Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
256
Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
256eBook
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Overview
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus triggered a firestorm of controversy with their self-published essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which argued that the existing model of environmentalism cannot adequately address global warming and that a new politics needs to take its place.
In this follow-up to their essay, the authors give an expansive and eloquent manifesto for political change. American values have changed dramatically since the environmental movement’s greatest victories in the 1960s. And while global warming presents exponentially greater challenges than any past pollution problem, environmentalists continue to employ the same tired and ineffective tactics.
Making the case for abandoning old categories (nature versus the market; left versus right), the authors articulate a new pragmatism that has already found champions in prominent figures such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Seeing a connection between the failures of environmentalism and the failures of the entire left-leaning political agenda, the authors point the way toward an aspirational politics that will resonate with modern American values and be capable of tackling our most pressing challenges.
“To win, Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue, environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear.” —The New York Times
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547348377 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 380,497 |
| File size: | 888 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Birth of Environmentalism
In the late 1960s, a new social movement swept through American political life. Earlier that decade, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring woke America to the dangers of pesticides. Smog was choking Los Angeles and other cities. And in 1969, pollution on the surface of Cleveland's Cuyahoga River burst into flames. That same year, Americans viewed the first photograph of planet Earth taken from outer space and realized how fragile and lonely our living planet truly is.
Modern environmental organizations emerged in response to these newly visible consequences of industrialization. The Sierra Club transformed itself from a quiet hikers' club to a lobbying powerhouse. Two years later, a group of young and idealistic attorneys determined to create an NAACP Legal Defense Fund for the environment founded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to bring the full weight of scientific and legal expertise to bear on environmental policy. And on April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day. The modern environmental movement was born, and it shone like a candle in the dark night of race riots, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War.
The new movement's impact on politics was swift and decisive. Public outrage at these new pollution problems, combined with the environmental movement's deft use of science, lobbying, grassroots organizing, and the courts, led Congress to pass and presidents to sign dozens ofenvironmental policies into law, from the Clean Air Act to the Endangered Species Act. By the end of the 1970s, the United States had protected millions of acres of wilderness and public land, dramatically improved air and water quality throughout the nation, and established the strongest environmental protections of any nation on earth.
Or at least that's how the story goes. As far as political fables go, this genesis story has served the environmental movement well. It depicts environmental leaders as the parents of America's most important environmental laws. It defines public support for environmental action as a relatively simple reaction to visible pollution. It imagines Earth Day to have been a spontaneous grassroots expression of popular discontent. And it establishes scientific and legal expertise as the basis of the legislative victories of the era.
And while most of the facts commonly marshaled to tell the environmentalist birth story are technically correct, the overall narrative is all wrong.
1.
On June 22, 1969, oil and debris on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames and burned for twenty-five minutes. The burning river quickly became national news. Time magazine published an article headlined "The Price of Optimism," complete with a spectacular photo of the river aflame. Randy Newman wrote a song about the famous fire. And decades later, environmental leaders remembered the fire as an emblematic cause of the burgeoning environmental movement. "I will never forget a photograph of flames, fire, shooting right out of the water in downtown Cleveland," President Clinton's EPA administrator Carol Browner said years later. "It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning."
But the famous photograph that appeared in Time was not of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969. It was of a far more serious fire in 1952 that burned for three days and caused $1.5 million in damage. In fact, the Cuyahoga had caught fire on at least a dozen occasions since 1868. Most of those earlier fires were much more devastating than the 1969 blaze: A fire on the Cuyahoga in 1912 killed five people. A fire in 1936 burned for five days. The 1969 fire, by contrast, lasted just under thirty minutes, caused only $50,000 in damage, and injured no one. The reason Time had to use the photograph of the 1952 fire is that the 1969 fire was out before anyone could snap a picture of it.
For at least a hundred years before 1969, industrial river fires were a normal part of American life. In his scrupulous reconstruction of the era, the environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes,
The first reported Cuyahoga River fires were well over a century ago. Indeed, it appears that burning oil and debris in rivers was somewhat common. Due to the volume of oil in the river, the Cuyahoga was "so flammable that if steamboat captains shoveled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames" ... The Cuyahoga was also not the only site of river fires. A river leading into the Baltimore harbor caught flame on June 8, 1926 ... The Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, "repeatedly caught fire" like the Cuyahoga, and a tugboat on the Schuylkill burned when oil on the river's surface was lit.
It wasn't that nobody had noticed that the river had become a disaster. In 1881, the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga "an open sewer." The problem was that there wasn't the political will to do much about it. After the Civil War, the city was understandably more concerned with building a new sewer system to prevent more cholera outbreaks than with addressing the occasional river fire.
Like the sad and largely unacknowledged history of the Cuyahoga, smog in Los Angeles and other cities was bad in 1970 but hardly worse than the foul air Americans breathed in earlier eras. All of which begs the question: if modern environmentalism was born in response to the dramatic visual evidence of industrial pollution, why wasn't it born in 1868, 1912, or 1952?
2.
The view of Earth from outer space. The harpooning of whales. The Cuyahoga in flames. Smog in Los Angeles. The clubbing of baby seals. Toxic waste dumps. The hunting of wolves near Yellowstone. The Amazon in flames. Polar bears on melting ice.
Environmental leaders and activists today overwhelmingly believe that these images are the lifeblood of their movement, responsible for motivating the public and policymakers to take action. And so they return again and again to the same idea: if they can just show Americans what is happening to nature, the people will rise up and demand action. Environmentalists believe this to be so because they strongly associate the images of an earlier political moment — the Cuyahoga on fire, the first images of Earth — with the birth and great accomplishments of the modern environmental movement.
In one sense, the dependence upon visual imagery is a kind of nostalgia masquerading as political strategy. And like almost all expressions of nostalgia, it is reductive and simplifies a much more complex picture, ignoring the values and context that defined the moment and obsessively returning to the same partial memories — the exhilaration of seeing images of Earth, the shock and outrage at seeing a river on fire, the imagery painted by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring of a world in which the birds had ceased to sing, and the feelings of great accomplishment as millions of Americans poured into the streets demanding action and Congress passed powerful new laws in response.
But in another sense, the overreliance of environmentalists on visual evidence of humans' degradation of nature is a consequence of the environmentalists' interpretive framework; principally, the idea of pollution. Consider that the meaning of the word pollution depends on the concept of nature as pure, harmonious, and separate from humans. Pollution is this kind of contamination, or violation, of nature by humans. Similarly, human development is an encroachment upon nature. These are not simply analytical categories but moral ones as well. Nature has been unjustly violated by mankind.
These stories are hardly marginal; they can be found in the most mainstream environmentalist discourses, from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Jared Diamond's Collapse to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Environmentalists are constantly telling nostalgic narratives about how things were better in the past, when humans lived in greater balance with nature. These stories depict humans not as beings as natural as any other but as essentially separate from the world. And while these narratives are easy to recognize, they are difficult to exorcise. They are deeply embedded in the stories environmentalists have long told, the strategies they have become accustomed to using, and the institutions they have built.
But faced with a new set of problems that refuse to reduce themselves so simply to visual explanations of human violations of nature, environmental leaders are at a loss. They complain that the challenge of mobilizing the public to fight global warming is due largely to the fact that global warming is invisible. But the problem is not that global warming is invisible; it's that environmentalists depend too much on the visible.
When all you have is a hammer, the old saying goes, the whole world looks like a nail. Environmental leaders rely on the idea that their political project is to show Americans the ways in which nature is being violated, whether through mailing or beaming those images into Americans' homes, sponsoring nature walks and environmental education programs, or proving through the sciences that human activities are degrading nature.
Environmentalists believe that getting Americans to protect the environment is a simple and rational process: Expose them to the beauty of the natural world. Show them how it is literally being destroyed by human activity. Advocate actions to stop the destruction.
But if getting Americans to see the destruction of nature were enough to galvanize action, why wasn't modern environmentalism born in 1912 or 1952, when fires on the Cuyahoga actually killed people and caused significant damage? If environmental protection is so obvious, natural, and rational a reaction to visible pollution, why didn't the environmental movement begin decades earlier, when pollution was much worse in most American cities? Plainly, something other than a random outbreak of rationality in the 1960s was responsible for motivating the editors of Time magazine, Randy Newman, and millions of Americans celebrating Earth Day to demand action to protect the environment.
3.
One of the Sierra Club's most successful coffee-table books, The Last Redwoods, published in 1963, explained rising ecological concern in the United States in this way:
[M]an does not live by bread alone. He has needs that are no less real and no less vital — although they are harder to measure in economic terms — than food and water and shelter. He has a thirst for beauty. He often has a hunger for solitude. He craves the companionship of other animal species. He has a deep, atavistic urge for identification with nature. Witness the extraordinary upsurge of hiking and camping and boating and the overwhelming increase in use of our natural parks.
It is the kind of statement that likely struck most readers at the time as deeply intuitive: being out in nature is a natural urge. But on further examination, it is an illogical passage. Humans do indeed have a strong urge to be in nature; such an urge might even be atavistic, a long-repressed genetic predisposition. But how can atavism explain the extraordinary upsurge of Americans hiking, camping, boating, and otherwise enjoying nonhuman nature during the postwar era?
Clearly, it cannot. What explains the postwar increase in recreational boating, camping, and hiking is not atavism — it's affluence. The satisfaction of the material needs of food and water and shelter is not an obstacle to but rather the precondition for the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world.
Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the standard of living for virtually every American improved consistently and dramatically. By 1970, affluent, comfortable, and secure Americans were strongly interested in quality-of-life concerns, which included things like clean air; clean water; and local, state, and national parks. America's unprecedented postwar prosperity created rising expectations for greater personal fulfillment and a sense that greater material wealth alone could not provide it. Social scientists often label these quality-of-life concerns postmaterial, because they emerge only after individuals and societies have met their basic material needs.
Throughout this book we will distinguish between material and postmaterial needs and values, and so it is important to be clear about what we mean by these terms. While many Americans today could be described as materialistic, that does not mean that they have not yet met their material needs as defined by social scientists. Meeting one's material needs entails meeting one's basic survival needs for food, shelter, and physical security. By this standard, virtually every American today — in contrast to roughly one-third of all Americans in the 1930s — has more than met his or her material needs and is a postmaterialist.
Once we meet our material needs, we all experience a variety of postmaterial needs that are no less strongly felt than our material needs for sustenance and security. This was Abraham Maslow's central insight — that higher needs such as personal freedom, meaningful work, and self-creation do not emerge strongly among those who have barely enough to eat or nowhere safe to live. And while some social scientists and psychologists quibble with elements of Maslow's hierarchy, the underlying concept — that there exists a universal hierarchy of human needs — remains to this day the consensus among social scientists.
Postmaterialists still have material needs. They just spend less time worrying about them than they do their postmaterial needs. Postmaterialists are more likely to worry about eating too much than eating too little. When they worry about where to live, they worry about the quality of life they'll have and not, for the most part, about whether they'll be secure from the elements. The shift from a materialist orientation to a postmaterialist one reflects a shifting of priorities from survival to fulfillment.
The ways in which we satisfy postmaterial needs, and our success in doing so, depend on our beliefs, identities, sociocultural positions, traditions, cultures, values, and moment in time. Throughout this book we will seek to understand differing values and ways of satisfying psychological needs without losing sight of the reality that human needs do not emerge randomly but rather progress in a predictable fashion.
We will also distinguish between lower and higher postmaterial needs, starting with outer-directed needs for status, belonging, equality, and freedom and moving to inner-directed needs for purpose, mastery, meaning, creativity, and self-creation. Like the progression from material needs to postmaterial needs, higher, inner-directed needs do not appear until people first meet their prior outer-directed needs. One way to think about the rise up Maslow's hierarchy is as the progressive realization of new levels of human freedom: freedom from hunger and deprivation; freedom from violence; freedom to love and belong; and freedom to realize one's potential for creativity.
There are important implications of all this for understanding the birth of environmentalism. Environmentalist values, such as the strong desire to protect ecosystems, largely spring from higher-order, postmaterial, and inner-directed needs. And indeed, around the world there is a very strong association between prosperity and environmental values.
The author of The Last Redwoods, which was written at a time when Maslow's ideas were in the air, understood that the appreciation of the outdoors is a human need; what he overlooked was the condition in which it emerged — a telling and ironic oversight, given the demand from environmentalists at the time that we pay attention to the ecosystems in which we live.
The connection between affluence and the birth of environmentalism goes a long way toward explaining why environmentalism in the United States emerged in the 1960s and not in the 1930s. It also explains why ecological concern remains far weaker in Brazil, India, and China than in the United States, Japan, and Europe. And it explains why, when environmentalism does emerge in developing countries, such as Brazil, it does so in Rio de Janeiro's most affluent neighborhoods, where people have met their basic material needs, and not in its slums, where people live in fear of hunger and violence.
4.
The watershed moments that led to the environmental policy victories of the 1970s originated not in 1968, 1969, or 1970 but rather in 1933, 1945, 1960, and 1964. These dates mark, respectively, the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt and the start of the New Deal; the end of the United States' successful prosecution of World War II; the election of John F. Kennedy; and the devastating defeat of Barry Goldwater by President Lyndon Johnson. These particular historical moments and many others forged the extraordinary affluence and economic growth that characterized the postwar era and made possible the liberal political consensus that largely defined both political parties until the mid-1970s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Break Through"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: From the Nightmare to the Dream 1Part I: The Politics of Limits 1. The Birth of Environmentalism 21 2. The Forest for the Trees 41 3. Interests Within Interests 66 4. The Prejudice of Place 89 5. The Pollution Paradigm 105 6. The Death of Environmentalism 130
Part II: The Politics of Possibility 7. Status and Security 157 8. Belonging and Fulfillment 188 9. Pragmatism 216 10. Greatness 241
In Gratitude 274 Notes 278 Bibliography 322 Index 333