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Wisconsin Style: New Approaches to Regulatory Innovation

Environmentalism: death or rebirth? The debate rages on

By John Morgan
For Multi-State Working Group

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“Over the last 15 years, environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it,” write Michael Shellenburger and Ted Nordhaus in their infamous article, "The Death of Environmentalism."

This was not the consensus of a room full of policy wonks, educators, business people and government agency representatives who dedicate their lives to continually breathing life into the environmental movement.

As with any rhetorical question, the answer to the question posed in a plenary session of the MSWG Annual Workshop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in June 2005 was particularly prickly.

The consensus of the discussants and those in attendance was that the term environmentalism encompasses a wide range of people, perspectives, groups, governments and business, and that, for environmentalism to be successful — and perhaps more successful than it has been — these groups must work together no matter what their political or ideological stances (much like is done under the auspices of the Multi-State Working Group, one might add).

But, if you think it’s hard for kindergarteners to "play well with others," try getting left-wing environmental activists to stand up and applaud when a right-wing president calls for renewable energy standards, for example.

“I think that the biggest deterrent with environmental progress has been the partisan and polarized society we find ourselves in. I think it’s particularly stupid and unproductive on such a popular issue as the environment,” said Paul Hansen, executive director of The Izaak Walton League. “Part of the problem, of course, is in the conservation community. We have this crazy situation where we’re cooperative in terms of vision and mission delivery, and we’re competitors for members and money.”

Indeed, many at the MSWG meeting stressed that environmentalism is neither dying nor reincarnating as much as it needs to embrace its inherent internal differences as a positive aspect of the movement, celebrate its successes and continue to move forward.

“There’s not one environmental movement. You have many. You have to be open to the fact that they can build coalitions; that they can even be opponents [and] take each other to court,” said Jurgen Van der Heijden, a professor in the Center for Environmental Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Van der Heijden stressed the need to look at environmental movements as being plural, rather than a single environmental movement. He stressed that there will be a need for coalitions and partnerships among NGOs, businesses and government al agencies and others. Yet sometimes they may not always agree, and this needs to be accepted.

“And I think that’s where the environmental movements are working at this moment,” van der Heijden said. “Some of them are in board rooms, some of them are in courtrooms.”

Some said that if there was any finger pointing, it should be at the more liberal side of the environmental movement and its need to come to common ground and build alliances with those who have traditionally been their foes.

“I can point to so many Fortune 500 companies who have really changed. If you look at the national environmental groups, I can point to one or two who have changed,” said Peter Wise of the Delta Institute. “Yes, there are issues, but boy we’re not dead.”

 

Reportage from MSWG's annual workshop

Building bridges across ocean's: China's role in a sustainable world

Bringing power to the people: a journalist's view

Pushing the paradigm limits: metagovernance and the environmental movement