Common Ground: Environmentalism, Reborn

December 2007 | Conversations

Environmentalism, Reborn

By Eric Larson

In 2004, when Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger co-wrote an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism,” distributing it at a meeting of environmental grant makers, they expected, at best, to get the attention of a few of their fellow enviro-insiders. The essay struck a resonant chord, though, and conversation exploded, not just among the eco-wonk crowd, but among activists, academics, journalists and regular folks throughout the world.

In the three years since, these “bad boys of environmentalism” have been busy — defending the ideas they posited in the original essay, penning a book — Break Through — that expands on the essay’s original premise, and founding the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank devoted to changing the tone of progressive politics. The old yarn, they argue, spun by the righteous left, the so-called “progressives,” is the one that forever laments the sorry state of our post-industrial world, now teetering precariously on the brink of human-induced apocalypse; the one which says “No,” and “Regulate,” and “Limit,” while scarcely offering its own vision of progress.

That’s no way, they say, to solve the tremendous ecological crisis we now face. Rather, change will come through celebrating the extraordinary advances which have allowed for much of the developed world to live as it does, by viewing the ecological crises we face as a potential catalyst for the same kind of innovation, investment and creativity that resulted in the first manned mission to the moon and the invention and proliferation of the Internet.

This vision is summed up in the subtitle of Break Through as a new “politics of possibility.” It involves nothing less than a fundamental shift of philosophical perspective. This month, we sat down with the very articulate and impassioned Ted Nordhaus in his Oakland office and got ourselves a good talking to.

Tell us about Break Through.

The book is an expansion of the premise laid out in the DOE essay — the problem of this ironically un-ecological thingification of nature, as if the environment is something that exists separate from us. We discuss how that leads to a second problem of environmental groups beginning to think their job is to speak for nature — an [objectified] idea of nature as understood by science. So you get this “Nature needs these things because the science says this” conversation.

It taps into an ancient narrative of the human fall from nature and from God. You get a very powerful tragic narrative — this idea of nature as a harmonious and balanced thing humans may once have been part of, but through modernity, industrialization and economic development, we have fallen from nature… And we will be punished. Read through the transcripts from Inconvenient Truth and the book accompanying it, and you can see Gore himself telling this story… that there will be a day of reckoning if we don’t get right with nature and with the earth.

How would redemption be achieved, according to this scenario?

By giving up our modern conveniences, making sacrifices and fundamentally choosing to live differently from the way we have lived. Gore didn’t say that exactly, but that’s implicated in his argument.

This is essentially a biblical narrative with nature substituted for God and science substituted for scripture. We argue in the book for a very different narrative. Not that we’ve fallen, but that we’ve risen. The reality of human experience on earth has been about overcoming nature — of creating better lives — not of controlling nature. Despite the valorization and nostalgia for these agrarian and pre-agrarian societies where people lived in harmony with nature — those stories of peaceful Indians — the reality is life [has always been] extraordinarily difficult. We argue that we’ve overcome all sorts of natural challenges to become more prosperous. And the way we are going to solve these new problems is by innovating and inventing. Seven billion of us on the planet can lead prosperous and free lives, and can do so in a way that doesn’t destroy the earth.

You are arguing that a narrative shift needs to take place. How is the new story different from the old story?

The pivot is to move from a tragic narrative to a narrative of overcoming adversity. To move from a backwards way of looking society to one focusing not on our deficits and weaknesses, but on our strengths. The old story is very deeply imbedded in our culture. One feature of developed societies — societies that go from industrial to postindustrial, material to post-material — is that we believe in a past when life was simpler. In the West and all over Europe you see this deep nostalgia and sense of dislocation — of not having found new ways of belonging and connecting with others. It’s well documented in the social sciences. It drives this powerful desire to recreate a time when things were supposedly “simple.” A lot of the new age spirituality stuff — people forming drum circles and the like — has been produced by the same sense of dislocation.

What is wrong with celebrating and maybe even adopting some simpler ways of being from the past?

Seeking those things out is really good. What we criticize is when, in doing so, people forget or deny the pre-conditions that allowed them to do it, by saying “I am just like the aboriginals.” And it’s laughable how different they are from an aboriginal. Some of our social values colleagues call it “regrounding.” It is this thing where people try to look back at traditions and use them. But they’re doing it so differently, they’re picking and choosing parts of traditions that they like and ignoring the other stuff that would be unthinkable to them.

Is “regrounding” a negative thing?

Regrounding gets problematic when it gets tied up with a whole set of ideas of morality. You start imagining that from your extraordinarily privileged place, you are a more moral person because you live with a smaller carbon footprint than someone who’s out there just trying to make a living.

Is the green thing a fad?

It’s nothing a recession and a war with Iran wouldn’t eliminate. We’ve been through this before. You look back to the early ’90’s, and green was the new black — it looked very much like this. Within 18 months, there was a recession and the first gulf war occurred. By 1992, [the green thing] had all but disappeared. The reality is that for most Americans, this is still not particularly a high priority. People will go buy this or that green product, but at the end of the day their concerns are much higher, both politically and in their everyday lives. If you look at all the green marketing: You are supposed to be doing this for the planet — not for yourself or to make your life better. The opportunity for the evolution of environmentalism is to orient sustainability around people’s day-to-day lives, and the things they struggle with.

What questions should our readers be asking themselves?

The way that the narrative tends to go is that people buy green so they can shrink their lives, make everything smaller. We think that the real power of green consumption — of being a committed green consumer — is being an early adopter of products and technologies that can be brought to scale with people’s needs. Like the Toyota Prius; I could give a shit that a Prius driver’s carbon footprint is smaller than mine. What I care about is that they’ve become an early adopter and made quite a large investment in a new technology. So, as a green consumer — look for the stuff that is radical and different. Buying that stuff matters because you help push it to market and get it to scale and that leads to all sorts of breakthroughs in performance and cost reduction. You are making an investment in a different kind of technological future.

In your book, you discuss the media backlash against Gore’s personal energy consumption habits. How do you think Gore might have avoided the bad press?

Moralizing is politically toxic. Gore asks us to fundamentally change the way we live, and he automatically opens himself up to this criticism. Laurie David actually confessed in interviews that she would pull up to SUV’s in her Prius and start screaming at them. Of course it’s going to come out that Laurie David flies all over the country in private jets. This is a problem. It goes back to this story that environmentalists are so accustomed to — the need to downscale and reduce and limit — and of course in their own lives, in one way or another, they end up destroying their own arguments. It’s not that they are particularly ostentatious people. It’s because of the reality that modernity is something none of us are prepared to give up without a fight. Nor should we. The narratives where we start talking about a reckoning and the ways we are going to be punished for our profligate modern lifestyles are wrong and extraordinarily politically destructive.

Where should we put our focus instead?

If at the end of his movie Al Gore had said that what we’ve got to do is innovate our way out of this problem — that we’re not going to sacrifice our way out of it but that we need to make big investments, a big commitment to transitioning to a clean energy economy and that it’s going to create millions of jobs, it’s going to make us safer, it’s going to ensure our economic future, it’s going to avoid all of the terrible results of global warming — no one could have attacked him for flying around the country, because he wouldn’t have been telling anyone that they couldn’t do it.

In the absence of an Al Gore that actually says those things, what keeps you hopeful?

I think this is generational. That’s not to say everyone over forty doesn’t get it, and everyone under forty does. Hell, I’m over forty. But it is to say that a whole cohort who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s really do see the world a lot differently. They get this stuff. I don’t spend a lot of time arguing the limits of growth with twenty year olds. There are young people taking over organizations, creating their own organizations, creating their own politics. They give me extraordinary hope. I think environmentalism is going to die because a new generation thinks about the world and sees the world in a totally different way. The logic of global warming is already driving this shift.

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