Kick the "Environment"

Also, to kick things off, I'm wondering who else has read this article that was released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association and was published on Grist in January:

The Death of Environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world, by by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

It's largely the old Lakoffian argument about framing the debate, in the context of environmentalism, where I guess it's managed to ruffle some feathers. One aspect of the authors' thesis appears that the idea of the "environment" does more harm than good for environmentalists' aims.

Here are some key passages:

There is no better example of how environmental categories sabotage environmental politics than CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy legislation]. When it was crafted in 1975, it was done so as a way to save the American auto industry, not to save the environment. That was the right framing then and has been the right framing ever since. Yet the environmental movement, in all of its literal-sclerosis, not only felt the need to brand CAFE as an "environmental" proposal, it failed to find a solution that also worked for industry and labor.

Because Japan has national health care, its auto companies aren't stuck with the bill for its retirees. And yet if you were to propose that environmental groups should have a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards, you'd likely be laughed out of the room, or scolded by your colleagues because, "Health care is not an environmental issue."

Industry and conservative lobbyists prevent action on global warming proposals by framing their attacks around an issue of far greater salience for the American people: jobs. The industry opposition claims that action on global warming will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. They repeat this claim, ad nauseum, through bogus studies, advertisements, lobbying, public relations, and alliance building among businesses and labor unions.

The environmental leaders we interviewed tended to reinforce the industry position by responding to it, in typical literal fashion, rather than attack industry for opposing proposals that will create millions of good new jobs.

Our defensiveness on the economy elevates the frame that action on global warming will kill jobs and raise electricity bills. The notion that environmentalists should answer industry charges instead of attacking those very industries for blocking investment into the good new jobs of the future is yet another symptom of literal-scleroris.

Answering charges with the literal "truth" is a bit like responding to the Republican "Swift Boats for Truth" ad campaign with the facts about John Kerry's war record. The way to win is not to defend -- it's to attack.

Talking about the millions of jobs that will be created by accelerating our transition to a clean energy economy offers more than a good defense against industry attacks: it's a frame that moves the environmental movement away from apocalyptic global warming scenarios that tend to create feelings of helplessness and isolation among would-be supporters.

Van Jones [the up-and-coming civil rights leader and co-founder of the California Apollo Project] believes Apollo [the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, environment, business, and civil rights leaders working to win passage of a New Apollo Project to create three million new energy jobs and free America from foreign oil in ten years] represents a third wave of environmentalism.

"The first wave of environmentalism was framed around conservation and the second around regulation," Jones said. "We believe the third wave will be framed around investment."

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream speech" is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an "I have a nightmare" speech instead.

In the absence of a bold vision and a reconsideration of the problem, environmental leaders are effectively giving the "I have a nightmare" speech, not just in our press interviews but also in the way that we make our proposals. The world's most effective leaders are not issue-identified but rather vision and value-identified.

If environmentalists hope to become more than a special interest we must start framing our proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics. Doing so is crucial if we are to build the political momentum -- a sustaining movement -- to pass and implement the legislation that will achieve action on global warming and other issues.

[Environmentalists] are so certain about what the problem is, and so committed to their legislative solutions, that we behave as though all we need is to tell the literal truth in order to pass our policies.

Environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be.

Above all else, we need to take a hard look at the institutions the movement has built over the last 30 years. Are existing environmental institutions up to the task of imagining the post-global warming world? Or do we now need a set of new institutions founded around a more expansive vision and set of values?

Now translate that into ecopoetics . . .

JS