.S. culture to 19th century environmentalism, and land use activists today have expanded their efforts to fight sprawl. To fight effectively, they must open several new fronts. Right-wing apparatchiks know that sprawl works in their favor. As long as outer-outer-ring exurban homes offer lower taxes and better schools, they will undercut community while supporting the delusions of Americans who are anti-government.

The new environmental movement also has to stand with groups that fight for sexual and reproductive rights because our histories are so intertwined. Laws restricting marriage in the United States trace their roots to the control of slaves, indigenous people, and land. One obstacle environmentalism increasingly faces is the privatization of nature, and efforts to ban gay marriage are closely related to efforts aimed at radically shrinking the public sphere.

People who advocate for the Earth must speak out against the destruction being wrought by the War on Terror. Accepting this new paradigm for national security means complicity in the creation of "national sacrifice zones" like the bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico; a domestic police state; and an ideological rallying point for the far right.

A final big fight has emerged from the new ways wealth is being created in the information economy. The U.S. today is in a period similar to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, in that we are passing things that once belonged to all of us into the hands of the few. The effects of this shift have been disastrous for the average American. In the late 1800s, government abetted the concentration of wealth through policies like the Homestead Act and the Mineral Rights Act. Today we are experiencing similar "land grabs" of tremendously valuable resources in arenas like the Internet, cell-phone bandwidth, and genetic information. Imagine if every water pipe in 1900 had been installed by Comcast or Verizon, and you get some sense of the assets we are now denying our children. Who owns bandwith? Who owns the sky? The proper answer is "everyone."

The economic boom of the 1990s was one of the biggest in American history, but almost all of the new money it generated went to the top one-fifth of U.S. households. Today more people are rich, and the richest few have enough money to make Louis XIV feel inadequate. Environmentalists have over a century of experience fighting the land grabs and wanton resource depletion that originated in the 19th century. These land grabs are the models for the dysfunctional parts of the information economy. It's time we put our long experience in service of a new definition of shared wealth for everyone.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers
The mountains and the endless plain --
All, all the stretch of these great green states --
And make America again!
-- Langston Hughes, 1938

Sharing is one theme that unites all the fights on this short list as well the bulk of Civil Rights activists, environmentalists, community leaders. What we have in common is the idea of commonality itself. The traditional values of Native Americans are based on sharing and community in nature. The deeper call of the Civil Rights Movement was to community wellbeing and harmony. And both Carl Pope and Adam Werbach, in their responses to "The Death of Environmentalism," call for approaches that go beyond self-interest to integration.

Americans have a schizophrenic relationship to communitarian values. On the one hand, we have the cultural and political roots described earlier. We also have a strong tradition of patriotism and volunteerism that brings people together in diverse and cross-cutting communities. Yet our culture seems to have lost the ability to speak of shared wealth, community, and the commons.

We are already one of the most privatized societies in the world, and the right wing wants to push it even further. The privatization movement is really an attack on the idea of the commons and community. As our shared political and public spaces shrink, so too does our ability to take collective action to relieve poverty and protect the environment. The mainstream used to listen when we talked about solving these problems through collective action. But now civic space has eroded so much that mainstream Americans think these problems can be remedied by a "free market." The term "market failure" has become exotic and marginal.

How are the Souls called forth?
-- Henry Dumas, 1963

The frames the old movements used were linked to a string of incremental victories that evolved from a long struggle. Almost a century after the Civil War, African Americans had little reason to believe that they could ever wield real political power. Yet a mere 10 years separate the bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks from the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That political sea change was the flowering of something that had deep roots. The most important contribution of the civil rights activists of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s was to build faith in the potential for change. Today's progressive activists must also build from one strength to another, from small victories to dominant values.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy inspired the country by announcing an ambitious and all-consuming goal -- the Apollo program, which would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Today the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" have issued a similar call. They have joined with others to launch the "New Apollo Project" to radically reduce America's dependency on oil as a source of energy over the next 10 years. They are calling for big investments in energy efficiency. This would be great. We support this goal. But we shouldn't confuse this new movement with the way JFK organized the moon shot. We should focus investments on the smaller, visionary victories sprouting up all around us. In fact, the Apollo Alliance has adopted this approach by supporting state and local-level activism.

In the early 1980s, environmental activists began to use the term "sustainability" to refer to a movement that began with pollution control and land protection but also included social justice, economic sufficiency, and democratic governance. American media and mainstream activists have a hard time with this new term for two reasons: first, it implies inter-connectedness; and second, because it implicates us in the profligate use of resources. Yet sustainability is an idea deeply rooted in grassroots activism around the country. Visionary national solutions from the Blue-Green Alliance to pension-fund activism all reflect a linkage between human, economic, and environmental rights.

The domestic movement for sustainability is linked, in turn, to international movements that are politically mainstream in their home countries. Sustainability is a pillar of national constitutions in Europe, while in less-developed countries the concept is often a unifying force in bringing landless, coal mining, or rural communities together in supporting environmental measures. The models for the U.S. may be slightly different, but there is no shortage of winning strategies and coalitions to import.

Environmental justice is another visionary movement that emerged in the mid-1980s to redefine civil and environmental rights. It has had many successes, but few mainstream environmental organizations have noticed how or why. For example, California has been leading the country in eroding civil rights for communities of color and immigrants. But, at the same time, California has also passed six environmental justice laws since 1993. The environmental justice movement is based in some of our country's most resource poor but idea and spiritually rich communities, and its leaders are keeping hope alive.

The environmental justice and sustainability movements have been re-framing environmental issues for more than 20 years. They see environmental challenges in ways that are new to the mainstream movement, and these new frames have already taken root in lots of ways. Table 2 shows some of the ways these movements have re-stated, renewed, and reworked traditional environmental issues into a broader, more powerful base.

Table 2
Re-framing Environmentalism: "New" Frames From the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Movements

Sources: The Earth Charter, Principles of Environmental Justice, Principles of Climate Justice, Tokyo Declaration, Bruntland Commission.

Successful movements fight big fights. They call for community and they build momentum from small victories. In short, they have a strategy for winning people's hearts and moving their values. Transformational politics also means new types of action designed to win the big fights.

I'm tryin to make a dollar out of fifteen cents
It's hard to be legit and still pay tha rent
-- Tupac Shakur, 1993

The Bush Administration's refusal to act on climate change was the main reason why "The Death of Environmentalism" was written. The authors call for a radical revision of the movement's goals and a more expansive definition of winning, just as we do. But the problem goes beyond needing a clearer vision. U.S. energy industries have already prepared themselves for a tactical fight. Efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions at the state level, for example, are hamstrung by industry advocacy for coal and nuclear energy. Michael Noble, the executive director of Minnesotans for an Energy Efficient Economy, is proud of the $100 million a year in wind energy investment slated for his region in coming years. But he wonders what he will tell his children about the $2 billion a year that will be invested in the same region in coal-fired power plants.

Global warming is an economic, trade, human rights, security, and jobs issue. When you're in the thick of it, lobbying for changes in climate policy often feels like leading Napoleon's troops into Russia. Environmentalists join only with other environmentalists to stop global warming, slow investment in coal, and fight the re-licensing of nuclear facilities that are now sold as "climate-friendly." What's more, we have to do all these things at the same time!

These efforts are not misguided. They just aren't enough. The environmental community must also invest deeply in outreach to other constituencies affected by these policies. We must get to know anti-deficit groups, community development organizations, labor unions, and trade associations for new industries. We must celebrate and join in common cause with those in evangelical communities who assert a scriptural basis for the sustainable and responsible stewardship of our earth. We must build a new macro-frame for a clean energy future. The goal is to shift the ideological and institutional playing field so that dirty energy industries are the ones playing catch-up.

This kind of change doesn't mean killing existing strategies. But it does mean making significant investments in visionary projects that can build new movements. Nonprofit groups in the U.S. spend over $70 million a year to fight global warming. How much of that sum serves non-environmental groups and advocates for crosscutting policy initiatives? Next to nothing.

Yet various fringe members of the environmental movement who work outside traditional borders are clearing the path to victory on climate change right now. We need more entrepreneurial funders making venture investments that can yield results in areas as disparate as toxic wastes and land use. As venture capitalist and environmentalist Bob Epstein has pointed out, companies in trouble need not change overnight. But they must take a substantial portion of their present activity and devote it to new approaches.

Mainstream environmental advocacy organizations and funders need to adopt a "15% solution." They need to overcome their own conservatism and invest in deep change. Over a fairly short time, a coordinated investment of 15% of that $70 million in the best ideas for deep change -- $10.5 million a year -- would boost our effectiveness immeasurably.

Right now, the sustainability and environmental justice movements cannot roll back the right wing's onslaught on civil society, the middle class, and the environment. But in these movements and a few others lie the seeds of the environmental movement's rebirth. We need to water those seeds and give them room to grow.

And if you're wondering why I got kids so big
They weren't born from the body, they were born from the soul
-- Queen Latifah, 1989

Winning will also depend on growing new leadership. The new environmental leaders will not be policy wonks -- at least not in public. They will speak to the broader range of problems Americans face. Ideas need a human face to break through commercial noise and political disillusionment. Winning movements must actively foster such leadership and then let it fly.

The U.S. needs to move quickly to solve mammoth problems like climate change and our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy. But even if we act with breakneck speed, environmental leaders 50 years from now will be facing challenges on these very same issues. Ensuring that our children inherit a better world than we did means preparing them to lead their own struggles for a just and sustainable future.

The leaders of the new environmental movement are already working in groups like the Green Corps, the Environmental Leadership Program, and the Climate Justice Corps. They are also being nurtured by every activist who mentors interns and younger staff. Today, these programs often fall short in the same ways "The Death of Environmentalism" does. They fail to connect the dots between broad social movements and environmentalism. Younger leaders are starting to break across issue lines, however, and they are doing this out of more than just youthful enthusiasm. They are doing it to broaden their base of people and ideas, and to gain access to more resources. Every mainstream environmental leader should follow their lead.

I'm talking to you, my many inspirations
When I say I can't, let you or self down
If I were of the highest cliff, on the highest riff
And you slipped down the side and clinched on to your life in my grip
I would never, ever let you down
-- J-Ivy, 2004

We agree with the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism," Carl Pope, and many others on the third and most important ingredient for social change -- transformative alliances. On its way up in the 1970s, environmentalism passed civil rights, women's rights, and a number of other causes in trouble. The 1970s were marked by rancor among movements as attention strayed from human and environmental justice. In environmental boardrooms across the country to this day, directors still make program choices by asking, "If we stop to help another cause, what will happen to ours?"

Focusing on a well-defined mission is a mark of good nonprofit management. But the question before us in this political night is not so different than the one posed by the Good Samaritan on the road to Jericho or by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis in 1968: "If I do not stop to help this cause, what will happen to it?" Remember the truth about the environmental movement's ancestry. Other movements come from the same family we do. One of our central struggles has always been getting people to recognize inter-connectedness. Socially, economically, and environmentally, it's time for us to start walking the talk.

Conclusion

You gotta understand man
[Elvis] was America's Baby Boom Che.
I oughta know man, I was in his army
-- John Trudell, 1989

In its details, winning means having ideas that fight the big fights, raise the value of community, and build from small victories to dominant frames. Winning also means new actions, like investing at least 15% in deep change strategies, fostering new leadership that transcends boundaries, and building transformative alliances.

Writ large, the soul of environmentalism shares with the Civil Rights Movement and many others one central characteristic: empathy. Empathy is what makes us reach out when we see a wounded bird. It is what calls to us when a child suffers from poverty or asthma. It is how we know our children will miss the snow when the latitudes of climate change have passed us by.

Empathy is also the central component of every point in the short list of big solutions. It is a central component in moving our country away from destructive individualism and toward a regenerative idea of community. It is a big part of what winning means to progressives.

Finally, political empathy is an action, not an emotion. It is expressed in building coalitions, not in writing essays. It means seeking and speaking the truth, not denying one's troubled ancestry. Empathy is about whom you spend your days talking and walking with. It is how, in Martin Luther King's words, we reach the Mountaintop.

And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
And sex kills ...
-- Joni Mitchell, 1994

Civil Rights and environmentalism share a common lineage. This essay focuses on what we can learn from that particular confluence. Its central argument is that we only truly understand our political predicament when we look at it in new and more inclusive ways. Other essays can and should be written on the qualities environmentalism shares with other social movements whose strength seems to be fading. Two of these movements seem particularly salient right now.

The first concerns efforts to promote economic rights and opportunity, including organized labor and the anti-poverty movement. Long before pundits invented terms like "outsourcing," the fight for workers was steeped in geopolitics. For nearly 100 years, conservatives tarred labor and anti-poverty advocates by calling them communists. Today communism is no longer a threat to the U.S. but we are still struggling to find a productive way to talk about the vast gaps in wealth and the often inhumane way we make people work. Environmental problems are commercial and geopolitical in nature, so we have much to learn by joining forces with labor and antipoverty activists. Environmental solutions have to do with our relationship to material wealth, so we must also suggest alternative definitions of wealth in the future.

The second area of particular importance right now concerns efforts to promote sexual freedom, including the pro-choice and reproductive rights movement and the gay rights movement. As the iconic environmental scientist George Woodwell pointed out recently, environmentalism and a woman's right to choose are inextricably linked -- they are both human rights.

It is inconsistent to block a woman's right to choose -- or a gay person's right to marry -- while advocating free choice in the destruction of species or landscapes. How do conservatives do that, and how have our allies in those movements responded? How do we broaden our connections?

Environmentalism must connect with and be of service to a broader social movement. This one essay cannot plumb the depths of challenges and innovations facing our colleagues in every arena, but we do suggest that our common issues be understood not just along the lines of race, but also of reproductive rights, sexuality, and class.

Dime con quien andes, y te dire quien eres.
Tell me with whom you walk, and I'll tell you who you are.
-- Mexican proverb

The authors wish to thank John Adams, Adam Albright, Jane Barker, Jim Barrett, Diana Bauer, Frances Beinecke, Amanda Berger, Ludovic Blain, Robert Bullard, Michael Cain and the leadership of the Army Environmental Policy Institute, Vivian Chang, Dahlia Chazan, Jack Chin, Carmen Concepcion, Robert Cordova, Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Katrina Croswell, Michelle Depass, Veronica Eady, Brad Edmondson, Juliet Ellis, Bob Epstein, Torri Estrada, Greg Fawcett, Leslie Fields, Maggie Fox, Full Court Press Communications, Jihon Gearon, Barry Gold, Michael Green, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, John Harte, Paul Hawken, Alan Hecht, Andrew Hoerner, Taj James, Roger Kim, Lilly Lee, Jodi Levin, Lance Lindblom, Penn Loh, Mindy Lubber, Felicia Marcus, Catherine Markman, Tom Medvetz, Anuja Mendiratta, Ansje Miller, Sharon Miller, Sophie Mintier, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Michael Noble, Ted Nordhaus, Richard Norgaard, Gamaliel Perez, Carl Pope, Steve Posner, Swati Prakash, Arlene Rodriguez, Rodger Schlickeisen, Michael Shellenberger, Rev. J. Alfred Smith, Anita Street, Julie Sze, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, Peter Teague, Max Weintraub, Adam Werbach, Bev Wright, George Woodwell, Eli Yudall, the folks at Redefining Progress for enthusiastically staffing this effort ... and all the souls who've fed our thinking and our work.

Michel Gelobter is executive director of Redefining Progress in Oakland, California.

Michael Dorsey is a member of the Faculty of Science in the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College.

Leslie Fields is an environmental lawyer and activist based in Washington, D.C.

Tom Goldtooth is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Anuja Mendiratta is program officer for Community Development at The Marin Community Foundation.

Richard Moore is executive director of the Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice.

Rachel Morello-Frosch is assistant professor of environmental studies at Brown University.

Peggy M. Shepard is executive director of West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc.

Gerald Torres is H.O. Head Centennial Professor of Real Property Law at the University of Texas in Austin and the president of The Association of American Law Schools.

Related Links:

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Civil-rights, suffrage activists didn’t give up, and neither should environmentalists

Martin Kaplan — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 11:03:08 -0800

by Martin Kaplan
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

This piece is adapted from a speech given before the Alliance for Global Sustainability last month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. The full speech -- "Reflections on Sustainability and Universities and Whether Environmentalism Has Died" -- can be found here.

Are the reapers quitting too soon?

The environmental community is in turmoil over "The Death of Environmentalism," the challenging essay released by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus last fall. Their thesis is that the environmental community has "strikingly little to show" for its efforts over the last 15 years and that environmental leaders are not articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis facing us.

Remarkably, the two charge that environmentalism is "just another special interest."

Former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach has contributed his own indictment of environmentalism, calling for the end of a separate environmental movement and the creation of a new progressive movement uniting all of those who can agree on a broad set of progressive values, only one of which is the environment. And New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently joined the attack, asserting that Shellenberger and Nordhaus are right that "modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live."

I suggest that these four individuals are arrogant, self-indulgent, and wrong in blaming perceived failure on those who have sought change, rather than on those who have opposed it.

Given their philosophy of causation and responsibility, I suppose in the 1850s, these four would have blamed the failure to abolish slavery on the abolition movement rather than the slaveholders and the economic interests tied to them. Perhaps around 1900, they would have blamed the failure to achieve women's voting rights on the strategy and tactics of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, rather than on men who controlled the society.

Not one of these denunciations of the environmental movement includes any equivalent attack on the entrenched opposition of the economic interests that sell oil and whose outputs include mercury and arsenic. And I find it quite outrageous that the phrase special interest has been transmuted from reflecting those who have a financial benefit at stake to those who are pursuing a goal of benefiting the entire society rather than themselves individually. This misuse of the phrase flies in the face of the way in which it was used during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century.

Their thinking provides no recognition of the tipping-point paradigm. Remember that after many years of little progress, the civil-rights movement in America blasted through the crises of the early 1960s to success, and we have also seen remarkable social change in relatively short time frames on issues relating to women, gays, and culture.

The conservation movement is only 100 years old and the environmental movement perhaps 50 years old. We are fortunate indeed that Shellenberger, Nordhaus, et al. did not evaluate the status of other historical movements midway in their terms. Perhaps these four individuals, lacking a historical perspective, have given up too early.

Reflections on Sustainability and Universities and Whether Environmentalism Has Died

This speech was given at the Alliance for Global Sustainability annual meeting, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., March 22, 2005.

The environmental community in this country is presently in turmoil over the challenging paper entitled "The Death of Environmentalism," an essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, which was released at the October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Their thesis is that the environmental community has "strikingly little to show" for its efforts during the past 15 years, and that environmental leaders do not articulate a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Looking at the string of global-warming defeats under Presidents Clinton and Bush, they conclude that the environmental movement's approach to problems and policies hasn't worked, and they charge there is nothing about the behavior of the environmental groups that indicates that they are ready to think differently in the future.

They attribute the success of environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s to concepts, methods, and institutions of that period that are now outmoded. Remarkably, they charge that environmentalism is "just another special interest."

Shellenberger and Nordhaus note the failure of others to join the fight against global warming and they contend that "the arrogance here is that environmentalists ask not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists."

They also ask the very good question: "why ... is a human-made phenomenon like global warming, which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century, considered 'environmental'? Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is?"

They state that "perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."

Adam Werbach, the former president of the Sierra Club, then followed up with a further attack in a speech in early December at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco entitled "Is Environmentalism Dead?" His stated thesis: "the ability of environmentalism, as a language, an ideology, a set of practices, and network of institutions, can not deal with the most pressing ecological challenges facing the planet ..." and calls for an end to a separate environmental movement and the creation of a new progressive movement uniting all of those who can agree on a broad set of progressive values, only one of which is the environment.

These papers and many responses can be found at the website of Grist Magazine, the online environmental news source.

I would note that the conservation movement is only 100 years old and the environmental movement perhaps 50 years old. We are fortunate indeed that these three writers did not evaluate the status of other historical movements midway in their terms. For example, would they have urged people to give up the fight to abolish slavery because it took a couple of hundred years? Would they have urged giving up the goal of women's suffrage, perhaps around 1900, nearly a quarter of a century before women achieved the right to vote?

I don't dispute that Shellenberger and Nordhaus hoped to start a serious debate within the environmental movement about its future. But the mainstream media picked up the debate in a predictable manner. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joined the attack on March 12, asserting that the authors are right: "modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live."

Kristof states that "the fundamental problem ... is that environmental groups are too often alarmists" and have lost credibility with the public, and states that he is "now skeptical of the movement's 'I Have a Nightmare' speeches." After this attack, it is surprising that at the end of his column he states "priority should go to avoiding environmental damage that is irreversible, like extinctions, climate change, and loss of wilderness." I guess that's not alarmist. Let's not forget that in the 1930s Winston Churchill was derided for his "I Have a Nightmare" speeches.

I suggest that those four writers are arrogant, self-indulgent, and wrong in blaming perceived failure on those who have sought change, rather than on those who have opposed it. Given their philosophy of causation and responsibility, I suppose in the 1850s they would have blamed the failure to abolish slavery on the abolition movement rather than the slaveholders and the economic interests tied to them. Perhaps around 1900 they would have blamed the failure to achieve the right to vote for women on the strategy and tactics of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, rather than on men who controlled the society. And not one of those four denunciations of the environmental movement includes any equivalent attack on the entrenched opposition of the economic interests that sell oil, mercury, and even arsenic.

I find it quite outrageous, too, that the phrase "special interest" has been transmuted from reflecting those who have a financial benefit at stake to those who are pursuing a goal of benefiting the entire society rather than themselves individually. This misuse of the phrase "special interest" flies in the face of how that term was used during the Progressive Movement at the beginning of the 20th century.

Furthermore, their thinking provides no recognition of the tipping-point paradigm with which we are all familiar. Remember that after many years of little progress, the civil-rights movement in America blasted through the crises of the early 1960s to success, and we have also seen remarkable social change in relatively short time periods on issues relating to women, gays, and culture.

In science and commerce, we have also experienced change with lightning speed, from the acceptance and proliferation of television, to cable, to the computer, and to the internet.

Perhaps these writers, lacking a historical perspective, have given up too early.

While criticism of environmental organizations is certainly appropriate on many levels, I would have thought these writers would have saved such truly damning criticism for those who, out of short-term financial or political self-interest, or simple ignorance, oppose every effort by our society to recognize the seriousness of environmental problems.

During these past 15 years that Nordhaus and Shellenberger critique, progress has been made on environmental issues in many countries, important research has been launched, and the world has pretty much come to accept as scientific fact that climate change is real and poses significant problems for the future. Much of that is due to the research and analysis of key scientists at many universities and corporations. But thoughtful, tough warnings have been met with corporate denial by many who should be leading the effort to protect our society if they truly realized how serious are the problems we face. The selfish response of many in industry has been matched or exceeded by the purposeful ignorance of many in government who have sought to delay any response on climate change by arguing that the maintenance of current jobs is more important than anything else.

Their approach reminds me of the valiant resistance by most of the New England fishing industry to any limitations on their fishing of the Great Banks because limitations would mean lost profits and lost jobs. They challenged scientific advice and proceeded to overfish the Great Banks to the point where the New England fishing industry has collapsed, causing the loss of many more jobs than would have been the case if there had been responsible management of the problem.

In addition, the American press, abysmally ignorant of science, has habitually included in any article on the dangers of climate change the contrary viewpoint of an environmental skeptic. But I don't recall the media requiring a balancing viewpoint to make the point that the Soviet Union during the Cold War was not dangerous.

George Monbiot, in a Feb. 15 article in The Guardian, provided a viewpoint the American press disregards:

The denial of climate change, while out of tune with the science, is consistent with, even necessary for, the outlook of almost all the world's economists. Modern economics, whether informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth.

Our economists are exposed by climatologists as utopian fantasists, the leaders of a millenarian cult as mad as, and far more dangerous than, any religious fundamentalism.

But if our political leaders are to save the people rather than the people's fantasies, then the way we see ourselves must begin to shift.

But of course, Monbiot was writing in the U.K. You won't find the viewpoint he expressed in the mainstream American press.

Mark Wrighton, chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, organized a series of colloquia from October 2003 to April 2004 on the "Role of Research Universities in Addressing Environmental Issues," drawing on those leaders who had developed programs at Harvard, Columbia, and MIT, including professor David Marks.

I believe Wrighton accurately summarized the current state of universities and environmental studies as follows: "We have islands of excellence ... that collectively do not have the impact that we think we could have ... ." He expressed the belief that all those involved in the colloquium effort "would probably agree that a major research university ... has a responsibility to prepare the next generation of educated men and women to have at least an understanding of environmental issues ... it is our responsibility to do more to address environmental issues, beginning with our educational programs and our operations."

Several universities, including MIT, have clearly done more than others, but as many universities, corporations, and communities make progress in energy and product efficiency, reduction of waste, and development of sustainable operations, the target has kept on moving. Increasing worldwide population, increasing global commerce, and increasing demands for energy and products will increasingly endanger the entire fabric of life on this planet.

In his Millennium Report to the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that "Freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on this planet" are the three grand global challenges for the 21st century.

Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University and former executive vice provost of Columbia University, spoke at the Washington University colloquium, and drew attention to the "Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development," which referred to "economic development, social development, and environmental protection" as "interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development," and called for "collective responsibility to advance and strengthen" them at "local, national, regional, and global levels."

Crow stated that it was "time for universities to accelerate movement to integrated science" and "time to focus on outcomes as a new strong driver of science," embracing complexity within education and research, and noting the overriding need to get out of our intellectual and academic silos, to focus on real problem solving rather than the advancement of knowledge within each specific field, and calling for education about the Earth, the environment, and its interactions with human society, to help create an engaged citizenry as well as skilled professionals who were able to integrate across disciplines.

Professor Don Melnick, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University, has stated: "Universities are the ultimate incubators of innovative solutions to complex global problems, but they must be mobilized to engage these global problems."

The gap between our achievements to date and the problems we must address is not narrowing, but sadly, is widening. Economic growth and resistance to change imperil our efforts to make the world more sustainable. In addition, much of corporate America is simply not focusing on the vast economic opportunities available to those who become the drivers of environmental solutions rather than the suppliers of continuing environmental degradation.

Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, points out that China's new fuel-efficiency requirements for cars and trucks sold in China are significantly more stringent than our own fuel-efficiency standards in this country, which have atrophied as a result of fierce and stubborn lobbying by the domestic auto industry. UCS has shown that most U.S. companies are missing out on the opportunities to develop and deploy the next generation of technologies to reduce energy usage and emissions, which will result in other countries providing leadership and increasing market share in comparison to that of U.S.-based companies even in the U.S. market.

This brings us back to the issue of climate change and sustainability. I believe we must consider it at a different and higher level -- the sustainability of planet Earth as a functioning biosphere able to handle immense shocks to its system. In The New York Review of Books from March 24, Princeton professor emeritus Clifford Geertz reviews Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Richard A. Posner's Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Diamond wonders whether we are blundering into self-destruction, and sees the first signs of overreach, waste, decline, and ruin. Geertz says Diamond and Posner (and Posner is no radical environmentalist or radical anything else) both ask, in somewhat different ways: "Is the modern way of life globally sustainable?" Perhaps the globalization of commerce and culture will be matched in the future by the globalization of collapse in our biosphere. I would hardly define this as strictly an "environmental" problem; nor should it be a worry only of "environmentalists."

We humans seem to believe that our species will survive, even if numerous other species around us expire. An analysis of the Earth over eons, however, would suggest that we have no knowledge of which species will survive future changes in the planet. I would suggest that some other species have better chances than we do.

And what does it mean to promote sustainability within the United Kingdom, as an example, if immense climatic changes terminate the benevolence of the Gulf Stream on those islands? Which countries, now livable, will become deserts and which will become frigid? When the academic world analyzes sustainability, do you include in this the sustainability of the entire system, or only parts of it? Are you studying and teaching about changes that may affect the entire web of life on Earth?

I spoke earlier of the suddenness with which change occurs in the human experience, on the social, technological, and economic levels. I would suggest that those who fear for the long-term future of human life on Earth, as do I, and those who have lost faith in the environmental movement should bear in mind the pattern of stasis followed by extraordinary movement. Perhaps there is hope that we humans will not sleepwalk into disaster.

At a December 2004 Harvard conference on the subject of climate change, President Lawrence Summers, commenting on the lack of response to climate change, said "going from the inconceivable to the inevitable will take place in a remarkably short time." I hope he is right, but I suggest two conditions are necessary for us to attain the goal Secretary-General Kofi Annan enunciated, that future generations shall have "the freedom ... to sustain their lives on this planet."

The first condition relates to universities and all other institutions and corporations that research and teach. They must focus on the global problems and the larger goals of addressing climate change and ensuring that future generations can sustain their lives on this planet, and insist that society pay attention.

If we fail to address climate change in the manner in which humans are capable, we are gambling with the future of human life on Earth. Joel Tickner, a project director at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, a leading proponent of the application of the precautionary principle in connection with chemicals and policy, points out that while the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge the dangers of climate change and refuses to consider precautionary responses to it, this same government in effect justified the invasion of Iraq on the same precautionary standards.

The second condition is recognition that technology solutions alone cannot achieve these goals. Human beings of all societies, all religions, and all cultures must find in their value systems the will to face these challenges with commitment and resolution.

Harvard professor Michael McElroy, former director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, wrote in the fall 2001 issue of Daedalus that we have the capacity to transform the Earth, to alter the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale, to eliminate species that took billions of years to evolve, and asks if we have a moral obligation to preserve the diversity of life forms on Earth. He also asks whether we have the right to alter the composition of the global atmosphere if we are unable definitively to assess -- in advance -- the consequences.

McElroy wrote: "Science alone cannot provide answers to these questions. Nor can we expect a definitive response from our colleagues in economics ... The critical question is whether we have the wisdom and ethical maturity to employ our scientific and technological skills with discretion. ... We need a moral compass: there are ethical as well as technical issues to be addressed if we are to chart a responsible course to the future."

This is not just a challenge to universities. It is a challenge to governments and corporations and the media, and to people of all countries, cultures, and religions. And it is not simply the responsibility of "environmentalists."

I cannot put it any better than professor Mary Evelyn Tucker, coordinator of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Harvard, who places the responsibility clearly on all of us: "A sustainable future requires a sustaining vision of that future. This vision needs to evoke depths of empathy, compassion, and sacrifice that have the welfare of future generations in mind. We are called, for the first time in history, to a new intergenerational consciousness and conscience -- and this extends to the entire Earth community."

I wish all of us much success.

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Four environmental funders join the debate over the movement’s future

Grist — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 11:36:32 -0800

by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

When Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus delivered the talk that has everyone talking, they chose an influential audience: environmental grantmakers. Although the now (in)famous pair focused on mainstream advocacy organizations in their discussion of the death of environmentalism, others have contended that new thinking by the folks who write the checks is key to revitalizing the movement. We've invited four representatives from foundations around the U.S. to discuss the issue. Most recent post of the day.

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005, 9:30 a.m. PST

The "Death of Environmentalism" has started a welcome dialogue in the "environmental" community. The authors have put their fingers on an important concern -- that the environmental movement seems to be faltering and needing a new platform of values and a new profile. But for me, the piece is out-of-tune and overstated.

More and more, the environmentalism that we support at Surdna is not "dead"; rather, it's different and more expansive than that of Shellenberger and Nordhaus. Some of it lives in large and diverse coalitions, stakeholder groups, and community-based natural-resource management projects at the state and local levels around the country that are driving significant changes in the way development happens; transportation is planned and funded (e.g., $40 billion for transit approved in state ballot measures in the last election); fisheries and forests are managed; and greenhouse gases are controlled. Some of it is emerging within major institutions and special-interest groups -- business, religious communities, hunters and fishers, and so forth. It often doesn't go by the name environment -- rather, community vitality, economic development and competitiveness, equity and fairness.

Granted, we still do not always gain the ground we would like to, and we can unquestionably do a better job on the big issues like climate change. But we must acknowledge and embrace the multiple voices and interests and local innovations that are emerging around the country. They are a significant part of the base that we need to underpin success on the bigger issues -- and their reach is often bipartisan, their label broader than "progressive." While we surely need a reinvigorated and reframed progressive movement, let's not conclude that "environmentalism" can live only inside that box.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 10:37 a.m. PST

I agree with Hooper's comments: Environmentalism must speak to a broader sector of our communities than just the progressive/liberal set. The portfolio of grants that I manage is located within the West (of the U.S. and Canada), and like Hooper, we do a great deal on the state and local levels. While the Democrats have seen gains in many of these states, it is clear that for broader progress to be made on our issues we must reach out to and connect with broader coalitions. We've invested in some remarkable work organizing ranchers, hunters and anglers, Native Americans, and business leaders to speak for things like responsible energy development, accountable land management, even wilderness. As such, I think we are beginning to see the politics of these issues shift. Ranchers supporting wilderness? I think it is pretty exciting stuff. And I think we would have been wholly unsuccessful if, once again, we had walked into their communities with an all-or-nothing political stance.

Many of these constituents are longtime environmentalists who either haven't had to or haven't been organized to speak about these values. And many of them characterize themselves as lifelong Republicans. Ultimately, I think we all strive for (re)establishing strong environmental/conservation values to the point where they are seen as the "political third rail." But until we have a stronger, committed, well-organized base that we truly represent, I think we'd be really remiss in passing on people just because they don't fall into a "progressive" box.

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 11:01 a.m. PST

Thanks, Hooper and Rhea, for getting the boat floating with this conversation. My feelings and thoughts surrounding the "Death of Environmentalism" debate reflect what has been stated already. I have always had difficulty referring to myself as an environmentalist. The Christensen Fund approaches environmental grantmaking through a bio-cultural lens. In a nutshell, we suggest with our grants that "what is good for traditionally sustainable land-based communities is good for the land." As a result, I am always considering the human element when it comes to environmental issues.

As a Native person, I reflect some of the tension that has existed and continues to exist between the "enviros" and "Indians." The enviros have traditionally been perceived as elitists who enter our communities telling us how we should go about protecting our lands, with little regard for the political, social, and economic complexities involved in land management on Indian and other non-Indian lands. For these reasons, I welcomed the Shellenberger and Nordhaus essay. Often it is good to shake things up a little and remind members of any movement to take a look at their complacency. The frame of environmentalism needs to become increasingly inclusive, and requires a strategy that compels the American populace to see how environmental values match their own.

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 1:28 p.m. PST

I am interested in the theme that I think I see in Hooper's and Rhea's responses -- the theme of an environmentalism that transcends ideological divisions. An environmentalism that "can speak to a broader sector of our communities than just the progressive/liberal set" and that can live outside of the "progressive box."

I confess that I am a little uneasy with an ideologically transcendent environmentalism. First of all, I think that it will become very difficult for the "frame" of environmentalism to become "increasingly inclusive" (a development that Enrique endorses and with which I agree) while also sitting out the broad ideological battles that frame distributive contests in this society. Second, explicitly demarcating an "environmentalism" that can live outside of a progressive box is demarcating an environmentalism that will no longer feel like home to some of our current family. Finally, I am just not so certain that there exists the broad values consensus (at anything other than a discursive or rhetorical level) upon which an ideologically transcendent environmentalism would feed.

I am not suggesting that the kinds of "unlikely alliances" that I hear so much about are unimportant. With respect to the contestation of this or that battle, I certainly agree that we should take our lead from the inclinations of the groups on the ground, as in the examples that each of you presents. What I am suggesting is that we are well positioned, I like to think, to also address ourselves to the relationship that environmentalism has with the broad ideological frameworks whose contestation will always provide the context for this or that political battle. Those ideological battles aren't going to go away, and I think that we need to find our place within them. To put maybe too fine a point on it, is ideological transcendence a strategy or a tactic?

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Not dead, just different
Monday, March 28, 2005 5:28 p.m. PST

Stuart ended his dispatch with a question: whether or not environmental ideological transcendence should be a strategy or a tactic. I suggest that it should be a priority. I feel this way because when we, as funders, support projects that only reflect strategies and tactics, we are also supporting changes to the status quo for the community that will be affected by the project. A change in the status quo is what often scares people who may or may not identify themselves as environmentalists. In addition, environmental strategies and tactics are often perceived by people as only win-or-lose propositions. There is rarely any middle ground when it comes to a battle over new proposed logging, a dam, or a mine. It is at that middle ground where the environmental movement's potential allies lie.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus suggest in their essay that the environmental movement should return to the offensive partly by attacking industry when it opposes proposals that would create new jobs. In order to accomplish this, however, ideological transcendence will be a crucial element. It requires allies from all segments of society -- including advertising, labor, and health workers, to name only three -- as well as from the traditional environmental establishment.

- - - - - - - - - -

Hooper Brooks is the program director for the environment at the Surdna Foundation in New York City, a family foundation with assets over $700 million and an 80-year history. The foundation's environment program makes more than $7 million in grants annually to organizations working on transportation, energy, biological diversity, and urban/suburban land-use issues throughout the U.S.

Stuart Clarke is the executive director of the Town Creek Foundation in Easton, Md. For nearly 25 years, Town Creek has supported public education, citizen action, and advocacy to achieve a healthy environment, an informed society, and a peaceful world.

Enrique Salmón, Ph.D., is a program officer for The Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports bio-cultural projects worldwide. His primary funding region is the greater Southwest of the United States and northwest Mexico. He is a Tarahumara Indian.

Rhea Suh is a program officer with the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she manages the Western grants portfolio. She currently serves on the Environmental Grantmakers Association board, and has been its chair and vice chair.

A Transcendental Meditation

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: A new ideology
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:12 p.m. PST

Stuart makes a good point when he says that "ideological battles aren't going to go away" -- that it will be difficult to sit these battles out in order for the frame of environmentalism to become increasingly inclusive. Yet Enrique makes a good point when he suggests, if I understand it correctly, that we have to transcend ideology if we are going to find new allies in the "middle ground" and from "all segments of society." The challenge is how to bring the two together (especially in the face of daily ideological onslaughts that are clearly anti-environmental).

That will probably be a function of time. As broader, wider-ranging coalitions and collaborations engage, as environmental issues get reframed, there is sure to be a recognition of shared values (not all the values of a traditional environmentalist, perhaps, but I'm more optimistic than Stuart on this score). From that may flow a new ideology -- one that has more of a mainstream image. For example, as good jobs, economic vitality, or improved personal health begin to be more clearly synonymous with a good environment, it will be hard to peel people away from supporting better environmental stewardship.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 2:39 p.m. PST

I share Stuart's uneasiness around the implications of ideologically transcendent environmentalism. I'm not sure any of us know with any certainty where these conversations and relationships may take us. However, I suppose I am open to exploring these new, unknown frontiers. If we are truly interested in breaking out of our safety zone and finding common cause with different allies, we must be open to what this can or should mean.

For example, there are enormous efforts being made to attract the attention of religious communities on a variety of environmental issues, including climate change and endangered species. But too often, we've approached this as "renting a congregation." Go out, get some religious people, sign them on to our letters! I fear it is just this type of superficial organizing that has led to the characterizations of our community as arrogant elitists. What does environmentalism mean for different faiths, and how can we best support them? As Paul Gorman, the head of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, likes to say, "The question should go two ways; it isn't just what the environmental community can do for the religious communities, but what religious communities can do for the environmental community." If the point of building relationships with the religious community is a hope that we can influence them around our issues, can we not expect that they might influence us as well?

I'm not calling for a wholesale shift in values or in ideology. Rather, I think we need to be genuinely open to having conversations with different constituencies in an honest and equitable manner. While we may not need or want to be aligned with each other on many things, we shouldn't pass up the areas where there may be opportunities out of fear that we are losing touch with our ideological underpinnings. After all, should ideologies be static? Can't and don't they evolve and adapt to ever-changing circumstances?

I'm really interested in your comments on the above, but I'd also like to shift the conversation to foundations. I think there is a lot of interest in trying to get some insight into how foundations work and what we perceive our role to be in the movement. I think that the environmental funding community is an obviously important part of the movement. We not only support the field, but we also play a role in shaping the strategies and activities of environmental organizations. Just as there is a spectrum of approaches to environmental preservation and policy in the field, there is diversity among foundations. As my old boss Michael Fischer liked to say, "You've seen one foundation, you've seen one foundation."

I think that we can simultaneously be facilitators of change (e.g., providing general support grants to organizations) and engineers of change (e.g., developing a specific initiative around a particular policy goal). I have seen and done both, and believe that both strategies have their merits. However, I do recognize that the latter -- engineering a particular strategy or initiative with a particular goal in mind -- is much more controversial. The tension may really be about who the decision-maker is; is it the grantee or grantor? Are we facilitators of environmental change or engineers of it? Are we to blame for the failings of the field? How do we view our role and our responsibilities?

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 3:40 p.m. PST

Rhea, I'd like to take one last (I promise!) swing at the ideology question before moving on to the important issues that you raise regarding the specific role of foundations in the environmental movement. Two quick points: first, the issue that I am concerned about has less to do with "losing touch with our ideological underpinnings" and more to do with the question of whether it is either necessary or desirable for environmentalism to even have clear ideological underpinnings. When I use the term "ideologically transcendent" environmentalism, I am referring to an environmentalism that does not see value in clear ideological underpinnings. Second, while developing divergent alliances with folks who do not share our ideological underpinnings can certainly be important, sometimes I wish we were more focused on and capable of developing convergent alliances with folks who do share our ideological underpinnings (!).

With respect to your comments about the roles and responsibilities of funders, my view is that if funders are clear about their intentions and clearly communicate those intentions, then they can contribute value in all sorts of different ways. I recognize that some folks get bent out of shape when they think that foundations are trying to "engineer" change, but I think foundations have just as much right to operate in that space as anyone else, so long as they aren't pretending to be doing something else. (I've just finished a nine-hour board meeting, so I am going to give myself permission to sign off on that considerably less-than-profound note and try to come back tomorrow with renewed vigor.)

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: Shifting the conversation
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 4:44 p.m. PST

Stuart, Rhea, and Hooper,

Today's conversation has been an interesting one. I feel aligned to what everyone is adding. I especially agree with Rhea's comment that suggests that ideologies should be allowed to be dynamic and "ever-changing" to adapt to circumstances. Environmentalism needs to be adaptive, or suffer the fate of past movements that fizzled out over time and became subjects in history books. And indeed, I think the environmental movement has adapted to changing political, social, and economic shifts. " The Death of Environmentalism" can be perceived as a bell-tone that more change is needed.

Speaking of which, foundations that support environmental projects have also been agents of, and affected by, change. We might not be having this conversation if a program officer at a foundation had not supported efforts by Shellenberger and Nordhaus to write and disseminate their essay. As funders, we reflect the various moods and facets of environmentalism -- even those like me, who have difficulty placing ourselves within the category of environmentalism. I feel it is our responsibility to continue to push the field's envelope, and even sometimes take chances with some grants in order to see what the possibilities are when it comes to positive change. At the same time, we can't neglect the core values and the purveyors of those values: the numerous hardworking NGOs that have brought the environmental movement to its current state. This raises an important question: should funders continue to support the NGOs that are so entrenched that change is virtually impossible, and how do we identify the current and new NGOs that could become tomorrow's environmental leaders?

- - - - - - - - - -

Risky Business

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:32 a.m. PST

Stuart, thanks for the clarification! Sorry, got it now! Yes, I am in agreement. I wish we were better at building broader collaborations within the progressive movement, and while it drives me crazy that we can't seem to figure out better ways of doing that, I understand the challenges. How many true funder collaboratives have you seen? It's hard for us to do it, even within our own communities.

Enrique raises an important question that speaks to risk tolerance in our grantmaking. Before I expand, let me put a caveat in that I'm making generalizations about our sector from the perspective of one foundation. I'm eager to hear all of your perspectives on this.

How do we classify "risk," and how far are we willing to go to take it? I think there may be some tensions for foundations, all of which presumably look for solid investments from which they can expect some sort of social return. For this, we look at things like organizational health, capacity, capability, strength of leadership, strength of budget, and a track record. I'd say that most of the large environmental NGOs fall into this category. They, in some ways, are "safe" investments, but as Enrique points out, they can also be entrenched. The whole inside-the-Beltway game has its obvious drawbacks right now. However, to be fair, I think that even though things are bleak, we have to continue to put up a fight in D.C. There will be huge battles over the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act ... and as we saw from the Arctic debate, we need to make a strong showing, even if we ultimately fail. Nevertheless, I think we are beginning to understand that even when we may be winning some battles on the Hill, we are losing the war. How can you turn something like the politics of environmental protection in Alaska around? Ultimately, I don't think it is going to be by getting more people to walk the halls of Congress -- perhaps more people to walk the roads of Fairbanks?

So here is where I think the risk element comes in. We have to try new strategies and new organizations. And many of these groups may be smaller, newer, less experienced, thus perhaps more "risky" investments. And we may need to expand our time horizons for expecting the "return." It may not be a one-year, two-year, or even three-year horizon, but rather a 10-year frame. That being said, I think for foundations to be able to manage that risk, there still has to be some measure of progress in the intervening period. Indicators of progress might not be the passage of a new bill to protect the Tongass (to use the Alaska analogy again), but rather indicators of social and/or political change that are meaningful.

This brings me to another point that I wanted to raise: theory of change. It may seem like the latest buzzword or obstacle course that foundations force grantees to scramble their way through, but I think it gets to the core of what any organization is trying to achieve. What is the problem? What is the proposed solution, and why do you think your strategies will actually get you there? I sometimes see a disconnect between the stated goal/solution and the strategies, and I think it might get back to the point about entrenchment. For example, on many federal policies we have relied on the public-comment process to have our voices heard. Organizing people to sign letters or send faxes (through an increasingly automated system) worked pretty effectively for a while. Now, however, we are seeing that public comments don't really seem to hold the weight they once did. Thus, the question really is whether the strategy is actually going to move you toward the solution you seek.

I do think organizations are becoming a lot more clever about refining these strategies. Given the current politics, for example, 10,000 letters from New Yorkers or San Franciscans on a given issue might not hold as much weight as 100 letters from local businesses or 1,000 letters from hunters and anglers (as a former and current resident of the stated cities, my apologies!). What I still think we are struggling with as a movement is how to move beyond the one-touch signature process to organizing in a much more meaningful and longer-term manner. Back to our previous conversations, I think this has to be a truly transformative process for our movement.

Foundations need to work with grantees to figure out how to make the short-term and longer-term strategies more effective. This not only requires more creativity on the part of the grantees, but also flexibility on the part of foundations.

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 1:56 PST

I have had a day of back-to-back meetings, and in that time this discussion has covered quite well just about everything I would have to say about the role of funders. I would add only a few thoughts about how funders can help accelerate adaptive change (in strategies, organizations, coalitions, etc.). They include: investing more time to communicate (succinctly and accessibly) about what funders are supporting and what they are learning from it; developing an open and honest dialogue between funders and grantees about what is working and what isn't; maintaining (to support the first two ideas) a streamlined measurement process to help program officers, boards, and grantees keep track of what actually happens with a grant; and developing collaborations of funders, practitioners, community leaders, elected officials, etc., to clarify challenges and design strategies to address them (this has happened recently with great success in a couple of states that are grappling with the intertwined challenges of smart growth, regional equity, economic competitiveness, and public health).

From: Enrique Salmón
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Rhea Suh
Subject: Re: In search of new strategies
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 6:13 p.m. PST

As I read Rhea's and Hooper's comments, I can't help but think about an article in The New York Times I read earlier today by former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley (N.J.). In the article, Senator Bradley discusses how the Democratic Party needs to begin the long-term process of building a strong coalition of support that resembles a pyramid. The base is made of strong and consistent donors and foundations that support research centers and think tanks. The next levels are occupied by policy matters and politics, and then the media. At the top is the president. This pyramid is in opposition to what he suggests the current Democratic Party resembles, which is a pyramid resting on its point. At the point is usually a charismatic president whom everyone can rally around -- but once the president is out of office, the pyramid collapses.

I think the environmental movement is not that different from the Democratic Party's pyramid. We rally around the latest noun that requires saving or protecting. But once the thing has been declared safe, the pyramid of support falters. This reminds me of Rhea's and Hooper's comments, because both suggest that the environmental movement needs to begin to invest in a long-term approach toward changing how environmentalism and environmentalists are perceived by the general public. Rhea suggests developing a theory of change that requires funders and grantees to really assess what the problems are and what it is going to take to solve them, including a real look at funder collaborations. And then Hooper mentions that funders need to invest more time communicating their strategies and assessing the needs of grantees. Both suggestions reflect long-term goals, and perhaps the need for environmentalism to begin building a solid base of support for its own pyramid -- one that can be woven throughout the social fabric of modern industrialized people.

In this way, perhaps, support for environmentalism becomes transcendent across ideologies. This means, of course, that funders need to start to support seemingly non-environmental projects such as political think tanks, media collaborations, and social-justice issues. Some of this is happening already, but it needs to steadily grow.

- - - - - - - - - -

At Play in the Fields of the Board

From: Hooper Brooks
To: Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: The next steps
Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:53 p.m. PST

Enrique's points are well taken, but I doubt that we will go successfully down that path unless we find an intentional way to do it. Beyond exchanges like this, do we need a "big," organized conversation, or series of conversations, between interested funders (and even skeptical funders) and leading organizations (large and small, national and local) to reexamine and think about how we might retune the whole field and avoid diffusion and fragmentation -- which political think tanks, media collaborations, and social-justice issues? Given the widely differing nature of private foundations (going back to Michael Fisher's observation quoted by Rhea early in this exchange), would that be an impossible task?

There may be some lessons to be harvested from emerging network theory, and some tools from our ever-improving communications technologies that would allow something productive to happen. Much of this exchange suggests a rich diversity of new approaches and foundation-NGO collaborations, but we haven't really had the space or time to go into detail. Can we deliberately harvest the lessons we are learning and make something that is better than the sum of its parts, or do we have to hope that something will emerge more organically? Thoughts?

From: Stuart Clarke
To: Hooper Brooks, Enrique Salmón, Rhea Suh
Subject: Responsibility for change
Thursday, March 31, 2005 3:24 p.m. PST

I think Rhea's comments analogizing social investing to financial investing are right on point. Sometimes I fear that too many funders do not think nearly often or carefully enough about risk, time horizon, or theories and models of social change. The only thing I would want to add to Rhea's comments is that I think there is a critical role for funders to play (perhaps through institutions like the Environmental Grantmakers Association and the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, and also in cross-sectoral collaboration with the Neighborhood Funders Group and the Funders Committee for Civic Participation, etc.) in helping to develop, test, refine, and disseminate sociopolitical theories of environmental change. As she suggests, such theories should provide the context for informing strategy and for conceptualizing and measuring risk and progress. We certainly have a strong vested interest in clarity and credibility in these areas.

I have tried to avoid mentioning the "Death of Environmentalism" essay in these exchanges because I think the attention it is receiving is far out of proportion to the analytic contribution it makes. But I am going to break my little self-imposed rule to point out that, aside from the sensationalism of its "slaying the fathers" rhetoric, much of the essay's traction comes from the fact that it was dropped into a discursive vacuum. No one is performing, on a large enough scale and in a consistent enough way, the function of establishing, sustaining, and communicating persuasive analytical frameworks relative to which the health, vitality, and progress of the environmental movement can be charted. Were someone (like us!) to perform this function, it would be much more difficult for folks to construct "environmental movement" strawmen and to curry favor with the media by running around pointing out that those strawmen have no clothes.

So I fully agree with you, Rhea, that foundations "need to work with grantees to figure out how to make the short-term and longer-term strategies more effective." I'm inclined to emphasize the role that foundations, working together, might play in generating the knowledge that would inform more effective short- and long-term strategies. It is certainly appropriate for us to expect grantees to be deliberate and reflective in their work. But I also think foundations are better positioned to be in the knowledge-generation business than are most NGOs. We certainly have the resources to be about that work in a sustained, systematic, and collaborative way, if we felt (as I think we should) that it was essential to our effectiveness in helping to advance the movement. So in the funder-grantee partnership in this work, I'd probably allocate a much larger share of responsibility to the funders.

This comes back for me, in a way, to my preoccupation in this exchange with ideology (I suppose that it is characteristic of preoccupations, that all roads will eventually lead home). I understand the inclination to believe that environmentalism will get farther by blunting its ideological elbows than by sharpening them. It is just not clear to me that that is an effective strategy for social change of the magnitude that we think we need. Ideological contestation is a component of social change, and in the absence of clear, grounded frameworks for thinking through and apprehending the meaning and meaningfulness of change, it is too easy to substitute metaphors like "pendulum's swinging" and "seeking middle ground" for historically grounded analysis that encompasses the processes by which ideologies are produced and reproduced, as well as their relationships to the production and reproduction of social relationships. George Lakoff's work seems to me to be grounded in a particular interpretation of these processes, and focused on strengthening the progressive hand in ideological contests. I have some doubts about Lakoff's methods, but I believe that this basic strategy -- strengthening the progressive hand in ideological contests -- is a strategy that the environmental movement ought to explore in a serious way.

From: Rhea Suh
To: Hooper Brooks, Stuart Clarke, Enrique Salmón
Subject: Where do we go from here
Thursday, March 31, 2005 5:59 p.m. PST

I couldn't agree more with Stuart: the funding community needs to do more to build and disseminate the knowledge base around theories of change. Every day, program officers read proposals, reports, and evaluations. Every day, they engage in strategy discussions with grantees. What have we learned? What are the lessons, and are they broadly applicable? Have interesting patterns emerged? Where are the models? Think about the cumulative body of knowledge about social change that exists within each of our foundations. How can we distill that and, as Stuart points out, disseminate it?

I think the huge challenge here, however, is how we then evaluate these theories against each other. There is no commonly agreed-upon metric for how progress is measured, and there are real value differences around the definition of success. For example, what is more successful: a project that creates a collaborative, community-based coalition in a local watershed designed to help restore flows for native fish populations, or a lawsuit that forces the agencies to restore rivers for the same native fish? Is it possible or even desirable to have a standard? Nevertheless, there are clearly fundamentals that are translatable to a variety of issues and problems, and there is clearly a need and an ability to be smarter about how we craft our strategies.

I want to address some of the questions that Hooper raised in his email, regarding the need for "big" conversations. I think we do need to have these conversations, and I think they are actually already happening (or just about to happen). For example, with respect to foundations, the Environmental Grantmakers Association is planning a series of five regional gatherings for its members to brainstorm positive visions and concrete ideas for how our funding, and the field in general, could be more effective. The idea is that the regional "salons" will bring in speakers from the field to share their visions about how our movement can have greater impact in achieving change. This will be followed up by discussion around questions just like the ones posed by Hooper. How do we define success? How can we improve collaboration? How can we avoid diffusion or fragmentation? And to pick up on Stuart's contribution, how can we work together to build knowledge around social/environmental change?

I have to say I'm inspired by this dialogue over the last few days. And I'm inspired by the conversations I'm having with grantees these days as well. The movement is faced with overwhelming issues and challenges. But I believe we are responding, and we are responding with discipline, creativity, and excitement. Examples: in the face of "Healthy Forests," funders and NGOs met in Santa Fe to exchange new ideas about forest protection involving a decentralized, community-based, and tailored approach to restoration; in the wake of Kyoto implementation, funders and NGOs met with religious leaders in D.C. to discuss the amazing organizing efforts in congregations throughout the country on climate change; in the boomtowns of the West, environmentalists, ranchers, and hunters pile into public meetings to fight irresponsible energy development, talking about the value of "clean water, wildlife, and a Western way of life." We may not be winning legislative victories in Congress, but we are making progress on the ground in ways we would not have dreamed of five years ago.

As this is my last post, I wanted to thank Grist for hosting this forum and all of you -- Hooper, Stuart, and Enrique -- for a great conversation these past few days. While there are many things I feel fortunate about with respect to my job as an environmental grantmaker, having smart, caring, and dedicated colleagues at other foundations definitely is at the top of my list.

- - - - - - - - - -

Related Links:

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Adam Werbach follows up ‘Death of Environmentalism’ with ‘Birth of Blue’

Response to "Death": Part V

Ken Ward — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:56:10 -0800

by Ken Ward
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

An environmental-justice advocate insists he’s not dead yet

Response to "Death": Part IV

Ken Ward — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 13:18:01 -0800

by Ken Ward
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Adam Werbach follows up ‘Death of Environmentalism’ with ‘Birth of Blue’

An environmental-justice advocate insists he’s not dead yet

Environmental funders share blame for movement’s weak pulse

Ken Ward — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:11:09 -0800

by Ken Ward
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

In responding to "The Death of Environmentalism," activist Ken Ward writes, "If the future toward which we rush is folly, the solution proposed by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus is foolishness." In this excerpt from his full rebuttal to the essay, Ward describes the role environmental foundations play in frustrating effective campaigning, and suggests that if they intelligently directed their funding toward a coordinated climate-change campaign, they could catapult the issue to the top of the national agenda. "The necessary decisions could be made in a weekend conference with less than 100 people attending," he writes.

Foundations should be smarter in
dispensing their greenbacks.

Our environmental leaders are collectively stupid, write Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their "Death of Environmentalism." They argue that the major green groups' unwillingness to draw bright lines derives from self-interest, bad political judgment, and a failure of will.

This blanket indictment is neither accurate nor fair. It also raises the question of why the authors' murderous instinct was not aimed at environmental foundations. The long list of sins committed by major environmental organizations -- narrow policy perspectives, tech-oriented solutions, finely delineated problem statements, incremental approaches, and the failure to draw bright lines -- is a letter-perfect description of the conditions that attach to virtually every environmental foundation request for proposal.

It wouldn't take much to change that. The key role of a relatively small, intelligently invested funding stream in the right wing's ascent to power has been well documented. "The Buying of a Movement," a report by People for the American Way, for example, concludes that "Conservative foundations invest efficiently and effectively. They offer a clearly articulated vision of their plan for America, and they invest wisely to effect that vision. They are comprehensive in their funding strategies and extraordinarily generous in the size of their donations."

Right-wing funders operate from a business perspective, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus note. They see themselves as investors in an entrepreneurial venture looking to control the political equivalent of emerging business sectors. They look for IPO's with strong management teams and good business plans, and they guarantee a flow of investment necessary to build infrastructure and support a product launch. Environmental foundations boast total assets and annual grants that dwarf conservative funders. By one informed estimate, the total cost of the right-wing network of policy centers, advocacy groups, and media outlets that laid the foundation for seizing control of the national agenda was around $300 million. Environmental program grants alone from just 25 of the most activist-oriented environmental foundations total $850 million annually, almost three times what conservatives spent on their entire apparatus.

The money is there, yet environmental foundations are unwilling, or unable, to undertake a similar approach toward building power.

The terrific mass of foundation money is like a black hole altering the political trajectory of all objects within its gravitational force. One could even argue that our power has been reduced by funders' activity. The comparison with conservative foundations underscores that the myopic attention to narrowly defined, policy-oriented programs denies support to critical infrastructure and undermines power-oriented work.

One example is the experience of Green Corps, America's only training school for environmental staff. [Editor's note: The author is a cofounder of the organization.] Founded by staff of the state Public Interest Research Groups, the decade-old program is valued by environmental groups, which vie to hire its graduates. Green Corps alumni are prominent in the ranks of our next generation of environmental leaders.

Other than a hefty two-year grant from the Beldon Fund -- one of the few foundations that offer general support -- foundation grants account for less than a quarter of the Green Corps budget, and little of this support funds the training program itself. The bulk of the budget must be raised by contracting for field campaigns, and Green Corps curricula must emphasize one type of campaigning as a result. The program's leadership is never freed from the tyranny of the annual funding cycle to explore new initiatives, like founding a graduate academy or ensuring that graduates are up to speed on cutting-edge networking technology. Most telling, the average class size today is smaller than the first Green Corps class.

The total cost of Green Corps is less than many single-issue environmental grants. This scant support stands in stark contrast to the right wing, which invested early and heavily in its systems for identifying, tracking, testing, training, inspiring, and placing thousands of emerging leaders. Right-wing funders place a premium on "cultivating the next generation of conservative leaders by supporting their undergraduate work, linking them with conservative networks and internships, placing them with think tanks, and guiding them toward high-level government positions," says People for the American Way.

Moving beyond training, let's look at a classic example of how funder-imposed policy -- driven by short-term political calculation and closed-loop conversations with weak institutional environmental groups -- reduced our power.

As legislation to deregulate the utilities surfaced in the mid-1990s, state-level opposition coalesced throughout the country. In New Jersey, a broad-based coalition that I helped found began to grapple with how to frame a response. We decided to emphasize consumer opposition, but also to make the case that New Jersey should retain oversight over utilities to deal with long-range issues like climate change.

We were dumbfounded to learn that staff from the major energy-policy foundation made a decision to acquiesce to deregulation in order to advance set-asides for renewables, known as renewable portfolio standards (RPS). Our analysis that deregulation could be defeated outright in several states was dismissed, and our suggestions on policy ignored. Foundation staff made it clear that state deregulation was a vehicle to win RPS, and that support from the network of funders interested in energy policy was contingent on toeing this political line. State-based opposition to deregulation was squelched by foundation hardball.

There have been some shifts within the foundation world toward a broader view of power, with more enthusiasm for funding scrappy initiatives, and a hint of rethinking the wisdom of depending too heavily on wholly owned subsidiaries. But a quick glance at current funding guidelines and the latest list of grants by the key players in the Environmental Grantmakers Association -- which includes representatives from 250 foundations around the world -- shows little significant change.

I believe the leading environmental advocacy groups go as far as they can within the limits that constrain them. Getting grants renewed is one major limiting factor, and the collapse of effective protest is another. If our foundations had distributed the "hundreds of millions of dollars" in climate-change program funding mentioned by Shellenberger and Nordhaus in the form of block grants, I think we would have seen very different and much stronger environmental work. Change how foundations function, and we would have a whole new ball game.

What is possible? If just 25 foundations were to commit funding for a coordinated climate campaign on a percentage schedule of current grants -- 2 percent in 2006, 5 percent in 2007, 10 percent in 2008, 20 percent in 2009, and 25 percent in 2010 -- a five-year budget of roughly $554 million would be established. This seems like a pretty cheap price for saving the world. Private contributions to cover direct lobbying and electoral campaign costs might be reasonably pegged at half this amount, or $277 million, for a total of $831 million.

This approaches the level of funding necessary to put climate change on the national agenda, if used to support coordinated campaign activity (as described at length here). Such an effort would mobilize and dramatically expand the core of environmental support, with ripple effects throughout the populace. Climate change and our solutions agenda would figure at or near the top of issues in the next presidential election -- effectively our only national referendum. The rest of the environmental advocacy agenda would be immeasurably strengthened, and our organizations and institutions made more powerful. A true national debate on the single most important threat we face would begin.

Winning it, of course, is an entirely different matter.

For more, read Ward's full response to "The Death of Environmentalism."

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

Dramatizing the “death” of environmentalism doesn’t help urban people of color, or anyone else

Adrienne Brown — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 12:18:50 -0800

by Adrienne Brown
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

"Death" is such a harsh term -- can't we say "transition to a happier place"?

Adrienne Maree Brown.

Photo: Sophia Wallace.

Or, how else can I put this ... You don't have to fall out of the tree. Just climb down and join us on the ground. Let's talk.

If you work on environmental issues, chances are you don't know me. I represent the other other side. The one outside the greenhouse. I'm young, I'm colored, I'm female, I'm urban -- and environmentalism isn't reaching me like it needs to.

So I want to add a few thoughts to the "Death of Environmentalism" discussion: first, an argument for why environmentalism cannot die; second, a snapshot of who the environmental movement is missing; and finally, a few of the practical shifts I see as necessary for making this a worthwhile transition instead of a death whose dramatizing serves no one.

We live in the most frightening of times, the most fearless of times. Our president, the leader of the most profligate world power in recent history, opposes environmental regulations at home and multilateralism abroad. The majority of our country's citizens have been successfully lulled into thinking that the environment will somehow sustain itself. We don't have good examples of sustainable culture; instead of taking care of our own waste, we dump it on the rest of the world. Rather than encouraging careful resource use, pushing for more innovative and effective products and technologies, and promoting renewable energy, our government goes to war to hoard the natural resources of other sovereign nations.

We see it. The people you aren't reaching are not blind, we aren't unmoved. More and more young people are realizing every day that the whole world is paying the price for the way we live, and we are waking up to that reality with shame and with a desire to change it. But we often don't connect that desire, or the work we do in our own lives, with the environmental movement.

And with good reason. Come with me on a little journey called: I'm young, I'm colored, and I need a job. I need an education to get that job, and then I need that job to pay off the student loans. I gotta figure out some way to get to and from school or work as gas prices go up and public transportation costs go up. I have to hustle all day long, have to hope I don't get arrested while working for being Arab or black or Latino or Pakistani, have to go home and eat some packaged non-food and then turn and try to love someone when neither of us has access to the condoms and sex education we need to be really safe and empowered in our interactions. If I'm lucky, I'll get to take a minute and dull my mind with some substance and watch a couple of hours of television where humans cut open their skin and try to put someone else's face on, or compete to eat bugs for a million dollars. And at some point I get to sleep in my tiny home with a window that looks into someone else's window.

At the end of that day, I may not separate the glass from the paper, the plastic from the cans. I may not carry my own water bottle everywhere I go. For a lot of young people right now, the environment is an issue for the privileged or the issueless. People who feel they are becoming extinct care less about the extinction of owls and oak trees. We sit on buses that pump nasty black smoke into our air, dreaming of owning SUVs. Many of us don't see real, unfenced trees anymore. We don't see stars -- the blue of our skies is unreal. The natural world is becoming a place to visit or dream of, a privilege for those who can find work outside cities, or a trap for those in the migrant worker population who lack fair wages and work situations.

Overall, too many young people see the struggles of humans as separate from the struggles for a healthy environment. It isn't because we have bad intentions -- it's because a generation that does not care about the impact of its lifestyle on the environment can be easily manipulated for corporate greed. We are getting played out. And unfortunately, the environmental movement has actually helped enforce that disconnect by seeming to draw divisions between the natural world and its human inhabitants -- and by seeming to worry more about the former than the latter.

That is the context for the next stage of environmentalism. You have an oppressed, depressed, furious mass waiting to be mobilized. And sure, some of us eat at McDonald's and wear leather shoes -- but we feel it is possible to demand better from our government and from ourselves for our environment. We feel it is imperative to connect the different survival struggles we are engaged in if we truly hope to sustain a viable movement for change. You will not die if you try to link hands with us in this struggle, if you try to meet us halfway.

We are in a unique organizing space right now, fresh off the election, understanding that it is imperative to combine electoral organizing with community organizing with issue organizing, in new and unique ways. Environmentalists have done groundbreaking work in this arena, getting citizens informed and involved around policies and petitions. But the movement has failed to reach the urban masses, and it has fallen prey to the marketing of the right, which casts caring about the planet as goofy liberalism instead of instinctual self-preservation.

So I offer three transition steps for the leadership of the environmental movement:

Change your framework. You have to frame environmental issues in a way that makes sense for us and relates to the issues we care about. But you will have to get closer to us and to the work we're doing in order to make that happen. We're talking about racism -- meet us there. I know the research shows one thing, the statistics make your case; but they also make a case that the most pressing issues in my life should be stopping the prison industrial complex, stopping the HIV that's ravaging my community, stopping the president from cutting Upward Bound funding. There's a place for you in each of those battles, just as there's a place for those activists in the battle for the environment. It is not either/or. The loss of your borders won't mean a dilution of your vision, it will simply mean a larger, greater, more inclusive vision.

Be easy and appealing. You need to turn up the heat and the appeal for environmentally friendly products and practices, while putting time and energy into bringing down the price. It's not written anywhere that everything recycled has to look used and cost twice as much. Lose that sage color scheme and price your wares to Target. If you aren't willing to be a little savvy for the survival of the world, then how committed are you? Take five minutes and catch up to what appeals to the greatest number. The environmental movement needs to make its home in this real world of ours.

Stop the environmental evangelism. I say this as a loving criticism of the people who are at the forefront of this work: you often get so caught up in the sky-is-falling mentality of environmental work that you can only see the urgency of your own issue. That's not how to approach folks. Fiscally conservative people of color vote in their economic interest, not because someone approaches them on the street apoplectic about mercury in the water. Mercury in the water is a completely relevant topic for black folks, but not if we can't see our faces on and in that movement, and see our interests as clearly part of the platform. You've got to talk to folks about the things that will move them -- which means you've got to identify how your work relates to the issues that matter to other people.

As a young woman of color who doesn't do environmental work for a living, I believe environmentalism needs to become something that the masses can integrate into how we live our lives. It's nothing personal. Every issue-based movement needs to think in terms of solidarity and collaboration right now.

How this discussion can move forward into worthwhile proposals and actions -- that is the question. Stepping back and thinking about a vision for a movement is absolutely necessary. Dramatizing its slow and agonizing death borders on indulgent. Too often, people rush to say something is dying when it's merely in a period of transition. Be less presumptuous. Shedding an old skin is not death but renewal, and those who follow the life of the planet should grasp that better than anyone else.

Related Links:

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Adam Werbach follows up ‘Death of Environmentalism’ with ‘Birth of Blue’

Response to "Death": Part II

Ken Ward — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:04:42 -0800

by Ken Ward
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

An environmental-justice advocate insists he’s not dead yet

Response to "Death": Part I

Ken Ward — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:54:03 -0800

by Ken Ward
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Adam Werbach follows up ‘Death of Environmentalism’ with ‘Birth of Blue’

An environmental-justice advocate insists he’s not dead yet

Enviro-justice activists send a dispatch from a panel with The Reapers

Vivian Chang — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 11:32:34 -0800

by Vivian Chang
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Thursday, 3 Mar 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.

The Asian Pacific Environmental Network was invited to speak on a panel yesterday with "Death of Environmentalism" coauthor Michael Shellenberger, Taj James, executive director of the Movement Strategy Center, and Adam Werbach, past president of the Sierra Club. The goal was to broaden the debate about the future of the environmental movement that was ignited by Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' recent paper. The room at the World Affairs Council was packed with a couple hundred people, primarily activists, organizers, and funders whose question was, "Now what?"

In contrast to the eruption at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference where the Shellenberger-Nordhaus paper was first presented, there was little argument about the shortcomings of the national environmental establishment and the weak state of the movement. Adam Werbach asked, "Who here thinks the environmental movement needs to change dramatically over the next years?" Every hand in the room shot up.

We all know things are terribly wrong, that the frameworks of liberalism and environmentalism have failed, and that no social movement -- environmental, labor, racial justice, women, LGBT -- is being spared from the right's consolidation of power. People were hungry to hear new ideas and new approaches to solving environmental problems and building broad-based progressive alliances.

The questions Shellenberger is asking are the right ones. But the solutions he and other progressive environmentalists are offering -- progressives taking over the Democratic Party and groups like the Sierra Club, values-based messaging that focuses on jobs and health care, and Shellenberger's Apollo Project, meeting environmental and economic objectives through business development of a clean-energy industry -- still lack an adequate race or class analysis. "Who's going to benefit from the new green industry? Will the hierarchy stay the same when the change comes?" asked Ibrahim Abdul-Matin of the Movement Strategy Center.

If we are in agreement that things need to dramatically change, it can't just involve the usual suspects. Taj James noted that while Shellenberger managed to piss off a lot of mainstream environmentalists by declaring their irrelevance, he pissed off a bunch of other groups for not even acknowledging their existence. Michael Gelobter, executive director of Redefining Progress, and recent pieces in Grist have been noting, in particular, the absence of communities of color and environmental-justice (EJ) groups. Diverse constituencies must be involved to help define a new progressive agenda.

And for communities of color and the environmental-justice movement, the critique Shellenberger offers of the mainstream national environmental movement is nothing new. As an EJ organization, APEN has been asking and responding to these questions for more than 10 years, among our members and with local, national, and international allies working in grassroots communities of color and indigenous nations. We believe that those most affected -- people of color and poor people nationally and internationally -- are critical to shaping the vision and strategies to achieve true sustainability and equity.

Shellenberger's call to "bury the word environment" had white folks taking notice, if not quite listening to each other. Ironically, the EJ movement has been leading the call to expand the definition and place people squarely back into the environment since the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. In the best-case scenario, this controversial debate will open new spaces for diverse leadership and vision, and progressive environmentalists will see the opportunity for EJ groups to apply their alliance-building experience with labor and faith-based groups. But this new movement will require a shared vision and leadership that does not replicate former power dynamics.

So where do we go from here? While we start to redefine our movement's vision and strategy -- whether we are an environmental organization with a $50 million budget, a community-based organization with a $300,000 budget, an individual activist, or a foundation -- we need to ask ourselves what our role has been in this collective "stuckness."

We start where we're at, and build from there. There are very real material reasons for the state of progressive movements, and while they shouldn't keep us from moving forward, they need to be factored into new approaches.

Real wages continue to fall, but the cost of living continues to rise. Jobs, living wages, and affordable health care and housing are primary concerns.

At a time when the need for our work expands, funding has contracted. Progressive organizations have been forced to significantly cut budgets or close doors. But they haven't been hit equally, and we need to reexamine how resources are distributed throughout the movement to build diverse progressive institutions.

Bringing different communities and sectors together takes skill, trust, and patience. We need to create a shared vision, language, and principles to struggle together politically.

And as much as the new strategy has to appeal to values that speak to average people, we also need to be concerned about transforming worldview. Why should someone care about eviction if they're a homeowner? Why should you care about another community's toxic exposure if you're not living there? Political education and leadership development to get beyond self-interest is essential for the long-term. Building relationships with people and communities will allow for principled political struggle and real alliances. And we need long-term investment of resources to build this progressive infrastructure.

We hope that this series of earthquakes, culminating in the Big One -- the loss of the 2004 election -- has created a new opening in the landscape. Folks want to figure out where to go from here, as the long lines at the mikes throughout the discussion attested.

APEN has always operated within a movement-building context. None of us can go it alone if we're talking about transforming the world. And we're ready to build from here.

Related Links:

What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Yes, clothes really do make the activist

Lou Bendrick — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 17:38:45 -0800

by Lou Bendrick
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

If environmentalism is dead, then that ratty sweater has to go, too. Ditto for sandals as everyday footwear -- only one man ever pulled off that look, and that was during King Herod's reign. One more thing: piling your dreads under that knit cap makes your head look like a Jiffy Pop about to explode. Yeah, I'm talking to you, environmentalists. It's time to keep up appearances.

Suit up, don't give up.

I'm sorry to be the one delivering the Carson Kressley-style bitch slaps to all you greens, but someone needs to broach this tender subject. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and fashion does matter. So get up off the tufted fainting couch, blot your swollen eyes with some unbleached, recycled tissues, and let me have a look at you. Oh my. You do look flaky in those pants.

I know it's repugnant to suggest that we focus on sartorial matters while trying to save our steamy, doomed planet, but the other team is running up the score. In late February, The Washington Post ran an article oozing with ardor for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who'd worn a black military-style jacket and sexy boots to an army airfield in Germany.

"Rice boldly eschewed the typical fare chosen by powerful American women on the world stage," wrote Robin Givhan in the Post. "She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps." Givhan went on to say that Condi's attire was not "overt" or "inappropriate." (This makes me wonder: If a female Democrat had worn that attire, would the media have swooned? I can just imagine the headline: "Vampy Dem Slut Struts for Troops." But I digress.)

My point is, image consultants are working around the clock to ensure that next-generation oil barons keep their pudgy bottoms in the seat of power. These consultants know that even the simplest tactics can produce enormous results. If you don't believe me, slap a cowboy hat on your head and pepper your speech with folksy malapropisms, and see if you can sell a war.

Why all this focus on style? Well, it's no big secret that clothes send powerful signals. Humans long have worn animal skins and fur to convey dominance, sexuality, and power. If you doubt this, get thee to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, much to the chagrin of intellectuals everywhere, herds of people are racing by the predynastic Egyptian art to see mannequins in cat suits. They're part of the current exhibit "Wild: Fashion Untamed," which explores animalism expressed through clothes.

Let my sandals go.

Today, power is communicated by custom-made suits. We have television to thank for this trend. It most likely started in the 1960 presidential debate, when Richard Nixon, who was recovering from the flu, looked positively ghoulish next to the tanned, telegenic John F. Kennedy. To make matters worse, Nixon wore a suit that didn't contrast well with the television studio's background. Most radio listeners declared the debate a tie, but TV viewers gave the victory to JFK. Ever since then, presidential aides have been fretting over suit and tie color. Of course, image consulting is a tricky science, because the press and public are a fickle lot. Poor John Kerry was criticized for being too stylish, and then for trying too hard to be casual. All Kerry needed was a leopard-print tie. (Wow, I'm really good at this.)

Still skeptical? The proof is in the silken tofu pudding. My friend Karl Warkomski is not only a Green Party member, but also the mayor of Aliso Viejo, Calif. -- a remarkable feat in Reagan-swooning, Bushie-loving Orange County. At least part of his recipe for success is a Trojan horse strategy: he dresses like Thurston Howell III.

"We greens have to stop looking like we eat bark and live in a root cellar," says Warkomski, who sometimes accessorizes his preppy work attire with hemp canvas shoes, the eco-equivalent of bling. And his theory holds water: Aliso Viejo recently passed a seriously green building ordinance. I doubt Karl could have garnered support for it while sporting a "How did our oil get underneath their sand?" T-shirt (though he does wear that T-shirt underneath his dress-up clothes).

All I'm asking you to do is, like Karl, think about your image. Strategically. This doesn't have to mean selling your soul. There are manufacturers out there making ecologically intelligent clothes. And if you can't afford or find a fair-trade, Italian-cut, three-button wool suit for that speech on the merits of wind power, try buying secondhand. I once found a pair of late-model Prada shoes in my Sasquatch size at a used clothing store, so you never know. If you're still at a loss for where to buy pleather pumps, ask Umbra. Help drive up the demand for ecouture. (Yes, I just made that up.) Stop complaining about capitalism and make it your bitch.

Apathy toward image may be an expression of rebellion, but it's also a blown opportunity. You could be promoting a green lifestyle as one of vitality and flair, rather than one of dreary deprivation. Yes, my lovely, that flannel shirt makes me think of splitting wood. And no, it doesn't make me want to become a woodsman.

Before you toss that cup of wheatgrass juice in my face, I beg you to remember one thing: to be effective, you need to be taken seriously. In order to work on your nefarious liberal plan to make our planet healthier and safer for all of humankind, you have to get your shiny boot in the door.

Calling all radicals: Unite for Kerry-Boxer

Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair

Four emerging environmental leaders discuss the future of their field

Grist — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 14:00:55 -0800

by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

To continue the conversation about the ostensible "death of environmentalism," we invited four next-generation leaders to discuss the issue with one another via email. Herewith, in almost real time, we are publishing their thoughts in our pages. All the participants are fellows with the Environmental Leadership Program, which works with emerging activists and professionals to inspire social and political change. So is environmentalism bound for the morgue, or alive and kicking? Stay tuned this week to find out. Most recent post of the day.

From: Torri Estrada
To: Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash, Thompson Smith
Subject: Getting the ball rolling
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 7:56 a.m. PST

Dear Stephen, Swati, and Thompson,

There has been too little debate within the environmental movement about who we are and where we are going, and too few reflections on our strategy for environmental and social change. In fact, sometimes I feel like the "environmental movement" is less of a coherent movement and more like a bunch of residents in an apartment complex; we all live together, but we probably do not know many of the people in the building -- and maybe not even the people on our floor. Therefore, I have to applaud the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" for fanning the flames of debate. Their arguments have some merit, and there are parts of the paper that I agree with. I would like to step back and highlight a couple of key points I have taken away from it.

First, I think we need to define what the environmental movement is. The DOE paper defined the environmental movement in fairly narrow terms, partly due to its primary subject matter (global climate change) and its intended audience (mainstream environmentalists and foundations working on global warming). But the DOE paper itself, as well as subsequent debates about it, left out many important parts of the environmental movement and their contributions to keeping environmentalism alive: environmental-health advocates, the environmental-justice movement, the international "sustainability" movement, and the dozens of other grassroots efforts related to the environment.

While DOE critiques the narrow frame of environmentalism (for excluding the "human environment" and failing to connect to larger social, economic, and political issues and dynamics), the paper and ensuing debate suffer from a lack of diverse voices in this ostensible autopsy of the environmental movement. In this debate and others, it is very important that we bring together a broad range of voices to evaluate our environmental work and figure out what we need to do to either revive it or build something new.

While I agree with the DOE authors that we need to connect environmentalism (narrowly defined) to larger movements for economic and social justice (and a broader, richer set of progressive values), we also need to address the issues that divide us: race, class, strategy, and power (or our tendency to confuse having power with rubbing up against it but not having it). In the United States, these dynamics divide the movement(s). How can we expect to develop a proactive vision and a common set of values when we are so divided along these lines? The environmental movement needs to refocus on building a broad grassroots constituency to build long-term political power. In this effort, we need to be able to speak with a wide range of people, from the inner city to the farm, from the working class to CEOs, and to people of color, immigrants, and everyone in between.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts,
Torri

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: The things that matter
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 11:40 a.m. PST

Hi folks,

As an environmental-justice activist, I must confess that I read "The Death of Environmentalism" article with the mild interest I might exhibit overhearing distant cousins arguing at a family gathering; I found it interesting, insightful, and even entertaining, but not compelling or new enough to draw my attention away from figuring out what's for dinner. (Can you tell I'm writing this just before lunch?) By no means do I intend to trivialize the important insights communicated by Shellenberger and Nordhaus, nor do I underestimate the transformative potential of the article for a movement that often does seem mired in its own tactics. But for many frontline environmental-justice activists and organizers, these insights are neither new nor particularly profound.

To summarize three of the authors' main critiques of the environmental movement:

The environmental movement suffers from a myopic obsession with legislative and other technocratic policy "fixes" for environmental problems. The movement has failed to articulate a compelling and attractive vision for environmental progress, and fails to communicate in the language of values rather than obligations. The movement has grown increasingly isolated over the years, ultimately amounting to a self-replicating (and stubbornly homogenous) community that cannot forge long-lasting or effective alliances with other interest groups.

My perspective is that many people of color and indigenous people who have been disproportionately affected by pollution, and by the exploitative relationship human beings have to our natural resources, learned these lessons and were often arguing them years ago. The article would have greatly benefited from at least acknowledging that these critiques have been made before, and that many who fall at least under the broadly defined umbrella of "environmentalist" are already working with these lessons in mind. (Of course, as Torri points out, this raises the equally hairy question of what exactly "environmentalism" is, and whether environmental justice is indeed a separate movement.)

I'm going to focus on the second critique, and leave the other two for later discussion. One of the strengths of the environmental-justice (EJ) movement, which very broadly defines the environment as "where we live, work, play, learn, and worship," has been its ability to articulate a powerful and compelling vision of human health, justice, and sustainability. As a movement that has put human beings at the center of our struggles and says that we all matter, EJ resonates among many who find themselves alienated by the message inadvertently sent by the environmental movement that we only matter inasmuch as we are the problem.

At the first National People of Color Environmental Summit held in Washington, D.C., in 1991, over 600 delegates from across the nation gathered and, over the course of five days, crafted 17 Principles of Environmental Justice. The principles are a combination of visionary statements such as those affirming "the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction," and more pragmatic philosophies about how we do our work ("the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision making"). Although it's a bit of a running joke within the environmental-justice movement that we've been able to agree on almost nothing since then, the stabilizing force of these principles has been a crucial anchor for the far-flung reaches of environmental-justice struggles. The powerful vision and values communicated in the principles are the foundation upon which all EJ strategies, goals, and tactics are built, and they confer a strength of conviction and integrity that I've always seen as a tremendous strength of the movement (the EJ movement, that is)

This point was also made, by the way, by Peggy Shepard, WE ACT's executive director, at the Future of Transportation conference organized in Los Angeles this past weekend by the Labor Community Strategy Center. I'll share more later about this amazing gathering of community activists from across the nation who came together to discuss strategies for addressing transportation's undue impact on climate change, and on historically marginalized communities. Now that's the future not only of transportation, but perhaps of the very idea of what we consider to be "environmentalism."

OK, I spent way more time ranting than I intended to. Believe it or not I've got some nice stuff to say about the article ... but back to work for now.

Peace,
Swati

From: Thompson Smith
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash
Subject: Re: Getting the ball rolling
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 11:52 a.m. PST

Dear ELPers and Gristers,

Thanks to Torri for kicking off this discussion of the Shellenberger-Nordhaus piece with his usual incisiveness, and also his knack for doing it in a way that invites conversation rather than armed battle.

Certainly, Torri is right that the DOE piece defined environmentalism too narrowly, and that a wider vision of what constitutes the movement would have led S&N to more complicated conclusions. The environmental-justice movement is all about bringing together the usual green concerns with the imperative for social and economic justice. One of the central problems (which Torri was getting at) is that the various segments of the movement remain too segregated from one another, too unaware of what each is doing, too divided by the very barriers of race and class and gender we are working to overcome, too uncoordinated to really make effective use of the ideas and power that we might have in a more unified effort. I think the bridging of those divides is the most important contribution that ELP is making to the movement as a whole.

But I also think the problem runs even deeper. It is that too many of us fail to build into our work and our organizations a consciousness that the roots of our ecological crisis and the roots of our social inequities and injustices are deeply intertwined. The project of building a more sustainable society is ultimately inseparable from the project of building a more just society. This isn't just a matter of philosophy. It is also about the concrete problems we must overcome and the strategy we must use to get there.

This is arguably less true in dealing with the narrower issues that the "big greens" have traditionally addressed: regulation of pollution, preservation of land, etc. It is perhaps more true when we are dealing with the bigger issues that now threaten the entire globe, such as global warming, mass extinctions, the collapse of ocean fisheries, soil loss, and freshwater scarcity.

In my work in Montana for local and statewide groups, I have often found myself struggling against the cramped vision that S&N so forcefully critique. In a number of interesting ways, I think that poses one of the bigger ideological barriers to getting these groups to develop broader and more diverse alliances and memberships. The grandest hope extended by staffs and boards was simply to slow down the pace of environmental destruction. Few if any were interested in a bigger strategy to create a sustainable society. They wanted to declare more areas off limits to development or resource extraction. Fewer were interested in challenging the way we live where we live. Most hoped to be a fly in the ointment, to stop bad things from happening. Fewer were interested in putting as much energy into making positive things happen. The standard M.O. was purely reactive. Whenever the occasional board member would advocate better planning, a more long-term vision, and proactive efforts, the old guard usually responded with angry, cynical sneers. They commonly defined their duty as "putting out fires," and regarded anything less pessimistic as dangerously unrealistic, a waste of precious money and time.

But what we need to be doing is setting fires, so to speak. (Or in some cases literally, when it comes to the restoration of a healthy fire regime in the Rocky Mountain West. But that's another debate!) As Shellenberger and Nordhaus imply, there are two ultimately unrealistic aspects to the old approach. First, a defensive strategy can never win a war. And second, we are dooming any chance of creating a sustainable society by never really trying to create one. We need an offensive program, aimed not just at slowing the pace of destruction, but at creating a sustainable society.

I have the greatest admiration for the work of many of the older national groups. It would be foolish in the extreme for any environmentalist to think that those groups are anything but absolutely essential and deserving of our eternal gratitude (and continued support) for the astonishing accomplishments of the past several decades. To me, the implication of the points raised by Shellenberger and Nordhaus are not that the Sierra Club should no longer haul in millions of dollars to do its work. It should, and it should get even more money. (But it should, in the process, dramatically broaden the diversity of its staff and membership, and strengthen its connection to other groups.) There is a finite universe of funds available for environmental work. We need to expand that universe, and add to it new kinds of organizations that clearly link social justice and environmental sustainability in their core missions -- organizations that argue bluntly and boldly for the fundamental changes we actually need if we are to become a sustainable society.

Sorry, this is too long already! And I have a grant deadline! I look forward to hearing more later.

Tom

- - - - - - - - - -

Torri Estrada is a program officer at the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, N.Y., and co-director of Environmental Justice Solutions, which provides support to community-based organizations, social-justice groups, and the public sector in the areas of environmental justice and policy.

Stephen Moret is president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce and a former project supervisor with Trinity Consultants, where he advised industrial clients on air-quality issues.

Swati Prakash is the environmental-health director for West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT for Environmental Justice), a 16-year-old environmental-justice organization based in northern Manhattan.

Thompson Smith is director of tribal history and ethnogeography projects for the Salish-Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee, a department of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Until 2002, he was executive director of the Flathead Resource Organization.

Playing Well With Others

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: My Matchbox car is emission-free
Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005, at 9:44 a.m. PST

Good morning folks,

Torri and Tom, I appreciated hearing your thoughts yesterday, and it got me thinking about what we need to do to overcome the many social obstacles and power differences we've identified as some of the root causes of the environmental movement's problems.

Don't Fear the Reapers Introduction to a special Grist series on the alleged "Death of Environmentalism." Death Wish. An interview with authors of the controversial essay "The Death of Environmentalism." We've Got Issues. What we talk about when we talk about the future of environmentalism. Changing the Climate-Change Climate. Bill McKibben ponders whether environmentalism really is kaput. Rainbow Warrior. Dramatizing the "death" of environmentalism doesn't help urban people of color, by Adrienne Maree Brown. The Death of Environmentalism. The original essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. And plenty more. Check out all our deathly content.

The one strategy suggested by S&N that resonates very strongly with me is the necessity of working with the labor movement to be able to win on any "environmental" struggles. This is more than just a strategy that has long been used by many in the environmental-justice movement; indeed, it is a familiar way of life for many of us. People of color are disproportionately represented in the nation's most hazardous and dangerous jobs, a fact that led to the articulation of the eighth Principle of Environmental Justice, "the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment, without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment." The fact that people of color are more likely to face pollution and toxic hazards on both sides of the fence line has led to the evolution of the Just Transition movement, a natural forging of labor and EJ interests. Since 1996 this coalition of labor, economic and environmental-justice activists, indigenous people, and working-class people of color has been working to ensure the "just transition" of communities and workers from unsafe workplaces and environments to healthy, viable communities with a sustainable economy.

Here in New York City, WE ACT has worked with the Transport Workers Union Local 100 since 1997 to reinforce our demands that the New York City Transit Agency reduce the disproportionate number of dirty diesel buses garaged uptown in communities of color. Our shared perspective has always been that the health hazards created by diesel exhaust affect both workers and community residents, and a lack of accountability characterizes NYCTA's relationship to both groups. Indeed, as we approach our second decade of collaboration with the Transport Workers Union, WE ACT is expanding our analysis of vehicle emissions from focusing on local health impacts to understanding the contribution of vehicle-related air pollution to global climate change. Consequently, we find ourselves with a tremendous opportunity to work with our labor allies to encourage the creation of jobs in the public transportation sector through increased public investments in clean, modern, efficient public transportation that is accessible to all.

Tom, yesterday you talked about recognizing that the roots of our ecological crisis and the roots of our social inequities and injustices are deeply intertwined. I think that transportation is one clear example of precisely this reality. Transportation is a sector with unmistakably linked environmental and social-justice impacts -- or, more accurately, environmental impacts that can be at least partially traced to institutionalized social inequities (i.e., racism). The rise of suburbs and their supporting highway infrastructure in this nation was fueled in part by the post-World War II "white flight" of many middle-class families from urban centers. The redlining and economic divestment from the communities of color that were left behind in the city centers led to the deterioration of what, in many urban areas, had been a vibrant public transportation system.

The result is the well-known malaise of urban sprawl, which is understood and framed as poor planning or poor investment of transportation funding, but never as the result of the racism-fueled fear of cities.

However we choose to describe the root cause of this nation's obsession with cars (and hey, being from New Jersey I'll be the first to identify with that obsession, although my dreams of hydrogen-powered muscle car ownership remain in the realm of fantasy), the net impact is irrefutable -- a society of increasingly isolated individuals driving in separate cars, with a growing, irrational personal economic and global environmental cost. I agree with S&N that forging effective alliances to focus on creating a sustainable economy is a keystone in the architecture of a "new" environmentalism. The challenge I'll pose is whether the "new" environmentalism suggested by the authors, which operates on a national level and seems dominated by white men who already enjoy leadership positions, is sufficiently different from the old guard to avoid the many other pitfalls of old-school environmentalism -- those weaknesses both mentioned and not mentioned by the authors of DOE.

Peace,
Swati

From: Thompson Smith
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash
Subject: Re: My Matchbox car is emission-free
Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005, at 10:39 a.m. PST

Hey Swati, Torri, and Stephen,

Swati, you took words right out of my mouth. Allying with unions in our effort to broaden and strengthen the movement is important in the ways you describe -- as an essential part of diversifying environmentalism across both class and race, for both moral and strategic reasons. But I think it is also crucial in two other ways.

First, environmentalists, EJers, civil-rights activists, and progressives in every arena need to recognize that progressive work in general has been made much more difficult over the past quarter century by the decline of the union movement in the U.S. A big reason for the rightward lurch that S&N describe has been the evisceration of unions as a powerful countervailing force. Politically and socially, there is simply no replacement for a strong union movement.

This is obvious to some, but not to many enviros. We too often have a tendency, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus correctly note, to look at the trees rather than the forest. We see unions in specific cases taking obviously anti-environment positions, and we lose sight of the long-term importance of unions in fighting for a more progressive and rational country, and for a fairer distribution of power and wealth. That loss of vision is due in part, as Torri notes, to many enviros lacking a deeper systemic critique of the roots of the ecological crisis and its connection to the maldistribution of power and wealth.

As a result of that disconnect, we almost never see members of conventional "environmental" organizations walking the picket lines or helping workers trying to save or form unions. Here in Montana, we see workers picketing Stone Container or Louisiana Pacific one day for their crappy contract offers, and the next day they're buying the corporate line about the need to clear-cut every national forest in sight. Yet I've found myself talking to brick walls in trying to get environmentalists interested in working on that contradiction. EJ activists do this all the time, as Swati can attest. It's another reason why we need to bridge the yawning chasm between EJ and mainline environmentalism.

This leads to a second area of importance in developing alliances with unions. When unions were the heart of progressivism in the U.S., it meant that our movement as a whole was about protecting and enhancing people's livelihoods. It was about bread and butter stuff. Now (for those not in the heart of EJ) we're all about protecting life, but too little about livelihood. That is a big part of our political weakness. How are our groups, or the alliances we're a part of, going to help somebody get a good job?

Swati, let's continue the transportation angle on this, which I agree is crucial. And do we ever have stories of relevance to that issue from Big Sky country.

Onward through the fog,
Tom

From: Torri Estrada
To: Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash, Thompson Smith
Subject: Oh Death!
Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005, at 11:36 a.m. PST

Good morning my verbose comrades,

Sounds like we all agree the DOE's authors have not acknowledged the contributions, critiques, and visions of other key players in the environmental movement, defined broadly. I wholeheartedly agree with Swati that many of the critiques offered by DOE are not new (except for this discussion of values, framing, and vision, which I will prod us to discuss later), and I continue to be frustrated with the environmental movement's knack of "talking around" its weaknesses and shortcomings (among itself) without a deep commitment to real institutional change.

This leads me to another issue, related to what Swati referred to as the environmental movement's "obsession with legislative and other technocratic policy 'fixes' for environmental problems." I support the work of many progressive organizations outside the environmental movement. Many of these organizations make broad, strategic alliances within and outside their movements for social justice. But rarely, if ever, do they work with environmental groups. So that leads me to ask: Why don't other movements in the U.S. and abroad readily ally themselves in struggle with the environmental movement, especially the mainstream, national organizations?

I think part of the answer is that the strategies and tactics of the environmental movement are largely centered around legislative and technical fixes, while those of other movements are rooted in more structural/systemic change and issues of accountability. The environmental movement does not play well with others, partly because: 1) they think their work will be "diluted" and made less effective by taking on other issues; 2) they do not want to give up their agenda and their ability to control the debate on an issue (which may be partly driven by who funds them); and 3) they do not want to challenge their relationships to institutions, policies, and people who, in some cases, are helping to perpetuate larger social and economic problems that other movements are struggling to address. What do you all think?

I wanted to pose a few questions: Can you all identify the venues, alliances, and spaces where the environmental movement -- again, defined broadly -- is discussing and addressing its shortcomings? And where are the dialogues and alliances being built between the environmental movement and other movements, be it with labor, racial justice, etc.?

Too much to say ... I am off to a lunch meeting.

Torri

From: Stephen Moret
To: Torri Estrada, Swati Prakash, Thompson Smith
Subject: Re: Oh Death!
Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2005, at 10:23 p.m. PST

Hello fellow ELPsters,

I apologize for being a bit late to the party. Things have been busy in Baton Rouge!

My read on the DOE article overall is that it would not have become such a big deal if not for its rather provocative title. Although I am not personally a member of the Sierra Club, I found myself largely convinced by the arguments in Carl Pope's response letter. In particular, I agree with his assertion that the DOE article itself offered limited analysis to support its conclusions. This is not to say that I disagree with DOE's central thesis that major changes are needed.

At the same time, I think the response to the DOE article has provoked a very productive dialogue about the current and future status of the environmental movement, one that hopefully will lead to a better future for the movement itself and the environment.

While I'm not intimately familiar with the existing efforts to curb carbon emissions in the U.S., I was intrigued by the DOE argument that these existing efforts would do little to address the overall issue. If true, this would represent an indictment of the leadership of the environmental movement akin to Matt Miller's criticism of the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties (i.e., that their proposals fall far short of addressing the problems they purportedly are designed to solve) in his book The Two Percent Solution.

I also agree with the point made in DOE that the environment has wide but shallow political support among the electorate. People want the environment to be better, and the air and water to be clean, but they implicitly make trade-offs in how they vote. Some of the topics advanced by environmental groups (e.g., issues like non-native plant species) do not resonate very much with the public at large. My opinion is that the lack of a groundswell for modern environmental policy issues is because the most pressing concerns (e.g., clean air and water) largely have been addressed by prior legislative efforts. Yes, there are still debates about coal-fired power plants, etc., but I believe the public at large has few urgent environmental concerns.

In my personal view, global warming is a different environmental issue than clean air, etc., in terms of the scale of the problem, the level of public understanding of it, and the tactics and strategy required to address it. To indict the entire environmental movement because it hasn't convinced the American public to take a particular set of positions on this very complex issue is, in my view, a little unfair and naive. I personally am not yet convinced that we fully understand the scale of the problem and the full set of potential solutions. With more time, research, and communication, we may yet develop a much broader shared perspective on the issue, as well as new approaches to address it.

Too often, I have perceived the global-warming mantra to be focused on legislating behavior that we can reasonably expect to cause significant economic hardship. Shouldn't there be some reasoned debate about the trade-offs, e.g., less access to health care for vulnerable populations? For example, all across the country, states are struggling to maintain their Medicaid programs due to spiraling costs. With less resources to go around, the poor are most likely to get hurt first and worst. Whatever solutions are proposed for global warming in the U.S. should be sensitive to this.

Heading to bed...

Stephen

- - - - - - - - - -

Power Back to the People

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Re: Oh Death!
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 10:37 a.m. PST

Hi everyone,

On my way to work this morning (after dropping off my dry cleaning at the non-perc-using "Muhammad's Environmental Cleaners" on my block in Central Harlem), I was mulling over what the term "environmentalist" really means, and what exactly we are referring to when we talk about "the environmental movement."

How would many of us, whether we label ourselves environmentalists, environmental or social-justice activists, progressives, independents, or just regular folks with a conscience, describe what it is that we are working toward? Maybe we would use simple terms like wanting a world in which there is enough to go around, and where everyone enjoys the basic right to a healthy environment and livelihood. Many of us recognize the parallels between spatial and temporal inequities in the distribution of so-called environmental necessities like clean air and clean water. In other words, an economic and political system, and culturally-defined habits of consumption that give rise to gross demographic and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of pollution and environmental "amenities," also encourage the depletion or disruption of natural resources today, with costs pushed off to some vague time in the future. For the nascent climate-justice movement, linking social justice with what we could call generational justice must be at the heart of any attempts to halt climate change. (For more on this, check out the "10 Principles for Just Climate Change Policies in the U.S." articulated by the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.)

Of course, it is only natural that people tend to prioritize the "here and now" over the "out there and later." Rather than bemoan this human instinct to preserve what is nearest and dearest to us as precisely the kind of provincialism that undermines any attempts to tackle the global-scale, decades-long phenomenon of climate change, I think we should turn this into a strength. Returning to a more grassroots level, building a base, and encouraging sharp analysis of the relationship between our health and well-being, the health of the environment, consumption patterns, and politics will restore the onus of responsibility for environmental decision-making to everyday people. We need to reclaim this responsibility (and whatever power is associated with it) from the inner circles of the Washington, D.C., Beltway where we allowed it to migrate sometime between the first Earth Day in 1970 and the passage of the technically complex, nonprofit-influenced Clean Air Act of 1990.

As for the environmental movement growing increasingly isolated over the years: we should note that many large environmental organizations remain more or less as distant from the people and communities that are the most affected by environmental damage as they were in 1990. That is the year that the Southwest Network for Environmental & Economic Justice sent a letter to the "Group of Ten" (the 10 largest environmental organizations in the country) criticizing the racism inherent in each organization's activities. Notably, this letter argued that a "resolution of the environmental crisis," could only come about through "a people's strategy which fully involves those who have historically been without power in this society."

Poor people, working-class people, and people of color are certainly at the heart of this category. But I would warn us against repeating the fallacy of viewing progress on climate change (or any other environmental issue) as a trade-off to other basic human needs and rights, like access to affordable health care. Stephen, I'm not sure I understand how transitioning our economy to one that produces fewer greenhouse gases requires the siphoning of public resources away from other fundamental rights such as basic health care -- although I do agree that our response to global warming can't be about legislating behavior (unless it's corporate behavior, where I'd say legislation absolutely must be a key tactic). Indeed, the heart of S&N's argument, which I thoroughly agree with, is that one of the major weaknesses of the environmental movement has been allowing environmentalism to be framed as somehow about preserving the rights of nonhuman elements of our world (like "climate") at the expense of people's basic needs.

The truth for me is that healthy jobs that pay a living wage, access to affordable health care, and the right to live in a world where our homes are not at risk of being destroyed by the vagaries of anthropogenic climate change are all basic, attainable rights that are part of one package -- not a "pick your poison" deal.

Well, I'm off to scrounge up some lunch before the snow hits New York.

Peace,
Swati

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Who's moving these discussions?
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 11:29 a.m. PST

Torri,

Yesterday you asked who was having the conversations within the environmental movement about alliance-building and moving forward with new strategies -- and then the very next email I got was from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. The email was announcing a conversation their director will be participating in next Wednesday with one of the authors of "Death of Environmentalism" and a leader from the Movement Strategy Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the whole thing being moderated by a leader from Redefining Progress. (Yeah, yeah, we all know the Bay Area leads the way with everything pertaining to the environment and social justice.) The conversation, called "Headed to an Early Grave or a New Lease on Life?," is striking in its illustration of how people of color, women, working-class people, and others who have historically been left out of the center of conversations about environmental goals and strategies should be (and already are) leading the way out of the "movement's" current identity crisis.

Still lovin' my city,
Swati

From: Thompson Smith
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash
Subject: Re: Who's moving these discussions?
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 12:01 p.m. PST

Dear folks,

As usual, I'm grateful to be in conversation with my fellow ELPers, and for the chance to engage with such trenchant questions and insights. Here's another two cents' worth:

First, Swati's right on about the need to turn the localism of much of our environmental work into a strength rather than a limitation. Interestingly, Swati, you're echoing Carl Pope on that score. But if we're going to do that with the problem of global warming, which manifests locally but can only be assessed in its global dimensions, we have to face the special problems that entails. (Like the Michael Crichtons of the world, who distort the issue by seizing upon local anomalies that seem to suggest global warming isn't happening, when the patterns can only be discerned by looking at the world as a whole.)

All of this means the alliances among local groups (as well as between local groups and national/international groups) have to be strengthened immeasurably. That's going to be one of the most crucial tasks facing us, and one of the greatest funding priorities, if we are really to deal with a problem so awesome in scale and complexity that it often seems just too overwhelming. Stephen's right that global warming is a different kind of problem.

One crucial typo I made in my first email was in saying that environmental funding is finite. I meant to say it's not finite. Just a minor boo boo. In fact, I think both S&N and Pope are wrong in implying that it is finite. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to get into a fight for money. We need to increase the overall pool of money. We need the Sierra Club. We need WE ACT. We need ELP. And we also need some new organizations that lack the baggage of the old ones and can help build effective, powerful alliances. I have personal experience in seeing the futility and wasted time and energy that can be consumed in trying to change the identity and culture of a long-established organization. We should realize that the more effective and energized the movement as a whole becomes, the more money it will attract.

[Adam] Werbach suggests reshaping the Democratic party. That's a debate that needs to happen. My only reaction to that idea is that it would be disastrous if it means no longer even trying to talk to the huge swath of red-staters who hear only from Rush Limbaugh. (Montana is a good example of how more fluid things are politically than they may appear -- in 2004, Bush won about 60 percent of the state, but by nearly the same margin, we rejected an industry bid to re-legalize cyanide heap leach mining, put a Democrat in the governor's mansion, and restored Democratic control to both the Senate and the House.)

All of us, as well as S&N, Pope, Grist, you name it, seem to agree that we need to define our vision and effectively communicate it at the level of basic values and emotions. But before we jump into questions of what that vision should be, we need to ask how are we going to define it. The process is crucial, and offers a great opportunity to begin forging the very alliances we are talking about. I believe there should be a series of expertly facilitated regional meetings around the country, involving the direct participation of all these groups, working through a well-proven process that will help us arrive at a common vision. I would recommend the oddly named "Technology of Participation," a wonderful technique developed through the Institute of Cultural Affairs in inner-city Chicago. Their method really makes everyone feel they have a stake, and results in usable strategic action plans, not just a document that sits on a shelf and gathers dust.

We also have to keep in mind just how basic we have to get in defining that vision. Swati, I think the simple terms you mentioned are a good start, but I would argue we have to get to something even simpler -- single words: Fairness. Respect. Life. Responsibility. This is Kristin Grimm Wolf's thing in helping design effective media campaigns. Once we've defined that "vision thing," she and similar folks should be engaged in helping design our short-, medium-, and long-term public-education campaigns. They know what works and what doesn't far better than we do.

Advertising and messaging experts can also help us address the ways we start out at an inherent disadvantage in combating the right. One reason why they can speak in bumper stickers more easily is that they are flowing with the cultural milieu. Let's face it, in some ways, we're trying to change basic aspects of mainstream U.S. culture, and the sooner we face that, the more effective we will be in working on it. Since at least the early 20th century, mainstream U.S. culture has been consumer culture. For far longer than that, it has been an aggressive culture that prizes risk and competition. Carl Pope talks about the need for us to champion the value of prudence/prevention over risk/retaliation. That's tough work in the arena of mainstream U.S. culture, but his comments don't seem to reflect an awareness of that difficulty. The GOP and the corporate advertising that drowns us every day are championing risk, competition, consumption, and self-interest, while we're trying to pull us toward different values -- ones that are indisputably a part of U.S. culture, but which have been increasingly marginalized for the past century (and especially the past 25 years). The last time Americans collectively embraced sacrifice was World War II. That's a long time ago, and we need to understand the obstacles to resurrecting that rather lost aspect of the national culture.

Stephen, I think your point is important about the danger of advocating solutions that won't deliver what we're claiming they will deliver. That deserves more discussion.

OK, I've got one elder in here describing the logging of the old-growth ponderosa pines here in the early 20th century, and another elder telling a story about playing hooky in first grade. She didn't speak English too well, and thought her classmate was inviting her to play a game. I've gotta record 'em --

Hasta luego,
Tom

From: Stephen Moret
To: Torri Estrada, Swati Prakash, Thompson Smith
Subject: Re: Who's moving these discussions?
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 1:58 p.m. PST

Dear ELPsters,

Thanks, Swati and Tom, for your thoughts. As someone not intimately engaged on a day-to-day basis with the broader environmental movement, I really value what I'm learning from you.

Swati, you implied I think that there would not necessarily be a significant economic cost to addressing the global-warming issue in the U.S. Do you have any sense of what the cost would be of the most plausible solutions? My concern about Medicaid was that if economic activity was significantly curtailed, then there would be less tax revenues for state (and federal) governments to fund Medicaid, not to mention other programs that serve vulnerable populations. Before our country engages in a highly costly solution (if that is the case), we need to consider the trade-offs and whether additional research could lead to a better answer. Maybe I just need to be educated on the actual costs.

Every day I interact with CEOs and other executives of large banks, manufacturing firms, law firms, entrepreneurial organizations, etc. To reach these groups will require a fairly succinct and fact-based description of the problem and potential solutions, including the likely cost and impact on their businesses. Has the environmental movement done this? I don't think so. Just like the email thread so far, most of the discussion focuses on how to drive a certain set of actions that are implicitly in line with the overall solution. But what, roughly, is the cost? What will be the impact on the private sector (and others)? Isn't there some pain involved? If so, how much and who will feel it? Can this be described fairly clearly? If not, how can the coalition be broadened? Too often I fear that the environmental movement is spending most of its time talking to itself.

Another concern I meant to note earlier is how the "far right" or "radical right" has been portrayed. Is someone a member of the "radical right" if they have not yet been convinced of the science behind global warming or of the proposed solutions? Is the "radical right" the majority of the population that recently elected George W. Bush? A huge portion of this country is better described as disengaged and/or unconvinced of the arguments associated with global warming. How can those folks be reached?

Incidentally, I should offer a footnote here that I am representing my personal perspective, not that of my organization.

Stephen

From: Thompson Smith
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Swati Prakash
Subject: Any economists out there?
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 2:28 p.m. PST

Stephen and other ELPers,

That's a great point about the need for clear, concise, and extremely well-documented materials to help someone in your position explain to business leaders the economic impacts of various responses to global warming. Clearly, it's going to take a lot to overcome the resistance of those who are, in the short term, benefitting most from the existing system. I would add that you would also need materials explaining the best estimates of the economic impact of doing nothing or of accelerating the warming of the planet. From what I've seen, the social costs will be staggering even in the most optimistic prognoses -- that is, even if we act aggressively and immediately -- and will soon overwhelm the growth-related benefits of a carbon-intensive economy.

Any help out there, econ-enviros?

Tom

- - - - - - - - - -

Building a Better Babel

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Re: Any economists out there?
Friday, Feb. 25, 2005, at 1:51 p.m. PST

Stephen,

You've raised a very valuable point about my needing to be able to speak in the language of dollars and cents, and I'll commit to trying to figure this out more in the context of climate change.

The problem is that the concept of public revenues is, in and of itself, a multiple-language, territorial thing. For example, the dollars that would be saved by the public health-care system (including Medicaid) in reduced visits to emergency rooms for asthma attacks, or the dollars that would be saved by private companies with less work and school time missed due to respiratory illnesses, are not factored in to the New York City Transit Agency's budget when they're telling us they can't afford not to use diesel fuel -- or into the board of education when they say they can't afford to install pollution-control devices on school buses.

Also, as Tom points out, there is a very real (and currently hidden or publicly subsidized) economic cost to climate change that has to be a point of reference for any estimates of financial costs of preserving environmental and public health and well-being. Although I don't know much about how the whole "public tax revenue base" is related to public benefit programs, I do know that here in Harlem, there seem to be an awful lot of development projects -- like the Home Depot that will bring hundreds more cars and trucks into the neighborhood every day, or the General Motors car dealership that will sell more of these cars -- that are receiving hefty public subsidies in the form of tax waivers.

Maybe this mega-eco-economics analysis we set out to do could include an estimation of how that both adds to the economic costs of climate change, and subtracts from the public coffers with the disproportionate socioeconomic impacts that you point out.

More to come,
Swati

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Onwards!
Friday, Feb. 25, 2005, at 1:55 p.m. PST

Happy Friday everyone,

Oooh, just as the conversation is getting nice and juicy, we're at the end of the week already. But, as you point out, Tom, we have to be having these conversations on more of a local level as well as in forums like Grist. And by "conversations," I don't mean the self-satisfied academic banter that often characterizes panels of speakers (who often look mighty similar) talking at each other and then going back to their own worlds with an interesting story to tell and no other evidence of having been out of their office for several hours. I mean the more deliberate and thoughtful self-reflections that most of us and our organizations -- already overcommitted and under-resourced -- find ourselves sacrificing by default. I mean conversations (or better yet, facilitated dialogues) that bring together an unconventional array of groups and individuals with a shared commitment to giving priority to voices that are not often heard in public venues, and to setting aside both defensiveness and overconfidence and being willing to engage in real learning.

I'm wondering how we, the environmental movement, could be engaging in more fundamental political analysis/political education in developing a theory (or theories) of how the world works, of the root causes of social and environmental problems, as a way to reinforce the foundation of our work. My subway reading last night was revisiting a favorite -- Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy -- in which Rinku Sen writes, "It is virtually impossible for an organization to achieve long-term change without a coherent picture of the world and a theory of how change is effected."

The same goes for a movement, however diffuse and broadly it is defined. A part of our current movement paralysis is, perhaps, the ever-decreasing numbers of people, organizations, and perspectives engaged in articulating the "environmental movement's" theory of change. Broadening the base and scope of this kind of political education and analysis helps local struggles from falling prey to NIMBYism. For example, the community leaders WE ACT works with to demand accountability from the New York City Transit Agency for cleaner and healthier fuels have made the connection between diesel fuel and the social and racial justice impacts of the oil industry at every point in the life cycle of oil and diesel, and have made the connection between local oppression and the oppression of other communities of color.

Related Links:

Lawsuit accuses Virginia power company of poisoning Dominican community with toxic coal ash

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

Bill McKibben sends dispatches from a conference on winning the climate-change fight

Bill McKibben — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:09:15 -0800

by Bill McKibben
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Tuesday, 25 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

A crisp, cold, blue-sky New England day, fresh snow on the ground, and everything right with the world.

Except that last night, as I was preparing to attend a three-day conference on climate change here in Middlebury, Vt., yet another disturbing report on global warming drifted across the net. This one comes from the International Climate Change Taskforce, co-chaired by Stephen Byers, a Tony Blair confidant from the U.K., and Olympia Snowe, the Republican senator from Maine. In one sense, it's nothing new: yet another document from moderate world leaders calling for urgent action and imploring the U.S. to join with the rest of the developed world to get something done. File it with similar reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the Nobel laureates, all the rest. This one's designed, apparently, to function as Blair's talking points for the coming year, during which he will serve as head of both the G8 and the E.U., and has promised to make climate change a top priority.

In another sense, though, the report is actually quite startling. It posits a new number as the climate crisis point: 400 parts per million atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. That concentration, the report says, has a better-than-even chance of eventually producing temperature increases of 2 degrees centigrade -- enough to trigger widespread drought, crop failure, and rising sea levels. That 400 ppm number is very low; previously, most crisis scenarios focused on 550 ppm, which would represent a doubling of pre-Industrial Revolution carbon concentrations. It's as if the American Medical Association suddenly announced that you needed your cholesterol down below 100 or your heart was going to go. This is especially bad news given that the earth's CO2 levels are already north of 375 ppm and increasing by two parts annually. Clearly we are heading straight past the 400 level. Recognizing that, the report's authors call on us to limit the amount of time the planet spends above the 400 mark, and to get back below it well before century's end. Which essentially means: change everything, right away.

None of which will be easy (an understatement underscored by another report that came in overnight, this one showing that China's economy grew 9.5 percent last year, its fastest increase in eight years). But it does provide a stirring background for the "What Works?" conference that kicked off today at Middlebury College, a semi-closed session designed to figure out why the United States has lagged behind the rest of the planet when it comes to global warming, and how we might catch up.

It's a conversation that clearly needs to happen. Since climate change emerged as an issue in the late 1980s, the U.S. environmental movement has floundered in its efforts to make progress. No legislation of any consequence has come close to passing the House or Senate; none of the three presidents in that period have really put their muscle behind any action; and the current administration has about as much interest in the issue as that of, say, Warren Harding. In short, pretty much a total rout, especially in contrast to Western Europe and Japan, where the progress, while modest and halting, has been real.

Conference co-organizers Jon Isham, a Middlebury economist, and Sissel Waage, a former Natural Step analyst, have assembled an interesting cast of characters, concentrating less on the big environmental groups and their funders than on trenchant critics and people with local success stories to tell.

Tomorrow morning, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus will host one of the first face-to-face discussions of their ubiquitously emailed paper "The Death of Environmentalism." Billy Parish, head of the Climate Campaign, will present plans for a large-scale program of civil disobedience. Blue Vinyl producers Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold will show rushes from their in-progress film Melting Planet. And John Passacantando, who ran the most dynamic atmosphere advocacy group, Ozone Action, before taking over the reins at Greenpeace USA, will moderate a Thursday morning discussion about the climate crisis. Groups working with supermarkets to cut energy use, leaders of programs training citizens to give speeches on climate change, even Middlebury students who have handed out thousands of compact fluorescent bulbs to Vermont homeowners will try to identify the rhetoric, the metaphors, the leverage points that might finally spur us into action. "We want to reflect on and appreciate the power of networks," says Isham. "Also the power of strategic thinking. And maybe most importantly, the power of a having a positive vision."

In that case, it might be best not to pick up today's edition of The New York Times and read the article datelined "Over the Abbott Ice Shelf, Antarctica." The one in which scientists describe the relentless thinning of huge glaciers, the disintegration or retreat of "ice shelves the size of American states." In some parts of the Antarctic, according to a British survey, "large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under a frozen cloak."

In the end, it doesn't matter what anecdote you choose, what precise parts-per-million figure you pick as the threshold of peril. Here's what we know: The U.S. has wasted the 15 years since climate change emerged as a real problem. Its environmentalists have failed to make measurable progress on the greatest environmental challenge anyone's ever faced. So we better come up with something new.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

Wednesday, 26 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

The bad boys of American environmentalism made their case this morning, and they made it well. By the time Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus had finished presenting the data that led to their famous "Death of Environmentalism" paper, most of the large crowd gathered for the "What Works?" conference here in Vermont were convinced that they had seen where the future lay for the climate-change movement -- or at the very least, where it didn't.

Dressed in fashionable black and toting their laptops, the pair looked like what they are: one pollster, one PR guy. They didn't fit the cultural profile (hiking boots, ratty sweater) of Vermont environmentalists, and they'd pissed off a good many in the crowd with their paper's no-holds-barred attack on the big enviro groups. But when they plugged in their PowerPoint, they had the goods. In fact, the data they presented were even more striking than the argument they'd made in their paper.

The statistics came from a data set on North American values collected by a Canadian polling firm over the last decade -- and what they showed was that, quite simply, this country is deeply conservative and getting more so. The battle of values has been won, at least for the moment, and not by us. For instance, what percentage of Americans do you suppose would agree with the following statement: "The father of the family must be a master in his own house"?

1992: 42 percent of Americans agreed
1996: 44 percent
2000: 49 percent
2004: 52 percent

Across 105 different values -- everything from "concern for appearance" and "joy of consumption" to "acceptance of violence" and "xenophobia" -- they found that over the past decade, an already generally conservative country has been making a beeline in the direction of status and security. A decade ago, 30 percent of Americans thought men were naturally superior; now the number is 40 percent. No matter what you ask, be it whether "to relieve tension a little violence is OK," or "it's important that people admire things I own," the numbers show a nation almost inconceivable to your average card-carrying Sierra Clubber. A decade ago, 17 percent of Americans thought that pollution was necessary to preserve jobs; now the number is 29 percent. In 1992, 66 percent of Americans said they "discussed local problems with people in my community," a number that has since dropped to 39 percent.

In other words, the sweet notion that we still live in a world where most people more or less agree with a worldview congenial to environmentalism -- and particularly to the difficult changes required to deal with global warming -- is simply wrong. Dorothy, we're not in 1978 anymore. Or, as Nordhaus and Shellenberger put it, there's been a "Fundamental Political Realignment."

In the face of that alignment, they insist, it's pretty pointless to keep doing what you've been doing. Instead, the answer is to look at the core values that progressives share, and then, more importantly, at what they label "bridge values," areas of agreement that "both our people and the people we need to reach could potentially share." They were less specific about what those might be, though they returned several times to their advocacy of the Apollo Project, the effort to address global warming not by talking about carbon but by talking about jobs and communities. Even so, they were unwilling to wax very optimistic. "I'm not convinced it's a likely outcome that we'll take back the government any time soon," said Nordhaus. Realigning politics, realistically, might take 20 years.

It's true that, as in their paper, the pair constructed a few straw men: The Sierra Club chapter in Boulder, Colo., can't really be obsessed over the question of whether or not dogs should share hiking trails with people. (Can it?) But whenever they returned to the sheer weight of data on how Americans see the world, one could sense the audience, almost against its will, agreeing. "One of the things we've noticed is that a Darwinistic economy seems to beget Darwinistic values," said Shellenberger. "There's a drift toward sexism, ecological fatalism, patriarchy." Well, yes -- if we're honest, that seems to describe the America we live in right now.

"We're asking you to join us in the deconstruction of environmentalism, not out of a sense of nihilism," said Nordhaus, "but so that we can come together to reconstruct an alternative vision."

There's something almost exhilarating in knowing how bad a situation really is. Spared the false hope that maybe things will get better on their own, at least you have permission to think expansively about what to do differently.

Where Do We Go, Where Do We Go Now?

Thursday, 27 Jan 2005

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Here's the different thing about this conference. Although participants spanned the generations, it was organized in large measure by 20 students here at Middlebury College. Some were already seasoned activists (or as seasoned as one can be at 21); more were new to the issue. But few had spent time in D.C., and none had been deeply imprinted with any one way of doing things. And so, when the gathering turned, as gatherings do, to What Do We Do Next, a fascinating array of projects and voices emerged.

For instance, one group had put together a project designed to flip Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) in favor of the McCain-Lieberman climate legislation. The group knew where he went to church and who his priest was; they had the list of his campaign contributors, and were strategizing about which ones might be willing to put a little pressure on.

Another set was working with Ben & Jerry's on marketing and packaging their newest flavor, "Fossil Fool," projected to replace (you read it here first) "One Sweet Whirled" as a way to raise awareness about global warming.

A third group was busy fine-tuning its Flat Earth Award website so that it would be ready for the afternoon launch of a new annual prize. If you click through, you can vote for Michael Crichton, Rush Limbaugh, or S. Fred Singer as this year's recipient of the prize for best twisting of the scientific consensus on climate change.

And a fourth group -- just as well-scrubbed, well-organized, and polite -- was busy laying the groundwork for a possible summertime siege of Ford Motor Co. headquarters in Detroit, a large-scale peaceful protest designed to highlight the fact that though it talks the talk, Ford doesn't drive it; its vehicles, in fact, have the lowest average mileage of the Big Three U.S. automakers. (In keeping with the generational dictum that if it doesn't have a website, it doesn't exist, those interested in this trek to Motown can check out EnergyAction.net.)

The point seems to be -- we're at a loss. No one knows for sure what's going to work next. The "Death of Environmentalism" survey data I wrote about yesterday makes it clear that "more of the same" is probably not a very wise strategy. And so there's a casting-about, an attempt to probe what might break us out of the box canyon into which we've wandered. John Passacantando, the gregarious CEO of Greenpeace USA, summed it up in a rousing speech this morning: "We need to take in all the data we can, and all the strategizing and theorizing. And then you need to throw it all out, and just try stuff." (Greenpeace, by the way, has decided to soften its tactics for the moment; this year's biggest project will be a kayak exploration of the North Pole designed to show just how fast the melt there is proceeding.)

From a certain point of view, all that's disheartening -- like, we have no idea where to go. But oddly, the mood around this gathering seems almost giddily hopeful. If you have no idea where to go you just might stumble down the right road. Historical parallels abounded: Billy Parish, the quietly charismatic leader of the nationwide campus movement Energy Action, was quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: "the more I learn about all this, the more frustrated I get, and the more I want to lay my body on the line." But it was also clear that the younger activists were not prisoners of past strategy. Many were quick to point out that their generation was not going to respond to a negative message.

For a long time, much environmentalism has appealed primarily to reason. But at least in the case of global warming, reason has proved insufficient. I can explain to you why an SUV is illogical, but you weren't buying it for logical reasons in the first place; the world is more complicated than that. What everyone gathered for this conference has in common are a nightmare about a world too hot, and a dream about a world cooler in many ways (though perhaps not quite as cold as the 20-below temperatures that greeted early arrivals this morning). How to share those dreams in a way that they'll get into other people's heads and hearts -- that's the task ahead.

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

A special series on the alleged “Death of Environmentalism”

Grist — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:26 -0800

by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Environmental leaders were rather dismayed late last year when upstarts began offering high-profile obituaries of their beloved movement.

Is environmentalism dead?

We are reminded of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which a wizened old man is offered to the collector of dead bodies in plague-ridden London.

"I'm not dead," the geezer wheezes. "I'm getting better!"

Replies the hulking young man trying to give him away, "You're not fooling anyone, you know. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

Is environmentalism ready for interment?

That's the none-too-subtle conclusion of "The Death of Environmentalism," an essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, a pair of strategists and organizers who've worked with a number of environmental groups over the last decade. As if the title were not provocative enough, the authors added injury to insult by releasing the paper at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a group with lots of hands on lots of purse strings.

The paper -- based on interviews with 25 leaders in the mainstream environmental movement (nearly all of them, like S&N, white men) -- argues that environmentalism is ill-equipped to face the massive global challenges of our day, particularly climate change. The movement has become a relic and a failure, the authors say, coasting on decades-old successes, bereft of new ideas, made fat and complacent by easy funding, narrowly defining "environmental" problems, and relying almost exclusively on short-sighted technical solutions.

Mainstream green organizations' varied legislative and legal victories -- and their cumulative membership rolls of some 10 million-plus -- don't cut it for S&N. These achievements, they claim, take place against the backdrop of a broader failure to offer the American people an expansive, inspiring, values-based vision.

They conclude that the environmental movement should meet its re-maker, as it were, and give way to a more cohesive, coordinated, and ambitious progressive movement.

Naturally, the paper kicked up some dust.

Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope wrote a long and scathing reply, pointedly addressed, "Dear environmental grant-maker." The kerfuffle got covered in The Nation and The San Diego Union-Tribune. Several blogs have weighed in, and debate over the issue continues to spread around the web faster than that Paris Hilton home movie.

Fanning the flames, enviro wunderkind Adam Werbach gave an impassioned speech in early December to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club entitled "Is Environmentalism Dead?" making a similar argument with even more emotional fervor -- or histrionics, depending on whom you ask.

Of all the points made by S&N, perhaps the most telling is in a follow-up post on the Breakthrough Institute blog: "Nearly every profession, from public health to business to law, has research studies, conferences, and peer-review journals dedicated to evaluating what's working and what's not. ... The environmental community has nothing like this."

Indeed. Here at Grist, we hope to create a space where these kinds of evaluations, debates, and dialogues can take place. We plan for this to be an ongoing discussion, with more voices chiming in over the coming weeks and months. Dig in:

An interview with Shellenberger and Nordhaus about their controversial essay Rebuttals to the essay from four mainstream environmental leaders: Carl Pope, Phil Clapp, Frances Beinecke, and Dan Carol A Grist editorial on the whole melee and the big issues underlying it Dispatches from Bill McKibben, who ponders whether environmentalism really is kaput [added 25 Jan 2005] An email chat between four emerging environmental leaders on the future of their field [added 22 Feb 2005] A dispatch from enviro-justice advocates attending a panel with the reapers [added 04 Mar 2005] An argument that dramatizing "death" doesn't help urban people of color, from Adrienne Maree Brown [added 15 Mar 2005] A plea to foundations to revitalize the environmental movement with smart giving, from Ken Ward [added 17 Mar 2005] An email discussion between four green funders on where environmentalism should go from here [added 28 Mar 2005] A speech contending that the reapers are giving up way too soon, by Martin S. Kaplan [added 01 Apr 2005] A call for race and class to be given their due in discussions of life and death, by Michel Gelobter, et al. [added 27 May 2005] A critique of the reapers' essay by environmental-justice advocate Ludovic Blain [added 31 May 2005] An entreaty for the environmental movement to address economic development in low-income communities, by Orson Aguilar [added 31 May 2005]

We'd like you to join the discussion -- please stop by Gristmill and let us know what you think.

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

An interview with authors of the controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism”

Amanda Little — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:00:48 -0800

by Amanda Little
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus stirred up quite a fuss when they unveiled their essay "The Death of Environmentalism" last fall, declaring the environmental movement kaput and calling for a more visionary and inspiring progressive movement to take its place. In an interview with Grist, Shellenberger and Nordhaus talk about their ideas, the responses they've gotten (or haven't), and what comes next. Get the backstory here.

What exactly do you mean by the death of environmentalism? Are you proposing that all existing environmental organizations should be shuttered, or that they should just nudge their strategies in a new direction?

Michael
Shellenberger.

Shellenberger: Neither. We need to create a set of very different institutions and, at the same time, not just nudge but transform existing environmental institutions into something more powerful. We are not saying that Natural Resources Defense Council or any of the big national environmental groups need to close their doors. We're saying that the environmental identity should be updated into something more relevant. What needs to die is a particular conception of what environmentalism is and how environmental advocacy and campaigns are organized and run.

In other words, you believe the current strategies are archaic, but the groups that built the movement will survive?

Nordhaus: They could, but they need to be radically reconceptualized. The very DNA of these institutions was constructed around a particular idea and model of doing politics, largely based on successes that the environmental movement had in the early '70s. They were developed to use scientific and legal expertise to identify a problem, craft a very specific technical policy solution to address that problem, and then go hire communications specialists and lobbyists and organizers to go sell that technical policy solution.

Shellenberger: That approach is failing for two reasons: First, the values, mindsets, frames of reference, and belief systems Americans use to make sense of the world have changed dramatically over the last 12 years, but the strategies of the environmental movement have not. Second, we're faced with a set of massive ecological challenges -- global warming, global habitat destruction, global species destruction, deterioration of the world's oceans, the ozone hole -- that are fundamentally different from the kind of problems the environmental movement was constructed 30 years ago to address. On every one of these emerging issues, our national environmental movement has been strikingly ineffectual.

Your criticisms echo those we're hearing about the progressive movement at large -- criticism that liberals focus too much on precise policy prescriptions rather than communicating a broader values message.

Shellenberger: A critique similar to the one we've made on environmentalism could be made of many other single-issue movements -- women's rights, abortion rights, anti-war, criminal justice, labor, and so on. Each of those so-called movements has turned itself into a special interest in defining the problem so narrowly and offering technical policy solutions instead of an inspiring vision.

Ted Nordhaus.

Nordhaus: The challenges environmentalists face are very similar to the challenges progressives in general face. Everything environmentalists do going forward needs to be driven not by individual policies, but by the politics -- capital P -- we want to build: the vision and values, the broader political coalition we need to accomplish our long-term social objectives.

Are you saying the environmental movement needs to team up with the other progressive factions to work together on a more holistic vision?

Shellenberger: Well, the issue movements did unite around the effort to get rid of Bush. They came together around a particular political strategy, but they didn't come together around a common vision for the country that's inspirational and aspirational, nor around a common set of core values.

What's an example of a device that could create the right political context?

Shellenberger: Take the proposal for a new Apollo Project. We cofounded the Apollo Alliance by starting first with core values to unify labor, community, civil-rights, and environmental movements around a vision of a new American future based on revitalizing our economic competitiveness and creating good jobs for millions of Americans. And whether or not it passes Congress right away doesn't matter -- Apollo can be used to put anti-environmentalist, anti-labor forces on the defensive. Those who vote against it will confront public scrutiny: "You voted against a program to create 3 million jobs?"

By contrast, McCain-Lieberman [aka, the Climate Stewardship Act] doesn't have nearly the same kind of resonance: "You voted against a cap on carbon?" No senator is going to lose reelection for voting against McCain-Lieberman. Even if McCain-Lieberman passes, it will do nothing to strengthen the progressive movement or make a big difference in the debate over advancing our values.

Nordhaus: Apollo changes the categories we use to discuss global warming in that it forces us to take off our environmentalist hat. We've got to stop talking about global warming narrowly in terms of carbon emissions and talk about a whole set of very different things -- the economy, people's futures, global trade, and competitiveness.

Shellenberger: The usefulness of any legislative proposal should be determined not just by whether it's going to reduce the level of carbon in the atmosphere, but also whether it's going to create a cultural environment where much more dramatic and sweeping transformations can take place in the future.

When the Republicans fought partial-birth abortion, every time they lost legislatively, they gained power in the court of public opinion and in Congress. They got the message out there, they changed people's thinking around abortion. We need to fight political battles that even if we lost for several years running, we may be in a stronger position than we are now.

Nordhaus: We need to start winning even when we lose. Right now, the environmental movement loses when it loses and even loses when it wins.

Interesting point, but the Apollo Alliance example doesn't convince me that environmentalism is dead. Apollo was founded almost entirely by old-guard environmentalists, which means the traditionalists are themselves generating a new vision.

Shellenberger: Of course! Both of us are born of the traditional environmental movement. Ted and I gave the last decade of our lives working as consultants to most of the big environmental organizations and many medium and smaller ones as well. We're not like Bjorn Lomborg or whatever. Still, Apollo isn't a panacea, and we took pains to make that point in "Death of Environmentalism." Apollo was a good start. Now the movement as a whole needs to transcend the moral and intellectual framework that defines modern environmentalism.

Can you give another example of the kind of device or initiative that would move the environmental movement beyond its current framework?

Nordhaus: What if we introduced a constitutional amendment that said that no state shall pay more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in expenditures from the federal government? What does that have to do with global warming? Well, it would tackle the subsidies dilemma that we've been trying to address for years: the federal highway subsidies, the energy subsidies, the coal and oil subsidies. New York and California, for instance, pay vastly more in federal taxes than they receive in federal expenditures and places like Alaska, Alabama, a whole raft of mostly rural and particularly Western and Southern states receive vastly more in federal expenditures than they pay in federal taxes. So this constitutional-amendment approach would take it out of an environmental context and create a political debate that problematizes the politics of subsidies. It recontextualizes the subsidy debate around fairness.

Shellenberger: You could poke a hundred holes in it, but it shows that if you get out of your single-issue mindset, if you shake the kind of technical policy approach to this stuff, you can start coming up with creative solutions and campaigns that are both more interesting and, potentially, more powerful politically.

I see your point. Still it doesn't discount the fact that enviros are winning important victories at local levels, waging lawsuits over factory farming and endangered species and pollution that have very real meaning at the grassroots, if not the national, level.

Nordhaus: Consider this: Most of those local lawsuits are litigating the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act. Meanwhile, under the new Republican-dominated Congress, it's not inconceivable that we're going to lose the ESA and NEPA. So while we may win a few more local lawsuits, the entire regulatory framework could get repealed.

Shellenberger: Our argument is that you could win all your little lawsuits, we could pass all the legislation we have on the table locally and nationally, but we would be no closer to achieving our larger objectives. Think about how devastating of a critique that is: If we got everything we wanted right now, we would still be hurtling toward global-warming crisis. We would still be destroying the Amazon, the lungs of the planet. Environmentalists offer no inspiring vision for the world or for the country that speaks in any way to the magnitude of the crisis or to the potential of the American people to really make this transformation.

So you're not necessarily opposed to policy proposals like tighter Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and McCain-Lieberman, but you believe they are only baby steps?

Shellenberger: If we could pass McCain-Lieberman tomorrow, should we pass McCain-Lieberman tomorrow? Of course, why not? Do I think that McCain-Lieberman and CAFE on their own are sufficient? No. Would I support passing CAFE if, in the process of doing so, we poisoned the ground for building the alliance with labor and business we desperately need to substantially reduce carbon emissions in the United States? No.

How old are you guys?

Nordhaus: Michael's 33, I'm 39.

Do you consider yourselves next-gen environmentalists?

Nordhaus: No. There are 22-year-olds who think like Carl Pope and there are 60-year-olds who think like we do. We were criticizing a set of institutions and an intellectual framework, not a generation.

Shellenberger: I consider myself a progressive, not an environmentalist. I'm done with "ists" and "isms" generally. I thought the most bizarre part of Carl's response to our paper was the accusation of patricide. Both of our parents have been involved in environmental policy. Ted's dad wrote significant sections of the Clean Air Act and CAFE. We love our parents and we love what they've done. In order to honor their legacy, we have to update it. Environmentalism is outmoded. Death is a part of the process of life. The idea that somehow the environmental movement is, or should be, immortal goes against everything that it claims to believe.

Are you saying that environmentalism has become a tradition, not a movement?

Nordhaus: Exactly. Movement implies going forward and making progress, tradition implies holding on to the past. After the 2004 [election] defeat there was no admission by environmental leaders that we got our asses handed to us on a platter and that we must rethink everything. Instead what we heard from environmental leaders was that they succeeded in the states and districts they targeted. In his response to our paper, Carl Pope agreed that we're facing a crisis and that enviros are politically weaker than they were 15 years ago, but then he went on to propose the same damn policies and politics that enviros have been pushing for 30 years.

So I take it you didn't find Pope's response to your paper convincing?

Shellenberger: We were baffled by it. Of all environmental leaders, we thought Carl would embrace this. He's the guy that reaches out the most to labor unions, he's the guy that fights anti-immigrant forces. He gave us the most extraordinary interview [when we were conducting research for the paper]. He, more than any other environmental leader, inspired the thesis of this paper.

Nordhaus: Carl Pope is the first and, thus far, only major person in the environmental movement to have publicly engaged this discourse at all and for that, if nothing else, we commend him. We emailed all these guys after the article came out and asked if they'd be willing to have a dialogue and the silence has been deafening.

Shellenberger: Yeah, it's like, God, please disagree with us. We would be honored.

Would you say that for the sake of creating debate and making your argument, you made exaggerations and generalizations?

Shellenberger: No way. I didn't say anything in there that I regret. Not a single sentence. And we didn't say anything in there that was designed to provoke. Our intention was not to make people angry, it was to start a debate.

Why, then, did you address your complaints directly to funders rather than to the leaders themselves? That seems inherently provocative.

Shellenberger: There is no place for public debate in the environmental movement. Even librarians have much fiercer public debates and dialogues than the environmental community. Or look at the AIDS movement, where public-health organizations and government agencies have fantastic debates every year. They have peer-reviewed journals and panel discussions at international conferences. Look at the intense debates over how to stem the flow of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The environmental movement needs a national or international forum to debate strategy.

Nordhaus: We definitely wrote this to be provocative and get their attention. But [the Environmental Grantmakers Association meeting] was the only conference, the only place to really talk to the leaders of the movement. Where else should we have gone? There's no place to go.

What do you say to criticisms that in researching your paper you only interviewed the movement's technicians and not other leaders, like Wendell Berry?

Nordhaus: We interviewed the people in the environmental movement who are deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars annually. Hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade have been spent to address global warming. I'm sorry, Wendell Berry isn't the person deciding how the enviro movement is going to construct its campaigns to address global warming. The people we talked to are. They are deciding where this movement is going, where the resources are going. They need to rethink their politics to make it morally compelling. They need to start talking about a future people want to be a part of.

Some detractors are saying your paper is nihilistic -- that it offers only criticisms and no real proposals for a rehabilitation plan.

Nordhaus: We know, we've said repeatedly, that our ideas are partially baked and that we need some help in reconstructing a viable political movement. This is not something that we can do in a 30-page pamphlet. We resisted suggestions from early reviewers of the paper to provide specific prescriptions because we wanted to begin a discussion and dialogue, not suggest that we had all the answers.

Shellenberger: This paper is about coming to terms with change. Our message is that it's time to acknowledge both an end and a new beginning and not fear it. As the Taoist saying goes, "If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you can't achieve."

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

Carl Pope of the Sierra Club Phil Clapp of National Environmental Trust Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council Dan Carol of the Apollo Alliance

Green leaders say rumors of environmentalism’s death are greatly exaggerated

Amanda Little — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:00:00 -0800

by Amanda Little
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

The leadership of the U.S. environmental movement took quite a beating in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus's "The Death of Environmentalism." We invited four mainstream green leaders to respond:

Here they share their opinions on the essay and their thoughts on the future of environmentalism. (Get the backstory here.)

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club

Before this paper came out, there was a debate going on in the environmental community about how we could more effectively organize ourselves, how we can build a broader progressive community, how we can deal with the reality of the radical right, and how we can deal with different kinds of emerging, grand-scale problems like global warming. Shellenberger and Nordhaus have set that debate back, not moved it forward. The memo they wrote was actually counterproductive to this effort and shoddy in its analysis.

They suggested that failing environmentalism should submerge itself in successful progressivism, but I would argue that the environmental community is one of the more successful parts of the progressive movement. You know, the last decade has been a very rough time for all progressive social movements that are focused on justice. The areas where we are failing and the areas where labor is failing and the areas where the civil-rights movement is failing and the areas where the anti-war movement is failing are all the same, so the problem cannot be the way we define the environment.

I am on the board of a number of organizations that constitute exactly the kinds of linkages between the environment and other parts of the progressive movement that they advocate. I'm co-chair of the Apollo Alliance, treasurer of America Votes and America Coming Together and America's Families United. I obviously believe that we need to build a broader progressive movement, but I don't believe that because I think that there's something wrong with the definition of the environment.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger said a number of very true things -- that we are making inadequate progress on global warming, that we haven't adequately mobilized public values to create political pressure, and all this is happening in the context of a reinvigorated right. But they make these points inside the very false frame that we have to die to be reborn. That's pathetic. It smacks a bit of the strategic errors we made in the Iraq invasion, where we didn't have a reconstruction plan, but we just went in and blew the place up.

When I read those quotes about how dying is part of living, it was like a bad dream. I was alive in the 1960s, and in the 1960s everybody said liberalism needed to die so that something more real could take its place, and what took its place was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nihilism doesn't lead us anywhere I want to go. Dying is not part of living, it is dying.

Phil Clapp, president of National Environmental Trust

Sure, this is a healthy debate. After an election like this one, I do think environmentalists have to sit down and reassess their strategy. Any movement that isn't conscious of examining what it's doing on a regular basis is in trouble. But even though substantively there were some good points in the paper, the exaggerated rhetoric is really preventing it from being a constructive contribution. People simply can't hear what you're saying when you engage in an enormous amount of rhetoric and diatribe.

Moreover, efforts to forge coalitions with other parts of the progressive movement have been underway for decades. You would think from reading this paper that no one in the environmental community had ever talked to the United Auto Workers about CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards], or to the United Mine Workers about global warming. These conversations have been ongoing for many years, and we've been making progress in fits and starts toward reaching common ground. Also, keep in mind that a majority of the proposals put forward by the Apollo Alliance, which they're calling next-wave environmentalism, first saw the light of day as the renewable-energy job-creation component of Carter's energy program in 1979, so most of them are hardly novel ideas.

Having been involved in environmental legislation for 30 years, my biggest concern about the paper is the assertion that global-warming efforts have been a total failure. The Kyoto Protocol will come into force on Feb. 16, and the U.S. played a leading role in designing that agreement despite the current administration's position on it. Domestic global-warming legislation is following exactly the same trajectory as all the other major environmental statutes of the last three decades.

What you have on global warming is the same dynamic that we had on acid rain protections in the 1980s -- the public broadly supported them long before they passed on the Hill because of an administration that disputed the science and a partisan and industry stranglehold that lasted for almost 10 years. Same deal with global warming: Large public support and recognition of the problem, an intransigent administration, a partisan and industry stranglehold on the Hill. I believe we'll have McCain-Lieberman [aka, the Climate Stewardship Act] in under five years, and it was first brought to a vote only a year and a half ago.

The big change going forward isn't to reinvent the movement ideologically but geographically. We need to concentrate our efforts on the Rocky Mountain region, the Plains, and the South, where we have to build a stronger constituency for federal environmental protections.

Frances Beinecke, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council

Shortly after the election we sent out an email to nearly half a million people saying a second term for the Bush administration presents an enormous threat to the environment. We received an overwhelming response from thousands of people who wanted to take action. That doesn't reflect a dead movement.

The paper by Shellenberger and Nordhaus has painted us in the policy box. You could have done that 10 years ago, before the 104th Congress, but you can't do that now. The mid-'90s were a major turning point for NRDC and the movement at large. We're policy experts at our core, but we realized that you can't get the policy right without the politics. That's when we began facing the challenge of conducting a broader conversation with the public about why these issues are important. The movement's use of strategy has since changed dramatically. Just looking at NRDC over the last 10 years, we've built a core of 1 million members and activists who are engaging on these issues and had enormous growth in both communications and outreach.

On climate, I agree that it's a huge issue that needs a large-scale response, a new kind of strategy, and that we haven't been effective at getting policy results yet. But I don't agree that we aren't making progress. On a global scale, on a corporate scale in the U.S. and abroad, and on Capitol Hill, climate is a much more present, obvious, and unavoidable issue today than it was five years ago. We've been there at every turn forcing it on the table.

I do think we can do a better job at presenting the broader picture of why we're engaged in these issues in the first place, of the values side of our issue. We're all in this because we believe a clean environment is a fundamental human right. We have to put more energy into framing this as a human issue.

It goes without saying that we should be working with people from the labor community, from the religious community, from the corporate world, and from every other community that has similar goals. No one would argue with that. We've been building those ties for 10 years and we will continue to build them. OK, we have plenty more work to do in this area, but the paper implies that these strategies are not underway, which isn't the case.

Dan Carol, board member of the Apollo Alliance

The notion that the existing membership of established environmental groups -- collectively over 10 million members strong -- is moot, or that the ongoing policy work of these groups is a waste of time, is preposterous, and distracting from the real work ahead.

Though Shellenberger and Nordhaus's paper refers extensively to the Apollo Alliance, it by no means represents our views. We believe that labor, environmentalists, government, and community leaders need each other now more than ever if we are to choose the right pathway toward energy independence and rebuilding our economy. The challenges ahead are too great to be nitpicking with our friends. The alliance does not do push-off politics, meaning we don't define ourselves or our vision by defining others' shortcomings. We try to evangelize and model new frameworks, and we're making good headway nationally and in 22 states. But our success is hardly contingent on the movement's demise. It depends on the movement's success.

The "debate" really comes down to a difference in philosophy about how to catalyze change: Do you catalyze change by creating destruction, or by showing the way? Do you want to highlight failure or do you want to highlight success? I think this paper is essentially a provocative device, but in my opinion you can't be both a provocateur and a movement builder.

Historically there has been a parallel between rethinking the environmental movement and rethinking the Democratic Party -- there's a degree to which this is a cyclical hand-wringing that always occurs at a time of loss, when screechy, angry complaints connect with disappointed people. We can't let our passion for what we think is right undermine our patience in building reforms and partnerships that last.

What the paper fails to recognize is the progress that's going on in terms of winning state, local, regional, and binational campaigns, and other emerging strategies beyond Washington. When you focus on national environmental legislation, you could argue we've hit a wall, given the Republican-dominated Beltway, but that's no reason to believe we don't have a solid foundation to build on.

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

The Climate Post: You heard it here first—Copenhagen a success

What we talk about when we talk about the future of environmentalism

Grist — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:00:48 -0800

by Grist
Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

This is the first in a series of editorials Grist will publish over the coming months to address the issues raised by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus's essay "The Death of Environmentalism" and Adam Werbach's speech "Is Environmentalism Dead?" Get the backstory here.

Whatever the merits of their arguments, we think it all to the good that Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Adam Werbach (henceforth known as "the reapers," to save on syllables and to amuse ourselves) are attempting to spark an open, public debate over the future of environmentalism -- if it has one, that is.

It's not enough for the leaders of the environmental movement to discuss these issues in closed-door meetings and the privacy of their offices, or via email and listservs. The debate over environmentalism's current health and future prospects deserves a wide airing, open to voices rarely heard in the boardrooms of big green organizations. Environmental leaders remain an overwhelmingly white, male, wonky bunch. We've got nothing against white male wonks -- we've got a couple on staff -- but it's quite possible that the homogeneity is influencing the agenda more than said leaders recognize.

We'll be bringing an array of perspectives on the movement's future to the pages of Grist in coming weeks and months. In this editorial, we clarify what we see as the most salient issues and constructive questions emerging as part of this debate. Some of these issues are implicit, but have not been stated clearly. Some have been muddled together when they should be considered separately. Some have been glossed over or left out, but we think they deserve attention.

We invite you to jump into the fray as our coverage unfolds, with the hope that a healthy dose of self-examination will nudge environmentalism (by that or any other name) on the path to a healthier, brighter, more inspiring future.

The Vision Thing

Enviros, say the reapers, have become myopic technocrats. They focus on a well-worn, narrowly defined set of issues and advocate almost exclusively for piecemeal procedural solutions (generally involving legislation, regulation, or litigation). Whether they win or lose their narrow tactical battles (see: stricter CAFE standards), greens gain little ground in the larger strategic war, which is fought over the values and vision of the American people. They will continue to lose that war until they develop a comprehensive, inspiring vision that gains adherents and momentum even when a particular lawsuit or piece of legislation fails, the reapers argue.

Questions: Has the green movement relied too much on fear and guilt and too little on inspiration? If a compelling vision is lacking, what should that vision be, and how can greens communicate it more effectively?

No Clan Is an Island

When the reapers call for the "death" of environmentalism, what they have in mind is its dissolution into the larger progressive movement. The green movement, they say, has become a special interest. It's got its own narrowly focused organizations with teams of lobbyists, lawyers, and tacticians. The reapers compare it to other "stovepiped" progressive caucuses like those advocating for minority rights and abortion rights. It has become insular, isolated from the rest of the progressive movement, and thus inadequate to address today's broad global threats. The result, the reapers argue, is not only weak environmental advocacy but a weaker progressive movement.

Questions: Are environmental leaders putting enough effort into making common cause with other factions within (or even outside of) the progressive movement? Will stronger ties with other factions suffice, or should environmentalism be merged into the broader progressive movement? Is the progressive movement any stronger or better off than the green movement anyway?

It's My Party and I'll Admit It if I Want To

Werbach is unequivocal: "It's time for us to drop our veil of bipartisanship and fight to fix the deeply broken Democratic Party."

After the recent election, there was much talk among enviros about how to "reach out" and appeal to possible red-state allies like hunters, anglers, and religious folk. The reapers reject this notion and say, instead, that environmentalists should join with fellow progressives in building a political party that shares their values, not just their aims on a few narrow issues like land preservation. People who are fond of nature but in favor of tax cuts for the rich, an eroding social safety net, corporate-dominated policy making, and preemptive wars are not "us" -- they are "them." Enviros are Democrats, say the reapers. It's time to admit it.

Questions (this raises quite a few): Should greens jettison the veil of bipartisanship and hitch their wagon to the Democratic Party? To what extent is there such a veil? What would it look like to abandon the already-wan efforts at reaching out to conservatives, and what would be gained by it? Is the Republican Party a lost cause -- and if so how did we lose it, given the conservative roots of conservationism stretching from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, who signed into law our landmark environmental statutes?

My Way or the Beltway

According to the reapers, the Beltway-centered environmental establishment has developed a set of rhetorical and tactical habits that often leaves it out of touch with Joe and Jane Average Citizen. Most people just aren't that absorbed by political strategery, regulatory jostling, and legislative maneuvering. Nor do most people spend a great deal of time pondering the beauty of Nature, the intrinsic value of Wilderness, or the fortunes of the lesser southwestern mottled prairie vole. Most people are concerned with doing right by their families, paying their bills, and having a little fun. Mainstream enviros would do well to pull their heads out of their, uh, wonks, and speak to these workaday concerns and aspirations.

Question: What can environmentalism do to connect with the "kitchen-table issues" of ordinary folk?

Non-White: The Choice of a New Generation

Here's one way to connect to kitchen-table issues: give everyone a seat at the table. At a time when the nation's ethnic and gender balance of power is shifting, the environmental establishment remains composed largely of middle- and upper-class white dudes, and focused mainly on issues they deem important. An environmental agenda set by a more diverse constituency might give greater voice to class and race issues, urban issues, and regional and local issues. In short, it might revive and remake the environmental movement.

Question: How can the environmental movement expand its membership and agenda beyond the current racial and socioeconomic profile?

There's Green and Then There's Green

Though it's rarely discussed openly, the elephant in the room is funding. Yes, money -- how it's spent, where it comes from, and what is demanded in exchange. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year are poured into environmental causes by foundations, corporations, and individual donors. That's a lot of dough-re-mi.

The reapers say that it may be time for foundations that fund environmental organizations to shut off the spigot, that a steady flow of money only makes it easier for greens to hobble along with their same failed strategies. Presumably they'd prefer that funding go to other (perhaps, ahem, their) projects and initiatives.

Questions: Is good money being thrown after bad, propping up a failed movement? Should foundations shutter their environmental programs and invest more strategically in coalition-building progressive initiatives? How should green greenbacks be spent?

We -- and our guests -- will be discussing these issues in more depth in coming months. We hope you'll join us. Get started by visiting Gristmill to share your thoughts.