ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Carl Pope has a guest essay a Gristmill, a review of Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.  Embedded within the review is a great thumbnail history and critique of the environmental movement, from its origins in the late ’60s.  First, he sets out what environmentalism is.

To me, environmentalism is an ethic, the blending of scientific insights into a set of values: concern for the future, humility about our place in the complex web of life, and a commitment to look for and try to understand these connections. . . . It’s an ethic that captures an essential truth: there is only one biosphere, only one ozone layer, and shared dedication to protecting these commons — the great collective inheritance of humanity . . .

He then describes environmentalism’s beginnings, and identifies the flawed strategic approach that still hamstrings the movement.

Environmentalism flowered between 1965 and 1975; it took on the era’s emerging politics — with all the problems Nordhaus and Shellenberger identify. In that decade, national environmental organizations chose to change things quickly but shallowly, rather than more slowly and in depth. We retreated from the challenge of creating a new and positive economy, confining ourselves to advocating incremental improvements in the old economy. Deep down, we probably knew that the way we were achieving our critically important successes would require revisiting — but we had no idea how hard that would turn out to be.

Pope argues that environmentalism made a serious miscalculation in failing to root its identity outside within American institutions with the strongest social contracts: unions with their ties of livelihood, and churches with their ethical ties. Instead, environmentalism relied on a third power base for social change: impartial expertise – and originally, as embodied in the federal bureaucracy. most of the early intellectual leadership of what became the environmental movement came from government scientists and land managers. Aldo Leopold and Gifford Pinchot are probably the most famous examples, but even Rachel Carson started out as a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.  Later, as it became clear that government regulatory bureaucracies were prone to became captives of the industries they had been intended to regulate, the progressive faith in expertise shifted to “public interest” advocates, with Ralph Nader serving as the prototype and mentor for the breed. But the ability of public interest advocates to influence public policy withered with changing political realities.

He ends setting out an entirely new task for environmentalism:

These three new realities strongly suggest to me that the task of environmentalism in the 21st century is utterly unlike that which it defined for itself in the 20th. For a hundred years, those who called themselves first conservationists and then environmentalists defined their task as being to constrain, and clean up after, an existing industrial order. For the next hundred years, our task is to shape, design, and accelerate the arrival of a new, sustainable economic order.

He ends with a dose of economic reality that ought to be pounded into the heads of every “conservative”

Finally, we need to recognize and help others see that the great expansions in human freedom and economic opportunity have been launched on the platform of newly available commons, not on spurts of privatization.

The environmental ethic, with its solid grasp of humankind’s one unifying need — protecting our shared natural commons — is the vanguard of the new progressive movement.