Is the “Death of Environmentalism” becoming mainstream environmentalism?

October 23rd, 2008

Posted by: admin

James “Gus” Speth just published an article in Yale Environment 360 critical of modern environmentalism. Speth’s argument is particularly notable due to his prominence within mainstream environmentalism. Gus founded the World Resources Institute (WRI), co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and is currently the dean of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Speth is careful to highlight the successes of the past, but argues environmentalism must develop a new politics to succeed. Sound familiar?

A specter is haunting American environmentalism — the specter of failure.

All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?

Before addressing this question and what can be done to correct it, two points must be made. First, one shudders to think what the world would look like today without the efforts of environmental groups and their hard-won victories in recent decades. However serious our environmental challenges, they would be much more so had not these people taken a stand in countless ways. And second, despite their limitations, the approaches of modern-day environmentalism remain essential: Right now, they are the tools readily at hand with which to address many pressing problems, including global warming and climate disruption. Despite the critique of American environmentalism that follows, these points remain valid…

…The methods and style of today’s environmentalism are not wrongheaded, just far, far too restricted as an overall approach. The problem has been the absence of a huge, complementary investment of time, energy, and money in other, deeper approaches to change. And here, the leading environmental organizations must be faulted for not doing nearly enough to ensure these investments were made.

America has run a 40-year experiment on whether this mainstream environmentalism can succeed, and the results are now in. The full burden of managing accumulating environmental threats has fallen to the environmental community, both those in government and outside. But that burden is too great. The system of modern capitalism as it operates today will continue to grow in size and complexity and will generate ever-larger environmental consequences, outstripping efforts to cope with them. Indeed, the system will seek to undermine those efforts and constrain them within narrow limits. Working only within the system will, in the end, not succeed — what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.

Read the full article here.

5 Responses to “Is the “Death of Environmentalism” becoming mainstream environmentalism?”

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  1. stan Says:

    To the extent that environmentalism has failed, it has failed because it has lost credibility. He makes factual claims in this article which most people would disagree with. Perhaps even more important that the lack of credibility is the increasing perception of voters that environmental groups do not care about people. See e.g. DDT and the millions of dead from malaria.

    Any movement whose leaders make statements that the world would be a better place, if millions died is likely to be viewed with suspicion by people. That is a sure path to failure in a democracy.

    Environmentalists push for ethanol and the world’s poor riot over the resulting hunger. Not good for the movement. They push for higher oil prices and block oil drilling which causes poor consumers to experience severe financial stress. Also not good for the movement.

    Environmentalists need to remember that “Let them eat cake” didn’t work very well the first time, either.

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  3. stan Says:

    Add the fact that the environmental groups are accurately perceived to be a subset of one political party, and it shouldn’t be surprising that half the electorate rejects them as mere political hacks. In the quest for temporary political power, they sold their souls. Moral preening falls flat.

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  5. Thin king man Says:

    It’s stupefying that someone as economically and politically naive as Mr. “Gus” Speth can climb so high in one of our putatively great academic institutions.

    Speth writes: > One shudders to think what the world would look like today without the efforts of environmental groups

    Indeed: one shudders specifically to think how much better off we’d be without these ocean-sized environmental bureaucracies and their never-ending red tape, which has damaged our environment beyond measure. To wit:

    Fact: A tiny palm-full of uranium contains more energy than 100 boxcars full of coal.

    Fact: Despite years of government subsidies (regulators, for instance, have forced utility companies to buy “renewables”), these same renewables generate only about 0.9 percent of our total electricity.

    Fact: The most efficient solar panels currently in use (on the space station) are costly, and their conversion efficiency is about 20 percent, which is not very much.

    Fact: Twelve miles of solar reflectors generate about 300 megawatts, a miniscule amount. Furthermore, those reflectors must be kept squeaky clean, maintained to the hilt, or they won’t work.

    Fact: At our current level of technology, no conceivable mix of solar, wind, or wave can meet even half the demand for energy.

    Fact: If, however, wind, wave, and solar are to become more efficient, it is only science and technology – as opposed to environmentalism’s plan of blasting us back into the Dark Ages – that will get them there.

    Fact: Wind comes strongest along mountain crests. Thus the Blue Ridge Mountain, the Adirondacks, the Appalachians, and so on, would, if environmental groups have their way, all be lined across the ridges with these inefficient windmill monstrosities, and you will also be able to drive from Texas to North Dakota and never be out of sight of these windmills. Yet enviros object to the building of one small nuclear plant, which takes up roughly one mile.

    Fact: Uranium generates gigantic amounts of energy in a very small space which wind and solar combined cannot come close to. Those, like Mr. Speth, I presume, who say otherwise have brought the world 400 million more tons of coal used per year, because for thirty years now, since 1979, following the Three Mile Island accident, we’ve been using more coal. That’s one of the places we’d be without environmental groups.

    Fact: The meltdown of the uranium core in 1979 at Three Mile Island was so overblown by anti-nuclear groups that it went virtually unnoticed how the containment vessel at Three Mile Island had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity.

    Fact: Uranium is abundant, clean, and safe — in technological societies.

    Fact: The catastrophe at Chernobyl, which once again sent greens groups worldwide scurrying to their soapboxes, only happened because that state-run reactor was astonishingly unsafe: in the words of energy expert Peter Huber, “You couldn’t have operated a toaster oven out of it.”

    Fact: the discovery of energy at the nucleus of the atom is the greatest scientific feat of the 20th century. All this environmental talk about how we need to “discover a new form of energy” therefore misses the point entirely: we’ve already done so. It’s called nuclear energy. And without environmental groups, this country would be inestimably cleaner. It’s enough to make you shudder.

    There’s also, of course, the singular fact that pollution problems were not created by the absence of government regulation and environmental groups: they were created, as Ludwig von Mises noted, “by a lack in savings and investment.”

    So long as the capital base of any society remains primitive, the means to deal with societal issues necessarily remains limited.

    That’s a crux.

    Unfettered markets — i.e. capitalism — by definition generates far, far greater capital than any form of statism, environmentally motivated or otherwise.

    And wealth brings cleaner environments.

    Wealth brings new technologies.

    Wealth brings cleaner food and water.

    Wealth brings longer life.

    Which is why underdeveloped countries (where, incidentally, fewer people drive cars) are more polluted, use dirtier, less efficient fuels, and destroy more woods and wetlands than industrial countries.

    The explicitly statist, neomercantilist policies of environmental groups have brought to a near standstill an incalculable amount of economic progress, and it is precisely this, this paucity of economic order, that brings about poverty, pollution, and environmental denigration — a fact of which Mr. Speth is ignorant.

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  7. docpine Says:

    Hmm. It sounds like “environmentalists” are saying if they don’t change “the system” to they way they like, the planet is doomed. One must ask “who is empowered by this claim and who is disempowered? “

    First off, what possible things might all the different folks who call themselve “environmentalists” have in common? People working on wildlife in Tanzania, in air pollution in China, on pesticides in Germany, on energy in the US? Since all these are complex issues that can only be resolved by an interplay within the political, social and biophysical systems of a particular place it is hard for me to say “environmentalists as a group have the correct moral answer for every difficult question that society faces and if the current people on the planet don’t agree we need to change the worldview that underpins our current world.”

    Good luck with that. I think the followers of folks named Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed have been attempting the same kind of thing. When it comes to a question of “how are we to live on this planet?” I look for guidance in the spiritual teachings of the wise people of the Earth and not to international NGO’s nor ivy league deans.

    So, there are a plethora of environmental issues and groups. A more pragmatic approach than redoing the global system might be to ask the question “which environmental efforts have been most successful?” and consider different hypotheses for why they may have achieved success.

    Los Angeles, Lake Erie, and other places are better at least in air and water quality than they were.. were those efforts against pollution successes? What about the reduction in pesticide use and the growing efforts at organic food production? Or does climate change mean that all other efforts to improve the environment are irrelevant (is that what “ruined planet” refers to)?

    One has to wonder if the framing of the climate change issue as the ultimate environmental problem has a convenient (for some) side effect of empowering international environmental groups at the expense of others on this planet- and delegitimizing many environmentalists who fight the good fight on a variety of other issues and scales every day.

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  9. Jim Clarke Says:

    Good points in the previous posts. Will no one defend Mr. Speth? I certainly won’t!

    One of the criticisms of modern environmentalism is that it is no longer about the environment, but a front for socialist movements. Mr. Speth confirms it with this diatribe.

    I found it amusing that his call for strengthening democracy involved every imaginable subset of the US population except the white male, who is, after all, the root of all evil! “Democracy for everyone…except those we do not like”! What is it about the self-flagellation that seems to be so universal in white, male college professors?

    Fairness? My mom told me that life is not fair and I bet yours did too. Calls for ‘fairness’ are extremely scary because who decides what is fair and how do you enforce it? It sounds like he is calling for ‘equal outcomes’ for all, no matter what an individual contributes. Sort of like “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Been there. Done that. Still waiting in line for the t-shirt promised by the central authority, with all the other half naked people!

    The real problem with the modern environmental movement is they have abandoned reality for ideology. Hence, they constantly invoke the high holy word ’sustainability’. In the chaotic, non-linear world we live in, sustainability is not only unnatural, but impossible. Change is not just normal, but the only thing in this world that is constant. For environmentalism to work, it must be founded in reality and embrace the concept that there is no ‘correct’ state of the environment, only more or less desirable states. Then it must convince the rest of society what is desirable, not threaten everyone with eternal damnation!