Really challenging piece by the young environmentalists Nordhaus & Shellenberger in The New Republic, pondering why the "green bubble" -- that is, cultural enthusiasm for environmentalism -- keeps bursting. Their bottom line: because it's a project through which the liberal elite expresses its cultural and existential anxieties. Excerpt:
To observe that green bubbles are fueled by the discontent of upper-middle- class liberals is not to dismiss environmentalism as elitist. Against nostalgic accounts like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, most social-change movements are started and directed by the relatively affluent and well-educated, from the preacher-led civil rights movement to modern feminism to gay rights. The problem is not that most greens are elites, per se, but rather that too few of them acknowledge the material basis for their ecological concern and that too many reject the modern project of expanding prosperity altogether.[snip]
There are, to be sure, negative and disorienting aspects of modern life: pollution, alienation, loneliness, inequality, and the proliferation of choices. But the truth is that, while we often talk of our desire for greater community and interconnectedness, we choose ever more privacy, autonomy, and personal freedom. Few of even the most ardent greens could seriously imagine subsuming their individual identities to a pre-agrarian tribe, or abandoning their office jobs for a life of hard agricultural labor. The retreat from older forms of community, and the move toward greater individuation, is universal and largely positive. Colin Beavan and Michael Pollan lament, respectively, the loss of community and the loss of connection between humans and the land. But both choose to live alone with their families in cities, not on agricultural communes, and both express themselves as unique thinkers and writers.
The writers then say that greens often talk about how climate change's negative effects will fall disproportionately on the world's poor, which may be true, but the greens never seem to worry about how grinding poverty itself makes the lot of the world's poor miserable -- and how economic development is the best chance to lift them out of their slough of misery. More:
The convenient and ancient view among elites that the poor are actually spiritually rich, and the exaggeration of insignificant gestures like recycling and buying new lightbulbs, are both motivated by the cognitive dissonance created by simultaneously believing that not all seven billion humans on earth can "live like we live" and, consciously or unconsciously, knowing that we are unwilling to give up our high standard of living. This is the split "between what you think and what you do" to which Pollan refers, and it should, perhaps, come as no surprise that so many educated liberals, living at the upper end of a social hierarchy that was becoming ever more stratified, should find the remedies that Pollan and Beavan offer so compelling. But, while planting a backyard garden may help heal the eco-anxieties of affluent greens, it will do little to heal the planet or resolve the larger social contradictions that it purports to address.
They conclude that the green movement is largely driven by an anti-modern utopianism (hey, quit looking at me, John Podhoretz!), the consequence of a certain class of Americans feeling guilty over the bounty, material and social, that modernity has brought them -- a class that is unwilling, by and large, to give any of it up, and that's unable to understand what it's asking the poor, as well as ordinary people, to give up.
I find this a fascinating analysis, and no doubt true to a large extent. But it leaves some questions unanswered. Read past the jump for more:
Even if this is a persuasive analysis of why the green movement doesn't get very far in America, except as the font of therapeutic lifestyle gestures and and inspiration for cultural politics among a relatively narrow slice of the electorate, that still doesn't address the realities of climate change and other environmental challenges that face us. Shellenberger and Nordhaus may grasp why green politics don't become a mass phenomenon, but the problems identified by environmentalists don't go away because the greens are ineffective at building a political consensus to tackle them. How might that be done?
I am pessimistic that it can be done, for precisely the reasons this essay identifies. Even if it's true that continued carbon-heavy development in China and around the world radically imperils the planet, nobody is going to listen to rich countries telling poor countries they can't have what the rich have -- especially if the rich countries are unwilling to give up substantially what they have to live poorer. The threats environmentalists identify seem abstract to someone who is living in real poverty, which is an all-too-concrete threat they live with daily, hourly.
One more thing: the authors seem to be saying that any attempt to renounce modernity is impossible, and should be resisted, because modernity has brought us so many good things. They would say this, because they're liberals, but in that sense they're liberals in the same way that most Americans, even Republicans, are liberals. Is it really the case, though, that because we cannot return to the pre-industrial past, that there's nothing we can or should do aside from treating our anxieties about modernity therapeutically? If that's the case, why are the Republicans who look at the environmental costs of modernity and say, "Tough s**t, that's just the price you pay for all these good things we have" not more admirably honest than greens who wring their hands over environmental degradation, but who aren't prepared to make any meaningful sacrifices to fight it?
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This article is a joke - I am amazed that this is what passes for intelligent discourse nowadays. Rod - is there any issue that we as a people face which you are not willing to blame on the liberal elites? It is amazing how much power they have and how powerless you poor helpless little non liberal elites are.
freelunch - I live outside Morristown - and if you do too then you know we have water problems here. Pollution - development which does not allow the aquifer to be recharged (lawns will finish us off), right outside of Morristown we have three municipalities in the last 10 years whose entire municipal well system was polluted with known carcinogenics. New deeper wells had to be dug in all those towns and until that happened, people in those towns got their water from tanks placed on each block. So much water is being drawn out of the Pine Barrens aquifer that the sea water has come in and now in south Jersey we have desalianation plants. We have a water problem - not just in the third world but in the US. Ask a Nebraska farmer about water. Look at the Colorado River - it once flowed freely into the Gulf - it now ends 150 miles before the Gulf in a muddy delta.
Snoozer, there was a dam on the Sandy River, about twenty miles from where I'm sitting right now, the destruction of which has opened hundreds of miles of upstream rivers and tributaries for salmon and steelhead. Those of us who actually live here think it's a Very Good Thing.
Why, of course you do. You don't need any real results, it's all about feeling, isn't it?
I don't know about wet dreams, (and why so damn snarky, anyway?)
Because I'm so 'dam' tired of all the pathetic juvenile nonsense used in our state to decide adult matters. Oh, and pathetically stupidly, too.
but, yes, I think that it's terrific that native species are being re-established over their former ranges.
Why, of course you do. Nothing happens to you. No loss, no hurt. No living destroyed, no land you used to love taken from you by people far away, sitting in comfortable homes and shielded from consequences of thier emotional tantrums. Why, you love it. Feel wonderful about yourself, and when told that others are hurt by your whimsical fantasies, just paint it over with self righteous rhetoric.
I prefer living in a world with elk and mountain goats and cougars and wolves.
Like hell you do. You live in a cement jungle, or in a heavily urbanized, slightly forested hilly terrain. ( oh, did you know that I just happen to live in Oregon, too?) You DO NOT LIVE WHERE THESE THINGS ARE GOING ON. No, you live far, far away, and don't give a damn about the hurt you cause untold people. After all, you're righteous and can post whole paragraphs praising your own love of the fine wonderful fantasies you portray about restored salmon and wolves and all those other sleeptime images you cling to.
It's okay for herons and ducks to have some wetlands, instead of Federally subsidized alfalfa growers.
You have absolutely NO idea what you're talking about.
It's odd that you, who comes across as a conservative, are so set against actually conserving. It's even odder that you as a Christian apparently despise so much of God's creation, things that you think provoke wet dreams, such as elk and mountain goats.
Oh, look at that. You can make up all kinds of nonsense and post it, pretending wisdom and knowledge of everyone's thoughts and beliefs and ideals.
Now, let me explain something. I have actually LIVED where the elk are. Where the mountain goats are. Where the wolves are. Where the salmon spawn. Where the ducks summer over. Where the deer and moose and elk wander my front yard, and the geese and ducks live in my back yard. I actually KNOW something about all of them, and not the selective bits of tripe that political organizations filter out to you to make you sit, dreamy eyed, fawning over yourself and your oh-so-superior Visa card as you raise money to empower them to live like kings and then wreak havoc on other people's lives, while having not a freaking clue how to accomplish a damn thing worth doing, but yet telling you how righteous and perfect you are for having given them money.
You really don't mind the raised electricity rates that have arrived with the advent of the "stakeholder" tax on all things good. You even tax yourself some more so those "green" guys can live with massive salaries and in places you can only dream about.
And, because people like those you so indifferently and self-righteously want to suffer needlessly have worked and built and created things, you have all you need to continue exploiting and destroying without a second thought. Oh, and posting about how wonderful and righteous you are for having done so.
Somehow I rather doubt you think that I "despise" all of Creation. Or that I don't consider being a steward of God's world a serious obligation. But, maybe you do. Doesn't really matter to me. The fact is, you've decided that YOU are the superior being, ensconced in your little mecca of liberal hell on the west side of Oregon, and that you, by virtue of your own judgement about yourself, have the right to impose your will on everone else, no matter what it does to them, and how utterly without results your plans will be.
That's the WHOLE problem with the "green" movement. And why it made no progress at all. Because it sought to "educate" those close in to the issues raised. And getting laughed at for being wrong, stupid, and ignorant. Now, they have a new approach. Raise money in New York for 'wolves in Montana' and raise money in DC and California for "water for suckers" in Klamath Lake. This way, there is no and never will be ANY accountability laid at the feet of the environmentalists for the massive harm and wrongs they have committed against both people and the land they so dishonestly claim to care about.
Raise votes in Tri-Met for a mountain in Malheur county. Lobby the I-5 corridor from Salem to Troutdale to destroy logging in Joseph. Wipe out the businesses and lives of 20 thousand people? Who cares? They were evil loggers and miners anyway, and you can justify your actions by just saying "I really LIKE clean air and water and trees!".
Did anything good happen? Well, no. But you are never called to account for your actions, nor the harm you caused others in your self righteous quest. You're insulated by a self generated cloud of fantasy virtue.
May God be the one to judge. Because I'm ready to jail the lot of you - for life, at hard labor.
Get a freaking grip, Snoozer. I grew up in Montana, among ranching folk. I know all about living around wildlife, having put in my time living in a cabin in the foothills of the Cascades. I've mucked out a cow stall, and parted out elk. Not that it matters, but I am far from being the wealthy liberal of your fantasies. I don't even know any wealthy liberals. My Dad insured lumbermills all over Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and Montana, and I traveled to his accounts with him when I was a kid. I know what a green chain is. I have hung out with, got drunk with and played rowdy songs with loggers. I hate what happened to small mill towns all over the Northwest when some idiots got worked up about the spotted owl. I think that hardcore Greenies are mostly exciteable SWPLs with no more knowledge of the natural world than what they can get from Nova. You don't know anything about me, but you feel free to lob your Rush Limbaugh talking points as a substitute for thought. You, Snoozer, are exactly the reason people with half a brain are fleeing what passes for conservatism in this country. You have this image in what I suppose you consider to be your mind, and to hell with anything that might contradict it. Arm waving and table pounding is not argument, but I suppose it's all you know. Rave on, Snoozer.
Snoozer, I live in Oregon as well, and do know what I am talking about. Have lived in Montana, too. If you want to engage in respectful discusssion, fine. Otherwise, find another hobby. Rod began with a thoughtful post, and we need to respond in kind.
Anti modernists have always had the opportunity to start ground up communities away from civilization. The problem is they always fail because people actually like modernity.
By seizing the power of the state they hope, like the communists, to force people to live the lifestyle until it sticks.
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