You say you want a revolution? Emerging economic strategies may hold the key to broadening democracy and enhancing environmental protection at the same time.

• Author: Alperovitz, Gar

Since the modern environmental movement was born in the 1970s, enormous funds and energies have been expended globally to understand and cure our environmental ills. The result has been some spectacular successes--the Montreal Protocol to control chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions and preserve the stratospheric ozone layer usually springs to mind--as well as growing understanding of the Earth's ecosystems and our effects on them, and a widely expressed commitment (at least on paper) to their health. In most countries, nearly everyone says he or she is an environmentalist.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So why don't the trends look better? Consider a few examples from Vital Signs, Worldwatch's periodic look at environmental indices. Nearly one in four mammal species is in serious decline. The Earth's ice cover is melting as global average surface temperatures continue to rise, due in major part to the largely unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. Half of the world's wetlands, key ecosystems that protect enormous numbers of species and provide critical ecological services, have disappeared since 1900 to pollution and development. During the 1990s, the planet lost 9.4 million hectares of forest every year--an area about as large as Portugal. In general, despite more than 30 years of modern achievement--and well before the Bush era--many of the most important environmental trends have been moving steadily in the wrong direction.

There are three types of progress on the environment. First are absolute "breakthroughs" in connection with discrete problems, such as the near-total elimination of DDT and lead. These are important but limited in number and overall impact. The second type includes a range of policies, programs, and regulatory efforts which serve to "do something about" a critical environmental problem but only retard, rather than reverse, a major trend. Thus the U.S. wetland-loss rate has slowed, yet losses in the 1990s continued at over 20,000 hectares a year. Likewise, in the United States gains were made for awhile in average passenger car fuel mileage, but these were overwhelmed by a rise in the number of cars, a shift to less efficient light trucks and SUVs, and an increase in miles driven.

The third type of achievement actually reverses the direction of a destructive long-term trend. Examples include the Montreal Protocol mentioned above (which, despite a postban black market in CFCs, has vastly reduced their release into the atmosphere), certain air- and water-pollution reductions, and the clean-up of Lake Erie.

Unfortunately, even before the Bush Administration's destructive policies, most environmental gains were in the second category: they did very useful things, but the positive achievements were not sufficient to reverse long-term negative trends. And that's clearly not good enough.

How do we get ourselves unstuck? Any strategic effort to get at and ultimately reverse these trends must begin by confronting the implications of an obvious truth: whatever people's true feelings about the environment, they will understandably choose jobs over the environment when the two appear to conflict. Air and water pollution, for example, is commonly difficult to deal with at the local level because citizens and political leaders fear the loss of jobs that a challenge to corporate polluters might produce, even when the threat is severe. The citizens of Pigeon River, Tennessee, for instance, chose a few years ago to tolerate potentially carcinogenic emissions by North Carolina's Champion International paper mill because of fear they might otherwise lose 1,000 jobs. A 51-year-old worker who supported keeping the plant open despite the danger spoke for many: "What do you do when you're my age and faced with the prospect of being thrown out on the street?"

If we are unable to solve the jobs problem, there will be continued political opposition to important environmental measures that might cause economic dislocation. On the other hand, to the degree communities can be assured of economic stability, their ability to deal with environmental problems can clearly be greatly enhanced.

A Thousand Blooms

To accomplish this, however, would require the environmental movement to develop a much broader strategic approach and, with it, new...