The Death of Environmentalism?

This century we will see at least the beginnings of the world's first potentially catastophic environmental crisis. Every other previous crisis I know of pales in comparison. Yet, those of us that see the danger have not been successful in alerting our fellow Americans sufficiently to send a message to their representatives.
Why is that? The answer is pretty simple. Everyone understands the danger or nuclear war. We can see the missles and have see photographs of the mushroom cloud.
70-80% of Americans consistently support the value of environmental protection. But we now have a president how merely talks about protecting the environment and in fact roles back policy when ever he can. Global warming can not be seen. Warnings of loss of jobs, something we all understand is given as the reason not to combat something we can't see.
You might say that the hurricaines in Florida are unprecidented, so there is something people can relate to. But then there is the archive of similar events in the past. There is the heavy snow and cold snap this winter that froze many an orange.
The average person simply can't related to a technical explanation. We need a new approach.
The authors of the exerpt below have shocked the community by saying "Environmentalism" is dead. They aren't saying they are giving up, they are saying there has to be another way, too much is at stake.
The word "Environmentalist" does conjure up an image of Druids worshiping trees in Christian Right circles. Some of those same groups are talking about "stewardship" of the earth as a moral value. We need to coalesce with these folks. We will need to change tactics to do so.
The Death of Environmentalism

...in their public campaigns, not one of America’s environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis.

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The entire landscape in which politics plays out has changed radically in the last 40 years, yet we act as though proposals based on “sound science” will be sufficient to overcome ideological and industry opposition.

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The environmental movement’s failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to deal with global warming is directly related to the movement’s reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g., “too much carbon in the atmosphere”) of any given environmental problem.

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With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who
molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. — Abraham Lincoln


Getting labor to do something different is no easier than getting environmentalists to. Its problems are similar to those of the environmental movement: lack of a vision, a coherent set of values, and policy proposals that build its power. There’s no guarantee that the environmental movement can fix labor’s woes or vice versa. But if we would focus on how our interests are aligned we might craft something more creative together than apart. By signifying a unified concern for people and the climate, [California Apollo Project] aims to deconstruct the assumptions underneath the categories “labor” and “the environment.”

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The world’s most effective leaders are not issue-identified but rather vision and value-identified. These leaders distinguish themselves by inspiring hope against fear, love against injustice, and power against powerlessness.

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While it’s obvious that conservatives control all three branches of government and the terms of most political debates, it’s not obvious why. This is because environmentalists and other liberals have convinced themselves that, in p politics, “the issues” matter and that the public is with us on categories such as “the environment” and “jobs” and “heath care.” What explains how we can simultaneously be “winning on the issues” and losing so badly politically?


One explanation is that environmentalists simply can’t build coalitions well because of turf battles. Another says that environmentalists just don’t have enough money to effectively do battle with polluting industries. Another says that we environmentalists are just too nice. These statements all may be true. What’s not clear is whether they are truly causes or rather symptoms of something far deeper.


Issues only matter to the extent that they are positioned in ways linking them to proposals carrying within them a set of core beliefs, principles, or values. The role of issues and proposals is to activate and sometimes change those deeply held values. And the job of global warming strategists should be to determine which values we need to activate to bring various constituencies into a political majority.

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If environmentalists hope to become more than a special interest we must start framing our proposals around core American values. We must start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics.