Nicholas Kristoff has a fine essay in the NYT on the decline of the environmental movement in the U.S. Much of what he says is on the mark. Kristoff is a lefty so his criticisms of the contemporary environmentalist movement, which is comprised largely of leftists, are the more telling. Here are some of them:
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public. Some do great work, but others can be the left's equivalents of the neocons: brimming with moral clarity and ideological zeal, but empty of nuance....I was once an environmental groupie, and I still share the movement's broad aims, but I'm now skeptical of the movement's "I Have a Nightmare" speeches.
In the 1970's, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou herd. Since then, it has quintupled.
When I first began to worry about climate change, global cooling and nuclear winter seemed the main risks. As Newsweek said in 1975: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend ... but they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century."
This record should teach environmentalists some humility. The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths.
Likewise, environmentalists were right to warn about population pressures, but they overestimated wildly. Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" [1969] that "the battle to feed humanity is over.... Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." On my bookshelf is an even earlier book, "Too Many Asians," with a photo of a mass of Indians on the cover. The book warns that the threat from relentlessly multiplying Asians is "even more grave than that of nuclear warfare."
Kristoff hints, though he doesn't say it explicitly, that part of the problem with the environmental movement in the U.S. is that it has come to be seen as too ideological. It gives people every reason to think that the real agenda is not so much saving the environment but rather the destruction of corporate capitalism and private property. As a result they've alienated a lot of people who would otherwise share their environmental goals. Kristoff finishes with this:
The loss of credibility is tragic because reasonable environmentalists - without alarmism or exaggerations - are urgently needed....So it's critical to have a credible, nuanced, highly respected environmental movement. And right now, I'm afraid we don't have one.
No, but we do have some very laudable environmental organizations. Our money goes to The Nature Conservancy, an organization which works quietly to preserve the Last Great Places, as they put it, by buying them up. There's a lot more out there to buy and a lot of nature to protect, so perhaps some of our readers might be inclined to give them a hand.
