ENVIRONMENTAL FAILURE: A CASE FOR A NEW GREEN POLITICS

Rachel's Environmental News
October 23, 2008

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.

Lost Ground

The need for appraisal would not be so urgent if environmental
conditions were not so dire. The mounting threats point to an emerging
environmental tragedy of unprecedented proportions.

Half the world's tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate
of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second,
and has for decades. Half the planet's wetlands are gone. An estimated
90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of
marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Almost half
of the corals are gone or are seriously threatened. Species are
disappearing at rates about 1,000 times faster than normal. The planet
has not seen such a spasm of extinction in 65 million years, since the
dinosaurs disappeared. Desertification claims a Nebraska-sized area of
productive capacity each year globally. Persistent toxic chemicals can
now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.

The earth's stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before its
loss was discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon
dioxide up by more than a third and have started in earnest the most
dangerous change of all -- planetary warming and climate disruption.
Everywhere, earth's ice fields are melting. Industrial processes are
fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at a rate equal to
nature's; one result is the development of hundreds of documented dead
zones in the oceans due to overfertilization. Freshwater withdrawals
are now over half of accessible runoff, and water shortages are
multiplying here and abroad.

The United States, of course, is deeply complicit in these global
trends, including our responsibility for about 30 percent of the
carbon dioxide added thus far to the atmosphere. But even within the
United States itself, four decades of environmental effort have not
stemmed the tide of environmental decline. The country is losing 6,000
acres of open space every day, and 100,000 acres of wetlands every
year. About a third of U.S. plant and animal species are threatened
with extinction. Half of U.S. lakes and a third of its rivers still
fail to meet the standards that by law should have been met by 1983.
And we have done little to curb our wasteful energy habits or our huge
population growth.

Here is one measure of the problem: All we have to do to destroy the
planet's climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children
and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today,
with no growth in human population or the world economy. Just continue
to generate greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to
impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates,
and the world in the latter part of this century won't be fit to live
in. But human activities are not holding at current levels -- they are
accelerating, dramatically.

The size of the world economy has more than quadrupled since 1960 and
is projected to quadruple again by mid-century. It took all of human
history to grow the $7 trillion world economy of 1950. We now grow by
that amount in a decade.

The escalating processes of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment,
and toxification, which continue despite decades of warnings and
earnest effort, constitute a severe indictment of the system of
political economy in which we live and work. The pillars of today's
capitalism, as they are now constituted, work together to produce an
economic and political reality that is highly destructive
environmentally. An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic
growth at any cost;

All we have to do to destroy the planet's climate and biota is to keep
doing exactly what we are doing today.

powerful corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by
generating profit (including profit from avoiding the environmental
costs their companies create, amassing deep subsidies and benefits
from government, and continued deployment of technologies originally
designed with little or no regard for the environment); markets that
systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected
by government; government that is subservient to corporate interests
and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by
sophisticated advertising and marketing; economic activity now so
large in scale that its impacts alter the fundamental biophysical
operations of the planet -- all combine to deliver an ever-growing
world economy that is undermining the ability of the earth to sustain
life.

Are Environmentalists To Blame?

In assigning responsibility for environmental failure, there are many
places to lay blame: the rise of the modern, anti-government right in
American politics; a negligent media; the deadening complexity of
today's environmental issues and programs, to mention the most
notable. But a number of observers have placed much of the blame for
failure on the leading environmental organizations themselves.

For example, Mark Dowie in his 1995 book Losing Ground notes that the
national environmental organizations crafted an agenda and pursued a
strategy based on the civil authority and good faith of the federal
government. "Therein," he believes, "lies the inherent weakness and
vulnerability of the environmental movement. Civil authority and good
faith regarding the environment have proven to be chimeras in
Washington." Dowie argues that the national environmental groups also
"misread and underestimate[d] the fury of their antagonists."

The mainstream environmental organizations were challenged again in
2004 in the now-famous The Death of Environmentalism. In it, Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus write that America's mainstream
environmentalists are

Today's environmentalism accepts compromises as part of the process.
It takes what it can get.

not "articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the
magnitude of the crisis. Instead they are promoting technical policy
fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards --
proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the
political alliances the community needs to deal with the problem."
Shellenberger and Nordhaus believe environmentalists don't recognize
that they are in a culture war -- a war over core values and a vision
for the future.

These criticisms and others stem from the fundamental decision of
today's environmentalism to work within the system. This core decision
grew out of the successes of the environmental community in the 1970s,
which seemed to confirm the correctness of that approach. Our failure
to execute a dramatic mid-course correction when circumstances changed
can be seen in hindsight as a major blunder.

Here is what I mean by working within the system. When today's
environmentalism recognizes a problem, it believes it can solve that
problem by calling public attention to it, framing policy and program
responses for government and industry, lobbying for those actions, and
litigating for their enforcement. It believes in the efficacy of
environmental advocacy and government action. It believes that good-
faith compliance with the law will be the norm, and that corporations
can be made to behave and will increasingly weave environmental
objectives into their business strategies.

Today's environmentalism tends to be pragmatic and incrementalist --
its actions are aimed at solving problems and often doing so one at a
time. It is more comfortable proposing innovative policy solutions
than framing inspirational messages. These characteristics are closely
allied to a tendency to deal with effects rather than underlying
causes. Most of our major environmental laws and treaties, for
example, address the resulting environmental ills much more than their
causes. In the end, environmentalism accepts compromises as part of
the process. It takes what it can get.

Today's environmentalism also believes that problems can be solved at
acceptable economic costs -- and often with net economic benefit --
without significant lifestyle changes or threats to economic growth.
It will not hesitate to strike out at an environmentally damaging
facility or development, but it sees itself, on balance, as a positive
economic force.

Environmentalists see solutions coming largely from within the
environmental sector. They may worry about the flaws in and corruption
of our politics, for example, but that is not their professional
concern. That's what Common Cause or other groups do. Similarly,
environmentalists know that the prices for many things need to be
higher, and they are aware that environmentally honest prices would
create a huge burden on the half of American families that just get
by. But universal health care and other government action needed to
address America's gaping economic injustices are not seen as part of
the environmental agenda.

Today's environmentalism is also not focused strongly on political
activity or organizing a grassroots movement. Electoral politics and
mobilizing a green political movement have played second fiddle to
lobbying, litigating, and working with government agencies and
corporations.

A central precept, in short, is that the system can be made to work
for the environment. In this frame of action, scant attention is paid
to the corporate dominance of economic and political life, to
transcending our growth fetish, to promoting major lifestyle changes
and challenging the materialistic values that dominate our society, to
addressing the constraints on environmental action stemming from
America's vast social insecurity and hobbled democracy, to framing a
new American story, or to building a new environmental politics.

Not everything, of course, fits within these patterns. There have been
exceptions from the start, and recent trends reflect a broadening in
approaches. Greenpeace has certainly worked outside the system,

Organizations built to litigate and lobby are not necessarily the best
ones to mobilize a grassroots movement.

the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club have had a
sustained political presence, groups like the Natural Resources
Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund have developed
effective networks of activists around the country, the World
Resources Institute has augmented its policy work with on-the-ground
sustainable development projects, and environmental justice concerns
and the emerging climate crisis have spurred the proliferation of
grassroots efforts, student organizing, and community and state
initiatives.

But organizations that were built to litigate and lobby for
environmental causes or to do sophisticated policy studies are not
necessarily the best ones to mobilize a grassroots movement or build a
force for electoral politics or motivate the public with social
marketing campaigns. These things need to be done, and to get them
done it may be necessary to launch new organizations and initiatives
with special strengths in these areas.

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.

A New Environmental Politics

Environmental protection requires a new politics.

This new politics must, first of all, ensure that environmental
concern and advocacy extend to the full range of relevant issues. The
environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to
consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy
skepticism of growthmania and a redefinition of what society should be
striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a
redefinition of the corporation and its goals, a commitment to deep
change in both the functioning and the reach of the market, and a
powerful assault on the anthropocentric and contempocentric values
that currently dominate.

Environmentalists must also join with social progressives in
addressing the crisis of inequality now unraveling America's social
fabric and undermining its democracy. It is a crisis of soaring
executive pay, huge incomes, and increasingly concentrated wealth for
a small minority, occurring simultaneously with poverty near a 30-year
high, stagnant wages despite rising productivity, declining social
mobility and opportunity, record levels of people without health
insurance, failing schools, increased job insecurity, swelling jails,
shrinking safety nets, and the longest work hours among the rich
countries. In an America with such vast social insecurity, economic
arguments, even misleading ones, will routinely trump environmental
goals.

Similarly, environmentalists must join with those seeking to reform
politics and strengthen democracy. What we are seeing in the United
States is the emergence of a vicious circle: Income disparities shift
political access and influence to wealthy constituencies and large
businesses, which further imperils the potential of the democratic
process to act to correct the growing income disparities. Corporations
have been the principal economic actors for a long time; now they are
the principal political actors as well. Neither environment nor
society fares well under corporatocracy. Environmentalists need to
embrace public financing of elections, regulation of lobbying,
nonpartisan Congressional redistricting, and other political reform
measures as core to their agenda. Today's politics will never deliver
environmental sustainability.

The current financial crisis and, at this writing, the response to it,
reveal a system of political economy that is profoundly committed to
profits and growth and profoundly indifferent to people and society.
This system is at least as indifferent to its impacts on nature. Left
uncorrected, it is inherently ruthless and rapacious, and it is up to
citizens, acting mainly through government, to inject values of
fairness and sustainability into the system. But this effort commonly
fails because progressive politics are too enfeebled and Washington is
increasingly in the hands of powerful corporate interests and
concentrations of great wealth. The best hope for real change in
America is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social
justice, and strong democracy into one powerful progressive force.

The new environmentalism must work with this progressive coalition to
build a mighty force in electoral politics. This will require major
efforts at grassroots organizing; strengthening groups working at the
state and community levels; and developing motivational messages and
appeals -- indeed, writing a new American story, as Bill Moyers has
urged. Our environmental discourse has thus far been dominated by
lawyers, scientists, and economists. Now, we need to hear a lot more
from the poets, preachers, philosophers, and psychologists.

Above all, the new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive,
reaching out to embrace union members and working families, minorities
and people of color, religious organizations, the women's movement,
and other communities of complementary interest and shared fate. It is
unfortunate but true that stronger alliances are still needed to
overcome the "silo effect" that separates the environmental community
from those working on domestic political reforms, a progressive social
agenda, human rights, international peace, consumer issues, world
health and population concerns, and world poverty and
underdevelopment.

The final watchword of the new environmental politics must be, "Build
the movement." We have had movements against slavery and many have
participated in movements for civil rights and against apartheid and
the Vietnam War. Environmentalists are often said to be part of "the
environmental movement." We need a real one -- networked together,
protesting, demanding action and accountability from governments and
corporations, and taking steps as consumers and communities to realize
sustainability and social justice in everyday life.

Can one see the beginnings of a new social movement in America?
Perhaps I am letting my hopes get the better of me, but I think we
can. Its green side is visible, I think, in the surge of campus
organizing and student mobilization occurring today, much of it
coordinated by the student-led Energy Action Coalition and by Power
Vote.

If there is a model within American memory of what must be done, it is
the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

It's visible also in the increasing activism of religious
organizations, including many evangelical groups under the banner of
Creation Care, and in the rapid proliferation of community-based
environmental initiatives. It's there in the joining together of
organized labor, environmental groups, and progressive businesses in
the Apollo Alliance and there in the Sierra Club's collaboration with
the United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in the United
States. It's visible too in the outpouring of effort to build on Al
Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and in the grassroots organizing of 1Sky
and others around climate change. It is visible in the green consumer
movement and in the consumer support for the efforts of the Rainforest
Action Network to green the policies of the major U.S. banks. It's
there in the increasing number of teach-ins, demonstrations, marches,
and protests, including the 1,400 events across the United States in
2007 inspired by Bill McKibben's "Step It Up!" campaign to stop global
warming. It is there in the constituency-building work of minority
environmental leaders and in the efforts of groups like Green for All
to link social and environmental goals. It's just beginning, but it's
there, and it will grow.

The welcome news is that the environmental community writ large is
moving in some of these directions. Local and state environmental
groups have grown in strength and number. There is more political
engagement through the League of Conservation Voters and a few other
groups, and more work to reach out to voters with overtly political
messages. The major national organizations have strengthened their
links to local and state groups and established activist networks to
support their lobbying activities. Still, there is a long, long way to
go to build a new and vital environmental politics in America.

American politics today is failing not only the environment but also
the American people and the world. As Richard Falk reminds us, only an
unremitting struggle will drive the changes that can sustain people
and nature. If there is a model within American memory for what must
be done, it is the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. It had
grievances, it knew what was causing them, and it also knew that the
existing order had no legitimacy and that, acting together, people
could redress those grievances. It was confrontational and
disobedient, but it was nonviolent. It had a dream. And it had Martin
Luther King Jr.

It is amazing what can be accomplished if citizens are ready to march,
in the footsteps of Dr. King. It is again time to give the world a
sense of hope.

==============

James Gustave "Gus" Speth is the dean of the School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies at Yale University. His most recent (and
important) book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale
University Press, 2008).

Copyright 2008 Yale University