Here's a topic that
we discussed on our blog a while back, but that might be of interest to Kossacks at large...
The November unpleasantness got a lot of people thinking about the general health of the environmental movement. Is it still an active force in American politics? Or has it been sidelined into irrelevancy?
More on the flip.
One of those who has been most active in prompting this discussion is Adam Werbach, a former big wheel over at the Sierra Club. Along with some others, he put forward a document called
the November 3 Theses that makes the case that environmentalism is dead, or at least not pining for the fjords.
I posted my reactions to Werbach's theses on our blog when I first read them. Executive summary: a lot of Werbach's prescriptions revolve not around revitalizing the environmental movement, but around revitalizing the Democratic Party. Are these two things the same thing? Should they be? Are we (and here I mean the royal "we", i.e. environmentalists broadly, rather than us at Oceana specifically) handicapping ourselves by tying ourselves too closely to the electoral fortunes of a political party, rather than trying to build environmentalism as a social movement?
I don't know the answers, but there's lots of food for thought to be had, that's for sure. What's your $0.02?