|
Paul O. Boisvert for The
New York Times
Michael
Shellenberger, left, and Ted Nordhaus, the authors of
"The Death of Environmentalism," at a recent conference
in Vermont. |
| |
IDDLEBURY, Vt. - The leaders of the
environmental movement were livid last fall when Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two little-known, earnest
environmentalists in their 30's, presented a 12,000-word thesis
arguing that environmentalism was dead.
It did not help that the pair first distributed their paper, "The
Death of Environmentalism," at the annual meeting of deep-pocketed
foundation executives who underwrite the environmental
establishment. But few outside the movement's inner councils paid
much attention at first.
Then came the November election, into which groups like the
Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters poured at least
$15 million, much of it to defeat President Bush, whose support for
oil drilling and logging, and opposition to regulating greenhouse
gases have made him anathema to environmental groups. Instead, Mr.
Bush and Congressional champions of his agenda cemented their
control in Washington at a time when battles loom over clean air and
oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Now a debate about the future of environmentalism is ricocheting
around the Internet about the authors' notion of, in Mr.
Shellenberger's words, "abolishing the category" of environmentalism
and embracing a wider spectrum of liberal issues to "release the
power of progressivism." Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra
Club, began things in the fall with a bristling 6,000-word
denunciation of Mr. Shellenberger's and Mr. Nordhaus's paper. An
online magazine, Grist.org,
has started a forum to debate their ideas and their assertions that
environmentalism has become "just another special interest."
One writer called the paper "ridiculous and self-serving."
Another wrote simply, "I'm not dead."
Others have embraced the paper. "The article articulates exactly
my feelings about the environmental movement," one enthusiast wrote.
Mr. Nordhaus, 38, is a pollster, and Mr. Shellenberger, 33, is a
strategist and the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute,
a new organization that advocates putting progressive values to work
to solve problems. They are receiving an increasing number of
speaking invitations like the one that brought them here to
Middlebury College in central Vermont recently, where they spoke at
a conference on rethinking the politics of climate.
The election results may not have been the only reason they have
struck a nerve. Other nagging concerns abound, like worries about
the effect of repeated defeats on morale and concerns about image; a
recent survey conducted for the Nature Conservancy suggested that
the group use the term "conservationist" rather than
"environmentalist."
"To a large extent, most of us in the environmental movement
think most people agree with us," said Bill McKibben, a scholar in
residence at Middlebury College and the author of "The End of
Nature," a 1989 book on global warming.
But Mr. McKibben, who called Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus
"the bad boys of American environmentalism," said their data showed
that the kind of political support the movement had in the late
1970's had come and gone. "The political ecosystem is as real as the
physical ecosystem so we might as well deal with it," he said.
Their paper asserts that the movement's senior leadership was
blinded by its early successes and has become short-sighted and
"just another special interest." Its gloomy warnings and geeky,
technocentric policy prescriptions are profoundly out of step with
the electorate, Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus say.
"We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all
of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted
strategies, must die so that something new can live," they wrote. As
proof, they cite the debate on global warming and the largely
unsuccessful push for federal regulation of industrial and
automobile emissions.
They avoided making tactical prescriptions, but they did chide
the movement for its limited efforts to find common ground with
other groups, like labor and urged their compatriots to tap into the
country's optimism.
Mr. Nordhaus, who works at Evans/McDonough, an opinion research
company, told the student-dominated conference at Middlebury College
that environmentalists "have spent the last 25 or 30 years telling
people what they cannot aspire to." Given the can-do spirit of the
country, "that isn't going to get you very far," he said.
The authors' arguments are based partly on data from a Canadian
polling company, Environics, that show American voters edging away
from the environmentalists and some of their allies. For example,
the percentage of the 2,500 people in the poll who agree that
pollution is necessary to preserve jobs rose from 17 percent in 1992
to 29 percent in 2004.
The paper - based largely on interviews with 25 environmental
leaders - has exposed latent fault lines in the often-fractious
world of groups who battle for strategies to preserve wetlands, save
endangered species and the wilderness, and eliminate toxic
pollutants in the air and water.
The observations have rippled through the environmental movement
to the anger of some of its leaders and foundation executives and to
the applause of a scattering of younger or less visible
environmentalists.
John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, was
the only national environmental leader who chose to come to Vermont
to hear the pair when they appeared at the conference. "These guys
laid out some fascinating data," Mr. Passacantando said, "but they
put it in this over-the-top language and did it in this in-your-face
way."
The movement has always been able to count on overwhelming
expressions of support for its goals; polls consistently show
approval of 70 percent to 80 percent or more. And memberships have
been rising steadily at organizations like the Sierra Club, which
reported an increase in membership from about 642,000 in 2000 to
750,000 last year. That helps those who dismiss Mr. Shellenberger
and Mr. Nordhaus as upstarts.
"The environmental movement is probably the strongest social
movement we have in this country," said Joshua Reichert, director of
the environment division of the Pew Charitable Trusts, a major
source of financing for environmental causes.
Mr. Reichart added: "It reflects the values and aspirations of a
huge majority of the country - but it simply can't compete with war
and terrorism, nor should we expect it to."
Mr. Reichert, his counterparts at the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation and scores of other foundation members who support
organized environmental activity were the intended audience of the
paper. It was underwritten by Peter Teague, the environment director
of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Perhaps the most scathing
response came from Mr. Pope of the Sierra Club, who said the paper
mischaracterized both the interviews with him and the state of the
environmental movement.
Phil Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust,
who pushed for new tactics in his own day, said the authors
fundamentally misunderstood both history and politics. "There's some
great fantasy out there that the nation's great environmental laws
were passed in some national wave of unanimity with millions of
people assaulting the barricades demanding environmental
protection," Mr. Clapp said. "In reality it was the result of 10
years' hard work - grass-roots organizing, careful and skillful
lobbying of members of Congress and careful policy analysis."
Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters,
said that the movement had been changing even before the paper was
written. "I think what we are looking at is the rebirth of
environmentalism, examining constituencies, messages and focus and
going beyond what we've been comfortable with," Ms. Callahan said.
But she agreed that success was not at hand as she and her
colleagues confront "the most hostile federal government we've seen
in the history of the environmental movement," she said.
The decision by Mr. Shellenberger and Mr. Nordhaus to pick global
warming as Exhibit A of their argument, Mr. Pope said, was unfair.
"Since global warming is our hardest problem, and we brought to bear
our weakest tool, expertise, it's hardly surprising that we are
getting our worst results," he said.
Mr. Pope also took a dig at his adversaries' motives. "Given that
the chosen audience of the paper was the funders," he wrote, "it
will be hard for many readers to avoid the suspicion that the
not-so-hidden message was, 'Fund us instead.' "
In the trenches of the movement, the reviews were more positive.
In San Francisco last year, Adam Werbach, who in his early 20's was
the national president of the Sierra Club, joined the chorus with a
speech that echoed the tone of the Shellenberger-Nordhaus paper and
that began, "I am here to perform an autopsy."
And in an e-mail message to Mr. Pope, Gerald Winegrad, a Sierra
Club member and a board member of the Maryland League of
Conservation voters, wrote, "We are failing now, I would suggest
very badly, in accomplishing our goals."
.gif){kind=spacer}
