"The Death of Environmentalism?"

by Rick Johnson

In this essay, Rick Johnson, executive director of Idaho Conservation League, shares his thoughts on Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus' paper "The Death of Environmentalism: Global-Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World."

Rick's perspective is that of a veteran environmental leader who has worked on environmental campaigns at both the national and local scales, and is now working in Idaho, where the political landscape for conservation is -- to put it mildly -- challenging. Rick's response is not framed as a critique; he offers no opinion on some of their most controversial assertions about global warming policy -- but instead he focuses on teasing out some of the larger insights and questions worth considering as we move forward.

We invite you to share your thoughts by submitting a comment below.

I recently picked up an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism”. The title grabbed my eye, but the content is what holds my attention. Written by Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Enviromentalism” is a penetrating critique by environmentalists of environmentalists and our movement’s failure to address the greatest environmental challenge of our time: climate change.

My daily work in the trenches is pretty small stuff compared to ramifications of a cooked planet, but “Death” provides insights useful for conservationists working at any level. While the essay critiques those thinking globally, for those acting locally there is much to chew on.

As the election made clear, we’re in for some heavy surf; the reality is that we’ve been in heavy surf for a long time, and we’re taking on water.

Conservationist credibility with the public is falling, and for reasons greater than the most recent election we’re losing traction with lawmakers. Many view the environmental movement as elitist and self-righteous, with “no” being the operative word in our vocabulary.

While our movement does much good, and conservation measures actually did well in the recent elections, we should be mindful of our failings, be they real or perceptions increasingly held by the public. Environmentalists are often viewed as detached from the lives of regular people, and in a public interest movement, this is very bad news. “Most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce what they have to worry about. Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it.”

The essay reminds us that conservationists today stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and those folks won big. Can you imagine passing laws with the impact of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act?

Winning big, in great part, was the result of environmental values laying right at the core of our national consciousness, and from advocacy leveraging those values for visionary policy advancements. Given the enormity of global warming, surely this should bring out the best of our movement, but does anyone see similar prospects for winning big, on this, the biggest issue ever?

According to “Death’s” authors, our movement’s ever-increasing focus on policy and regulation has estranged us from the core values connecting everyday folks with the environment they live in and care about. The environment is rarely presented as the integrated web of values impacting everyone, and has become more of a “thing” or policy pigeon-hole making the type of environmentalism we practice just “another special interest.” A special interest certainly won’t save the planet from climate change, and it may not adequately protect community-level conservation values, either.

An experienced colleague from Montana commenting on the essay said, “We surely, almost religiously, follow the campaign paradigm defined in the paper. Define an issue as environmental, identify a technical/policy solution and then relentlessly bore down on Congress to adopt the solution. The authors didn't mention the fourth step of the paradigm that we adhere to the in West: litigate, litigate and litigate some more whatever solution flows from Washington.”

The narrower our policy solutions become, the narrower our target audiences become, our politics become more fragile, and all the while the deeper and broader values underlying our work are insufficiently communicated. As we lose real people in the fog of special-interest political irrelevance, we lose with lawmakers, the media, and the public.

On a national level, the number of people “who agree with the statement ‘To preserve people’s jobs in this country, we must accept higher levels of pollution in the future,’ increased from 17 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2000. The number of Americans who agreed that, ‘Most of the people actively involved in environmental groups are extremists, not reasonable people,’ leapt from 32 percent in 1996 to 41 percent in 2000.”

Across the West I have seen similar trends in polls, focus groups, and in our collective failure to successfully advance an ambitious agenda to protect the land we love. We occasionally win battles, to be sure, but we may be losing the war because we’re losing the hearts and minds of a lot of the people we need to succeed.

The authors raise concern with conservationist’s approach to losing, for not creating strategies for “winning while losing.” Losing environmental battles is part of our turf, especially now, but a “legislative loss can be considered a win if it has increased a movement’s power, energy, and influence over the long-term.” The right has been doing this for years; the authors’ example is the movement to ban so-called partial-birth abortions. Over and over they lost, yet they got stronger with each loss because of how they fought…and then they won.

Winning and winning while losing requires effective use of politics. The essay decries “environmentalism as though politics didn’t matter.” In my twenty-plus years in the trenches, this is a not uncommon practice. We like bigger and bolder solutions, yet sometimes advocate them in ways that are political losers by ever increasing orders of magnitude. We talk to each other instead of listening to the public. We want people to support us, yet we don’t link our goals with the core values people feel are truly threatened, like having a decent job or health care.

Penetrating as it is, the value of “Death” is not the critique. Many of us recognize the hole we’re in. How do we get out? The ideas found in this essay resonate with me because I see them popping up right here in Idaho as we work to create politics of the possible on wilderness in one of the most conservative states in the nation.

Our work—globally or locally—“must be evaluated not only for whether they will get us the environmental protection we need but also whether they will define the debate, divide our opponents and build our political power over time.”

“Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years defining themselves against conservative values…without ever articulating a coherent morality we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right’s values that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a serious way.” Or as Kevin Phillips is quoted in the essay, “liberal intellectuals and policy makers had become too sure of themselves, so lazy and complacent that they failed to pay attention to people who didn’t share their opinions.”

Van Jones, quoted in “Death,” suggests that “The first wave of environmentalism was framed around conservation and the second around regulation…We believe the third wave will be framed around investment.” This is a compelling idea, and if used well can demonstrate that conservation can complement conservative values rather than always look as if we’re trying to overthrow them.

When I say more conservative, I’m not buying Bush “mandate” stuff; he doesn’t have one. But across the nation and across party lines we are if not red, certainly more purple than the blue even some of our friends once were.

Our movement needs to be mindful of these shifts in the public and of our political position as trusted advocates. Where needed, we should recalibrate our campaign and communication strategies, and a first step is reframing our goals around the values we support, that when well-articulated are already supported by the public in just about every poll out there.

Winning campaigns begin where the people are, and that means listening a lot, learning from what is heard, and crafting proactive and achieveable value-based strategies that scale the wall rather than smash into it over and over again.

If we’re going to win—including winning while losing—we have to retake the offense rather than wait and see what gets thrown at us. Proactive campaigns create goals, get us into the streets and Rotary Clubs talking to real people, listening to real people, and force us to create new politics based on communication strategies that touch the values that motivate and inspire us and are shared by nearly all Americans.

As “Death of Environmentalism” suggests, our work should provide something akin to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. A positive and compelling vision, grounded in values in synch with daily lives of the audience. We’ve too often been giving the “I have a nightmare” speech, and that’s not the vision we need to protect the planet, rebuild our movement’s standing with the public, or to win community-level campaigns. “Death of Environmentalism” is an imperfect analysis of where we are, and certainly does not contain all the answers for how to move forward, but it does provoke a number of important questions we should all be asking.

Rick Johnson is the executive director of Idaho Conservation League (www.wildidaho.org).