[Cross-posted from ProgressiveHistorians.]
Part II of a three-part series on history and environmentalism
Yesterday, I described the looming prospect of environmental disaster. Today, let's look at the state of the movement organized to fend off that impending destruction.
For many, the following iconic images have come to symbolize the sad state of the environmentalist movement.
What natural disaster happened on this desolate mountain in Vail, Colorado in 1998? A human one -- ecoterrorism.
Rumors hurtled around with the speed of a careering luge. Some said all 31 chairlifts had been damaged, and one New York radio station reported a terrorist-fueled apocalypse - that the entire mountain was engulfed in flame. The facts were only slightly less impressive: four lifts and three buildings damaged or destroyed - the largest being the 33,000-square-foot Two Elk Lodge, which was reduced to a heap of ash and twisted metal. ... The fires proved to be the costliest act of eco-sabotage in U.S. history and, as some were already speculating, perhaps a harbinger of tactics to come.
A communiqué from [the Earth Liberation Front] was faxed to a local radio station three days after the fires, claiming they had been set "on behalf of the [Canadian] lynx" - an endangered species in whose name a coalition of environmental groups had been suing to stop [conglomerate Vail Associates'] expansion into a national forest area known as Category III. Much to VA's dismay, ELF announced that the fires were only a warning, a shot across the bow. "We will be back if this greedy corporation continues to trespass into wild and unroaded areas," it wrote. "For your safety and convenience, we strongly advise skiers to choose other destinations."
-- "Powder Burn" by Robert S. Boynton
The ELF ecoterrorists thought they were saving the planet. Instead, their rash and destructive action set back environmental reforms by a generation. Along with author Edward Abbey's public musings in The Monkey Wrench Gang that a suicide bomber should blow up the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, the Vail arson cemented in the minds of many Americans the notion that environmentalists are activist Osama Bin Ladens, that they are more to fear than the planetary destruction they are seeking at all costs to avoid.
How did the environmentalist movement fall into such disarray? It was not always so weak and ineffectual. A year and a half ago, I posted a diary at Daily Kos entitled An Obituary for the Environmentalist Movement? In it, I described the origins of American environmentalism.
Like many movements, this one started with a book.
Certainly, there was the earlier proto-environmental movement involving John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and protector of Yellowstone; Theodore Roosevelt, who protected 190 million acres of America's wildlands; and Gifford Pinchot, who founded the U.S. Forest Service and later helped bring down the conservative Taft administration. But the achievements of this group of visionaries were largely obliterated by the end of the 1920's. Muir was unable to save the Hetch Hetchy valley from damming and destruction; Roosevelt's wildlands were largely returned to development by the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations; and Pinchot's Forest Service became a moderating veneer over all manner of degradations by logging companies on America's forests. And the movement remained dead for thirty years.
And then in 1962 came the book that changed everything.
I am reading that book, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, right now. It is not an easy read, either in language or in import. It explains in punishing detail how chemical pesticides reduce long-established species of plants and animals to rubble and create a sort of genocide against nature. It leaves unsaid the most difficult implication of all: that, just as Attila's hordes could not find succor without destroying everything in their wake, every expansionary move made by the human race leads to the death of some part of the natural world.
After the book came the movement, complete with its own Prophet, the great David Brower. Declaring, "We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children," he transformed Muir's moribund Sierra Club into a powerful weapon that he successfully wielded against those who wanted to dam the Grand Canyon. Sympathetic laws flowed down from the federal government in quick succession -- the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wild River Act, and the Wilderness Act. This last measure created another level of wildland protection even higher than that of National Park: the National Wilderness Area, in which even human visitation would be limited in order to preserve untouched the wildlands of America. The Act stated, "Wilderness...is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. ..." The Act was passed "in order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas...leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition...to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. ..."
So what happened to the movement that once commanded the ear of Presidents and the attention and concern of a nation? Embittered by defeat after defeat, the aging activists of the 1960's lacked the political acumen and the personal stamina to keep up the fight at such a fever pitch. Rachel Carson died of breast cancer as her book was hitting the presses; David Brower angrily left the Sierra Club he had once helmed, deeming it insufficiently radical for worldwide environmental needs. (The recent decision by Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope to endorse Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee seems to have borne out Brower's assessment of the group.) There was a general abdication of leadership reaching the highest levels of the movement. And into the void stepped the ecoterrorists, sowing the seeds of distrust throughout American society.
We see the results of that distrust in Michael Crichton's book State of Fear, in which he calls out global warming as a vast and dangerous left-wing conspiracy comparable to the eugenics movement of the past century. We see them in the silence and complicity of the press as President Bush has pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty and declared fifty-eight million acres of pristine National Wilderness Areas open to logging. And we see them in the lack of interest in environmental issues among young progressives today.
There isn't a lot of environmentalism in the blogosphere. In part, that's because the fast pace of the medium caters to immediate political needs; extinction by inches is too slow and too distant to register in the instant-gratification consciousness of the Internet generation. But there's a larger issue at work as well: the fealty of the new liberal activist movement to the notion of what Markos has termed the Libertarian Democrat:
For too long, Republicans promised smaller government and less intrusion in people's lives. Yet with a government dominated top to bottom by Republicans, we've seen the exact opposite. No one will ever mistake a Democrat of just about any stripe for a doctrinaire libertarian. But we've seen that one party is now committed to subverting individual freedoms, while the other is growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility, and--most important of all--individual freedoms are paramount.
The problem with this framing is that it doesn't work well with environmentalism. The impetus to defend individuality at all costs can be overridden in order to defeat a common enemy (see Markos's support of antitrust laws and labor unions), but there's no big, bad malefactor behind mass extinction, only a slow and impersonal process. It can give way to concerns for national security, but the environment is too slow to appear a threat to the national interest. So increasingly Libertarian Democrats defend the inertia of capitalism against the necessity of strict and even draconian environmental regulations. It's not that they oppose existing regs, mind you; they support the Clean Air Act and all those other laws already on the books, and wouldn't mind having new ones. It's just that the environment isn't high on their priority list, because protecting it properly would necessitate a departure from their individualist views.
The environment doesn't respect our "individual freedoms" while drawing boundaries for future extinctions. It threatens us as a world, not as individuals. And just as workers came together to form labor unions when their collective job security was threatened, we should come together as a planet to pass sweeping international legislation protecting the environment for future generations. In a world of declining ecosystems, every tree has an impact on every person's life, and governments should legislate accordingly. Mass extinction can only be averted by the ultimate communitarianism, overriding the rights to individual property and even state sovereignty when necessary to avert environmental disaster.
Benjamin Franklin's adage that "We must all hang together, we will surely all hang separately" has never been more true on a global level. The time for binding international treaties on environmental issues is not now, it is yesterday. Yet we are stuck with no long-term environmental solutions, while Republicans gleefully dismantle the planet for profit and Democrats eschew environmentalism in favor of short-term "individual freedoms."
Meanwhile, the planet marches on down the road to envirocide.
Tomorrow: the one man who can avert environmental disaster, and why we should make him President.