In RE-BIRTH OF AN ENVIRONMENTALIST Alan AtKisson delivers what I think may well be the last word that needs to be said about the so-called “Death of Environmentalism.”
The essay is long, and a bit rambling, but insightful, poetic and smart. Well worth the read. Here are the key ‘grafs, with apologies to Alan for what I’m sure is somewhat ham-handed editing:
In my view, and the view of many others I know working on sustainability, the immediately infamous “Death of Environmentalism” essay was very old news indeed. Truly ho-hum stuff. It was the lament of people who are tired of being what I call (in my own little model of cultural change process) Iconoclasts, meaning folks whose role is to challenge the status quo. We usually think of Iconoclasts as activists, but they can also be critics, protestors, columnists. The role of the Iconoclast is always thankless, difficult, draining.
The Death of Environmentalism authors write as though they were the first to have the insight that environmental campaigns by themselves don’t work. As though generations of environmentalists (and other kinds of activists) before them had not experienced tiring of the nay-saying protestor role and decided to switch to visionary Change Agentry instead. As though no one else had thought about the need to create an Apollo-scale… vision of change in our energy system. The same metaphors and analyses have been around since the 1970s; there were just fewer people ready to listen.
Adam Werbach recently performed a lengthy “autopsy” on environmentalism. Among other things, he showed how his mentor, the great David Brower had gotten off of “environmentalism” and onto The Ecology of Commerce, green job development for union workers, and similar sustainability topics. But this proves nothing essential, and negates the continuing important role played by the conserve-and-protest organizations that Brower founded. And an old activist has every right to get interested in new ideas at the end of his life.
But I dearly hope that no one seriously interprets this tempest in a green teapot to mean that environmentalism should disappear. Calls for the dismantling of environmental funding programs (as Werbach does) and the like are just silly. Environmentalists are, after all, winning many critical battles, in many parts of the world … and the greatest need for them is yet to come.
Environmentalism is also getting subtler about when it must say “No,” and when it can peddle a “Yes.” In fact the difference between “environmentalism” and “sustainable development” — or “worldchanging” or “bright green” or whatever — is, I would submit, starting to narrow now, after a dozen years of gap-widening.
