From Felicity Barringer in the NY Times comes
Paper Sets Off a Debate on Environmentalism's Future:
MIDDLEBURY, 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.
That'll put a crimp in the funding stream!
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.
Even worse!
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."
Gosh! It wasn't about sucker fish after all!
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.
No word on group counseling.
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.
Ah, the fantasy-based community!
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."
Bwhahaha! And Lurch spent Christmas in Cambodia and opposes gun control.
"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.
It's one of the tenets of the fantasy-based community.
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.
You can only claim the sky is falling so many times before you attract yawns.
"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.
Why not just take up a hobby? Knitting is nice.
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.
Ya think? Anyhow, the big ecolobbies and ecodonors aren't buying it:
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.
...
"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. 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.
...
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.
Bureaucratese is her native tongue.
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.
Sniff!
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.
They don't call it expertise when they have to shovel it out of the stable.
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.' "
Ah, a feline fight over the cream. This could get nasty!
