What’s Killing Environmentalism: Moralistic, Overzealous Behavior

Seven years after it was signed by 35 countries, the Kyoto Protocol, which sets limits on the emissions of gases thought to produce global warming, has just taken effect. The introduction of the limits, said the Japanese official who presided over the conference that drew up the pact, was “a day of celebration and a day to renew our resolve.”

But for many leaders of environmental groups, the treaty has been the catalyst for a fierce debate about the effectiveness of their efforts, and even whether environmentalism has a future.

What triggered the controversy was a paper that two political strategists, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, delivered in October at a meeting of the major foundations supporting environmental causes.

Entitled “The End of Environmentalism,” their paper argued that environmentalism had become merely another special interest, content to operate in the corridors of government or at international conferences and focused mostly on devising expert solutions to potential dangers, such as developing standards for acceptable levels of pollution.

Noting that the Kyoto requirements applied to just 35 countries — and did not not include the world’s largest gas-emitter, the United States — Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger called the agreement the latest in two decades of Pyrrhic victories and outright failures, stemming from the inability of environmentalists to build broad support for their proposals.

Gaining the attention of the American public, they contend, requires a complete rethinking of what environmentalists stand for and do. “By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution,” Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger wrote, “environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war,” unaware that their positions are no longer tenable against stronger conservative and industry opposition.

Instead, they argued, environmentalists should promote “a compelling vision of the future,” one that links their concerns to “core American values.” In short, the authors wrote, they must replace their “I have a nightmare” pronouncements about global warming and the like with the environmentalist equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

But, the Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope — one of those older generals — noted in a sharp rebuttal to the paper, Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger are vague on the details of such an appeal. Nor, he contended, is the environmentalist record as dismal, or the movement’s leaders as unimaginative, as the two critics suggest. It is difficult to decide who should pay to alleviate global warming, Mr. Pope asserted, so the Kyoto issue is a special case and should not prompt environmentalists to abandon tactics that continue to be effective.

If that is so, Mr. Pope’s argument shows how fixated environmental leaders have become on the technical details of the problems they are trying to solve, rather than on what they are hoping to accomplish.

The Kyoto Protocol is weak not only because its costs are hard to estimate and the scientific basis for global warming questionable. At least as important was the reluctance of rapidly industrializing nations, such as China and India, to accept restrictions on using energy that might have hampered their growth.

That is why Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger believe environmentalists must rethink their approach. Instead of aligning themselves with limiting growth, they ought to join forces with those who favor economic expansion. Instead of focusing narrowly on environmental issues, they should ally with groups that support other causes, such as improving health care or raising wages. Once they have obtained power, Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger suggest, they can do what conservatives have done: work out any differences within the coalition and deal with their opponents from a position of strength.

Apart from the cynicism of that strategy, the reason it has been controversial is that it asks environmentalists to behave pragmatically. When the environmental movement in the United States began, that was how it operated. It gained influence by taking on and making compromises over issues of limited scope that could be widely understood and readily tackled, such as polluted waters, automobile emissions, or pesticide-induced ecological damage.

But having won those battles, the movement began to embrace broader, less easily defined, and more contentious topics, such as “environmental justice” and “deep ecology” (which seeks to reorder relationships among “human and nonhuman life”). As a result, influential corners of the environmental world have come to resemble religious movements more than political ones, concerned with changing souls more than changing policies.

Mr. Nordhaus and Mr. Shellenberger are wrong to liken environmental groups to special interests. The problem of environmentalism may be not that it has become too narrow and technocratic, but rather that it has grown overzealous and moralistic. Whether environmentalists can learn to restrain such ambitions will be the decisive factor in reviving their movement’s sagging fortunes.

In an era in which government has largely fallen out of favor, joining forces with other groups championing increased public activism on economic and social-welfare issues would not seem like a promising approach.

Nor in a world clamoring for the resources necessary for higher growth rates do ritualistic denunciations of the “carbon industry” — i.e., the energy producers — seem like a fruitful way to win allies. If environmental groups want to end their downward slide, they would do well not just to copy the tactics used by their conservative opponents, but also to find ways to embrace some of their goals.

As Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, has written, this is the same challenge that liberalism as a whole needs to address. If it is not to become an increasingly marginalized political force, liberalism must show that it takes public concerns seriously, and not try to impose its own more “enlightened” views. It also has to offer credible alternatives for dealing with those concerns. Otherwise, liberalism, like the environmental movement that sprang from it, will be consigned to the sidelines, observing the passage of laws and adoption of treaties over which it has had little influence.

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.