The environmental movement is having an identity crisis. It is splintering into pieces that today are actively fighting each other. It is being bifurcated into an old generation still pushing for the myriad campaigns to save wilderness, animal species, habitat, and rainforest, and a new generation of neo-environmentalists who are advancing a broader green future made up of efficient new technology, green energy, and innovative solutions to the natural resource demands of an overpopulated world.
It’s not an amicable disagreement. It’s turned into an all-out war of friendly fire, each faction fighting for the future of environmentalism.
The outright hostility of the conflict is a product of the high stakes. Despite its successes, environmentalism has failed to reverse the tide of environmental devastation on a global scale. Climate change still threatens worldwide catastrophe. Habitats across the world are still being vaporized at an astonishing rate. For all the campaigns to save polar bears, whales, and spotted owls, the glaring reality is that the world may be devastated by much bigger problems that single-issue environmental movements have done little to address.
Neo-environmentalists are calling for an environmental movement that takes these big threats into consideration. Their message is clear: You can’t save the whales, the trees, and the polar bears if you don’t save the earth. And with a rising demand for First World living standards among the billions of people in China, India, and other emerging economies, the threat of global environmental destruction seems like an inevitability that can only be averted by radical, global environmental solutions.
The old-school environmental movement is having a hard time addressing these global issues. Their “Think Globally, Act Locally” mantra now seems outdated and ineffective in a world that demands global action. Take Tahoe, for example. Mired in a struggling recessionary economy, and dealing with outdated and environmentally damaging infrastructure, groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore have continued to focus on stopping redevelopment projects and blockading planning documents, effectively leaving Tahoe unchanged.
A question that seems hard to answer is: What is the traditional environmental movement’s vision for the future? In front of the catastrophic global environmental challenges, is stopping the Homewood resort development a success? In a world where our energy consumption is directly tied to coal mining and coal emissions, is suing a small, local biomass plant (as the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity recently did) that sources renewable energy locally, and provides an alternative to open burning, an environmental victory?
At the heart of the environmental identity crisis is the environmental movement’s long unease with technology. Born from a lineage that includes anti-technology escapists and naturalists like Henry David Thoreau, the traditional environmental movement is loathe to accept technological solutions to environmental problems.
By contrast, the neo-environmentalists say that green technology provides an arena for environmentalism to turn from obstructionism and become solution-oriented.
“For environmental groups, the answer won’t be coal power or no power plant at all. There will be real alternatives that can be promoted and supported. Green technology gives environmentalism the material means to build a better civilization as well as the political potency and clarity of purpose that comes with the need to make new things work,” wrote Alexis Madrigal in an article in the The Atlantic called, “Think Globally, Destroy Locally.”
Of course, these solutions don’t sit well with some. In a beautifully honest piece in Orion Magazine entitled “Dark Ecology,” author Paul Kingsnorth talked about the modern world’s complexity fetish. Calling it a “myth of progress,” Kingsnorth criticized a culture that says “plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things.”
I have mixed feelings about the internal conflict that the environmental movement is going through. I understand, and applaud, the pragmatism of the neo-environmentalists, but I don’t know if I find myself agreeing with their most aggressive market-based and technological solutions. I wonder about modeling carbon reduction on the grift-ridden standard of Wall Street. I question whether putting all of our faith into technology-driven options like geoengineering will not drop us into another “progress trap” where we deepen the hole we have dug for ourselves. And I cringe when soulless bureaucratic words like “ecosystem services” crop up when neo-environmentalists talk about rivers and forests and meadows.
But I can’t find myself lining up behind the lawyers who have enriched themselves off of Tahoe’s tidal wave of litigation, and I have a hard time sympathizing with the upper-class environmentalists who drive SUVs up to their 5,000-square-foot second homes, turn on the coal-powered electricity, all while fighting Tahoe’s latest regional plan, development proposal, biomass plant, or regional logging operation. There has to be a more logical environmental approach than this naked hypocrisy. And more importantly, these environmentalists can’t continue to rely on the easy option of simply lodging a lawsuit. Instead they should engage in the much harder work of actually advancing legitimate solutions that take on the transportation, energy, and planning problems at Tahoe.
Despite the differences and the unyielding ideology even among supposed environmental allies, I keep thinking there is middle ground — one that recognizes obstructionism isn’t going to solve the world’s daunting environmental issues, and accepts the challenge to lead us toward a sustainable future. One that leavens the optimism that technology will solve all of our problems, and admits that a Wall Street-esque commodity market that trades nature like a penny stock might have some unintended downsides.
Perhaps out of all this conflict, a new cohesive environmental movement will arise that takes the long tradition and deep respect for nature of organizations such as the Sierra Club and melds it with the pragmatic solution-oriented approaches of the neo-environmentalists. I, for one, hope it is a new coming of age for an environmentalism that obstructs less and leads more, without sacrificing a respect for the deep, numinous mystique of wild nature.
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