Collide-a-scape

Goes to this post at Green Inc.

And quoting a well-known American environmentalist, there’s this catch-all reasoning, which only die-hard greens will embrace and which will alienate most everyone else:

Overpopulation is the driving force behind virtually all environmental problems — air pollution, water pollution, the extinction crisis, global warming , yet it is rarely ever addressed by conservation groups. They are really afraid of touching the issue and appearing anti-human.

That’s from Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. I’ve covered endangered species issues in the West for many years. Overpopulation is not the problem–not by a long shot. Mostly, it’s the sprawl of residential and commercial development that has chewed up wildlife habitat. Not teeming hordes of people. Just their wasteful, highly consumptive habits.

There’s a number of good reasons why overpopulation (and its toxic surrogate, immigration) is the third rail of American environmental discourse. Just ask the Sierra club.

That’s the headline, and this is the best quote:

I grew up in the city; I wasn’t a girl scout; I didn’t camp; I wasn’t a skier; I wasn’t an avid hiker—but the environmentalism I came to know was more about the effects of pollution in society.

Meet Lisa Jackson, EPA administrator. She says her goal is to put the agency

in the minds of the American people, and not just those who consider themselves environmentalists.

If only the nation’s leading environmental groups strived to reach beyond their white, upper middle class demographic, more Americans would consider themselves environmentalists.

I kinda knew that Joe Romm wouldn’t find the Super Bowl Audi commercial funny. He’s humor challenged. But David Roberts at Grist? Jesus, can’t you guys just chill and see past your environmentally correct navels for once? Dudes, it was satire! It worked. Hell, I bet Al Gore laughed. If you’ve ever seen him on late night shows, you know Gore has a wicked sense of humor. He knows how to poke fun at himself to good effect.

The world is full of stereotypes. Sometimes parody is the best way to deflate them.

UPDATE: Romm’s readers seem evenly split on the ad.  Many are offended. Plenty others echo my thoughts and suggest that people lighten up.

UPDATE 2: The majority reax by libertarians over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog is notable for it’s antipathy towards environmentalists. They loved the commerical’s mockery of greens (taking it at face value), then felt betrayed at the end by the endorsement of a “green” car.  But I think the libertarians at least figured out that they aren’t Audi’s target audience.

UPDATE 3: Okay, it’s official. I’m obsessed with the polarized reaction to this commercial in the green community. I’ve been scanning comments throughout the day on various sites where greenies congregate. Here’s the best damn comment I’ve read. It captures my sentiments precisely. So is the ad offensive?

I think this is pretty much the same question as asking if Chris Rock is funny or offensive. If you think his jokes reinforce stereotypes, then you probably don’t understand the audience. “Grandpa” isn’t going to become MORE racist after hearing a Chris Rock joke. Personally, growing up in a rural, almost exclusively white area, I think it was better that I got those stereotypes from Chris Rock on TV than a racist neighbor. The framing is important. Similarly, it’s better this idea is attached to a “greenwashing” car company than the crazy extremist who actually believes it’s going to happen and says, “we shouldn’t start down the slippery slope of environmentalism!”

That’s what Geoffrey Lean suggests is needed to counter what he calls the “swiftboating” of climate science in the wake of Climategate. He argues that “environmentalists must bear a fair share of the responsibility” for the rising number of people who don’t believe in global warming (according to recent polls). He partly blames the “backlash” on Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, because of “the film’s polemicism and exaggerations.”

But Lean also argues:

Environmental groups, once brilliant at swaying public opinion, have lost their touch. They have progressively become part of the establishment, while the skeptics have taken the insurgent role that environmentalists once exploited so well. As they became more and more involved in the process of formulating agreements and legislation to tackle global warming, talking to governments and attending negotiating conferences, leaders of the environmental movement have increasingly appeared to take public opinion for granted.

The problem with Lean’s logic is in that first sentence: environmental groups were “once brilliant at swaying public opinion” precisely because of scare tactics that prophesized eco-doom if immediate attention wasn’t paid to the environment. Exaggeration was enviro stock in trade. That was how mainstream green groups like the Sierra Club traditionally swelled membership rolls, by selling imminent eco-collapse.

And you know what, when a river catches on fire and oil is spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara and industrial toxic waste is leaching into groundwater, that doom and gloom campaign sells itself for a few years. After all,  you can see the unfolding disaster yourself. It’s visceral. But after a while, thanks to this green awakening in the public body, which spurs reform and new oversight institutions, the environment improves and not every new disaster suddenly feels like the end of the world.

But to keep those membership rolls inflated, green groups stayed with that numbing narrative of eco-catastrophe. At some point (early 1990s?), Americans became inured to the bad news drumbeat, be it about endangered species, old growth forests, or industrial runoff pollution.

There’s reasonable speculation by social scientists that the same thing might be happening again with respect to the incessant scaremongering by climate change advocates. So is Lean suggesting that Greens go back to those old tactics and double down on scaring the besjesus out of everyone? I don’t know. He just says Greens need to get a War Room so the planet doesn’t end up like John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign.

It’s hell on the planet, sadistic to our fellow creatures, and bad for your health. Nothing in this WaPost essay is new, but the main point is worth pondering:

What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

That’s the title of a fantastic piece by Chris Turner in the October issue of The Walrus, a Canadian magazine. He turns the typical environmental tale of crisis on its head, suggesting that,

We need a new kind of story, a new template for our ecological philosophy — one that acknowledges what we have lost and the emerging limits of what can be saved, but does not lament. To borrow the terminology of the linguist George Lakoff, we must first change the frame.

To do that, the author argues, we have to acknowledge that we are living in the Anthropocene epoch.

Turner’s story is one of the best examples of long-form environmental journalism that I’ve seen in years. An array of topics are crosscut: discussions of climate change, ocean acidification, the imminent death of the Great Barrier Reef, geo-engineering, sustainable communities, the history of scuba-diving, and a compelling, new ecological concept called resilience science.

That new branch of ecological science seeks to bridge both nature’s and society’s needs. It recognizes that complexity is inherent and change a constant. As Turner describes it,

Resilience embraces change as the natural state of being on earth. It values adaptation over stasis, diffuse systems over centralized ones, loosely interconnected webs over strict hierarchies. If the Anthropocene is the ecological base condition of twenty-first-century life and sustainability is the goal, or bottom line, of a human society within that chaotic ecology, then resilience might be best understood as the operating system..that encourages sustainability in this rapidly changing epoch.

Until last year, I was an editor for nearly a decade at Audubon magazine, America’s premier environmental magazine.  During that time, a common theme–almost a guiding philosophy–was to produce stories that at least gave people hope for a better future, instead of hammering a relentless narrative of degradation and destruction. I credit David Seideman, the editor-in-chief, for that piece of editorial guidance. He grew up with Audubon Magazine as a child, is an unabashed environmentalist but also a history buff. And he knew enough about that depressing environmental narrative (which had its place in the 1960s and 1970s) to realize that Audubon readers had grown weary of it by the 2000s.

True, plenty of stories in environmental magazines, including Audubon, still celebrate the innate wonders and beauty of nature. But the dark flipside always seems to be imminent or irreparable loss, usually because of some human action.  What Seideman did–and is still doing with a great team at Audubon–is is to focus the magazine more on how to fix longstanding environmental problems. (Trust me, this was no easy feat during George W. Bush’s two terms.) A shining example of this is the latest issue, which includes a special feature on green design.

But if I were creating an environmental magazine from scratch today, I would cede the “lament” and “inspirational” narratives to my colleagues and use the twin concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene as my foundation. Combined, these two concepts offer more than a rhetorical frame–they suggest the makings of a new paradigm, one that provides the “operating system” to grapple with the world’s increasing complexity and fragility.

If the science of resilience has arrived to guide us, then the stories showing us how should follow.

H/T: Resilience Science

Jackson Lears has a must-read essay in the current issue of TNR that leads off:

In contemporary public discourse, concern for “the environment” is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

After all, we have been here before.

There’s much to chew on in the Lears essay, and you’ll likely find yourself alternately agreeing and disagreeing as you read through it. For example, some of you Joe Romm acolytes may applaud the whacks against the Breakthrough Institute boys, then wince at the spanking Lears administers to Bill McKibben.

I’d like to return to the essay in another post, after I’ve fully digested it, especially because some of the “cautionary lessons” that Lears discusses from the 1970s and 1980s speak to the heated, contemporary debate over climate change politics and policy.

But a few quick observations. I noticed that Lears annoints Donald Worster as the top dog in the field of environmental history:

Over the last quarter of a century, he has played the leading role in creating the field of environmental history, producing a series of pathbreaking books on ecological thought and its consequences (or lack of them). Now he has turned his talents to Muir, the iconic mountain man.

That passage is mostly true; it would be more accurate to say that Worster played a leading role. For my money, William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, Richard White, Alfred Crosby, Patty Limerick, among others, have also played leading roles in the emergence of environmental history as compelling sub-discipline of history.

As I’ve commented before on this blog, though, I still believe that cultural geographers beat environmental historians to the punch, pioneers such as Carl Sauer, David Lowenthal, and J.B. Jackson.

Finally, if you want a hint of where Lears stakes his own meta-argument, read this passage, which comes near the end:

The history of electric cars is a green parable for our time. It raises subversive questions about roads not taken. It shows that, without adequate public backing, green entrepreneurs–no matter how shrewd–cannot successfully buck the corporate consensus. And above all it challenges the fundamental dogma of development, technological determinism. For decades if not centuries, critics of development have been told that the capitalist (and for a while, the socialist) version of progress is simply unstoppable–a neutral, inevitable, and beneficent process that is beyond politics and policy debate. For a moment, in the forgotten 1970s, this dogma came under scrutiny. But the cyber-revolution of the last thirty years revived it. Techno-determinists from Thomas Friedman to Bill Gates have repeatedly told us that we must choose to do what we have to do anyway– re-organize our lives in accordance with the dictates of technology. The rhetoric of inevitability conceals the business interests it serves, and negates the possibility of challenging them.

I hope the Lears essay engenders a lively debate over the eco/societal roads taken and not taken.

Following the logic of that Grist article I cited in my last post, this commentary on the congressional climate bill strikes me as pretty “radical,” coming from a well-respected, mainstream greenie like Bill McKibben:

If you pass half a health care bill, you can always come back in a decade. People will suffer in the meantime, but it won’t grow impossible to fix the problem: The Clinton debacle in the 1990s didn’t mean that we couldn’t try again this year. But, if we don’t do what the science requires on climate change, the situation will get badly out of hand. In the last two years, methane levels in the atmosphere have begun to spike sharply, apparently because warming temperatures are now melting the permafrost that caps large deposits of the potent greenhouse gas. If we let the planet keep warming, we won’t be able to shut that cycle off–we’re clearly much closer to that kind of tipping point than we imagined just a few years ago. Half a job may not be better than no job at all.

Interesting headline by Grist.

Once upon a time, radical greens might have been called monkey-wrenchers, bombers, arsonists, whale defenders, even tree-sitters.

Today, if you belong to a green group that is agitating against the congressional climate bill, because you think it’s not strong enough to curb global warming, you might as well be a traitor to the cause. That’s the unmistakable subtext of this Grist story.

I’m starting to feel bad for No Impact Man. He’s not getting much respect lately from NY media elites. Several weeks ago, Elizabeth Kolbert dissed him in The New Yorker, prompting his eloquent and polite rejoinder here.

Today, with the release of the movie that chronicles his widely publicized environmental stunt, (he must hate that word by now), he and the film get whacked by the Times lead movie reviewer:

Taken as a polemical documentary championing environmentally conscious action, “No Impact Man,” directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, is of little interest and less utility. It provides no new scientific insights or political arguments, and celebrates various behavioral changes without assessing their value or importance. Mr. Beavan’s evangelical, self-congratulatory demeanor has the effect, especially early in the film, of playing to the unfortunate perception that what drives many environmentalists is, above all, the need to feel superior to their neighbors and fellow citizens.

Later in his review, Scott the environmentalist/film critic warms up to the movie and its star, but can’t resist a few final jabs:

I remain unconvinced that the cause of planetary rescue will be advanced very far by what is, in the end, an elaborate stunt. But as a professional writer, a New York husband and a man with a compost bin, an organic-produce fetish and a guilty conscience, I can’t, in the end (all appearances to the contrary), judge Mr. Beavan or this film too severely. Making an impact is easy. Making a difference is hard.

It has been said that the sensitive soul in No Impact Man has taken all the mocking criticism to heart. Spare me the crocodile tears. If the book and movie are hits, he can cry all the way to the bank.