Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Polities of Possibility.

• Author: Houck, Oliver A.
• Position: Book review

"... have been greatly exaggerated." (1)

Mark Twain

Every few years a sect few of us have heard of, having proclaimed that the world will end at midnight, files into a stadium in Florida or Los Angeles to greet the void. They draw the usual publicity, and their pronouncements are covered on the evening news. I have always wondered what happened the next day when the sun came up instead, showing them terribly, and fortunately for all of us, wrong. In what condition did they leave the stadium, where did they go and what did they do? Now, I think I know. They wrote a book about how right they were.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have done much the same in their new book, Break Through: From The Death of Environmentalism To The Polities of Possibility. (2) You may remember that this pair of public relations specialists made national headlines in the Summer of 2004 with an essay entitled The Death of Environmentalism (3) which they dropped on, of all vulnerable places, the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. (4) They were not only going to make headlines. They were going to kick over the money tables in the temple. Environmentalism was moving too slow. It was time to wipe the slate.

As events soon proved, they were quite mistaken. In the data they selected and their central example the failure of the environmental community to stop climate change (5)--they quite underestimated both the challenge and what was happening in response. Their reaction has been to write a book that retools the arguments they made before in what is now a post-An Inconvenient Truth, (6) Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agents world, and add to it some chapters on "Possibility," which turns out to be better messaging. If environmentalism, by some sort of unacknowledged dumb luck, is still alive after all, they would still prescribe remedies for it, remedies that remain dramatic in their rhetoric but quite modest in content. That theirs are well-intentioned criticisms we can accept without question, and at times useful ones--although the radical right has seized on them as validation of its rather weird pathology. They remain hobbled, however, by perceptions that are only partially true and that lead them to a Happy Days scenario that is more than a little dangerous. To understand this, we need to begin where they did and track their journey.

The Death of Environmentalism, a rather eye-catching overstatement, rested on four legs. The environmental movement is in-grown and has ignored the alliances needed to change society. (8) Its leadership is missing the big picture. (9) Its politics have relied on doom and gloom, rather than positive scenarios. (19) The great demonstration of these failings is the movement's inability to arrest global warming. (11) Case pretty much closed. Then came the kicker, which of course attracted the most attention: the authors had become "convinced" that modern environmentalism "must die so that something new can five." (12) We needed to burn the village to save it.

After the flash of its initial flame, The Death of Environmentalism took quite a dousing. In fact, the Sierra Club had started building alliances with urban and African Americans as early as 1975 (13) and the National Wildlife Federation brought in a whole separate constituency of blue-collar, hunting and fishing America. (14) The Environmental Policy Center's coalitions with labor were responsible for remarkable legislative initiatives, (15) as was its celebrated link with the California Proposition 65 tax revolt against pork-barrel water projects. Western ranchers are now leading the fight for alternatives to coal and gas leasing in the Rocky Mountain West (16) and the environmental justice movement is a prime driver in Louisiana, Southern California, and New York City. (17) In 2006, environmental political action committees (PACs) were instrumental in the defeat of some of the most hostile members of Congress in memory, starting with House Resources Committee Chair Michael Pombo. (18) If you look in only one direction you are likely to miss the play at the other end of the field.

The Death of Environmentalism also took a shot at the leaders of environmental organizations, whom they characterized as individually smart but collectively blind. (19) When one thinks of the initiatives of the Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, Green Seal, and The Nature Conservancy, to name but a few, lack of foresight hardly comes to mind. Their strategies run the gamut from hard-nosed lobbying and law enforcement to free market incentives, landscape easements, corporate partnerships, electoral politics, advertising campaigns, boycotts, product labeling, children's literature, television programs, teaching materials, and so it goes. These are among the most competitive and individualistic enterprises in America. It is a jungle out there, not a monolith, and in...