The Death of Environmentalism Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf environmentalism is incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born. Michel Gelobter and other environmental experts and academics wrote The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century in response, criticizing "Death" for demanding increased technological innovation rather than addressing the systemic concerns of people of color.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger#%22The_Death_of_Environmentalism:_Global_Warming_in_a_Post-Environmental_World%22) from Foreword Michael Shellenberger
and Ted Nordhaus suggest that it’s time to reexamine everything we think we know about global warming and environmental politics, from what does and doesn’t get counted as “environmental” to
the movement’s small-bore approach to policymaking.
I suggest we also question the conventional wisdom that we can’t talk about disasters like the unprecedented hurricanes that devastated Florida and the Caribbean. The insurance industry says that, at $20 billion, the hurricanes will surpass the costliest disaster in US history — Hurricane Andrew. At what point have we become Pollyanna fearing that we’ll be called Chicken Little?
the environmental movement’s foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn’t as “environmental.” Most of the movement’s leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be
doing.
The entire landscape in which politics plays out has changed radically in the last 30 years, yet the environmental movement acts as though proposals based on “sound science” will be suffi cient to overcome ideological and industry opposition. Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not. It’s a war over our core values as Americans and over our vision for the future, and it won’t be won by appealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-interest. We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellen-berger -
- Book Review DAVID NAGUIB PELLOW https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249233012_Break_Through_From_the_Death_of_Environmentalism_to_the_Politics_of_Possibility ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 1, Number 1, 2008
- Reviewed Emily Alves* https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=sdlp
The Long Death of Environmentalism FEB 25, 2011 https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-long-death-of-environmentalism
Human technology and ingenuity have repeatedly confounded Malthusian predictions yet green ideology continues to cast a suspect eye towards the very technologies that have allowed us to avoid resource and ecological catastrophes. But such solutions will require environmentalists to abandon the "small is beautiful" ethic that has also characterized environmental thought since the 1960's. We, the most secure, affluent, and thoroughly modern human beings to have ever lived upon the planet, must abandon both the dark, zero-sum Malthusian visions and the idealized and nostalgic fantasies for a simpler, more bucolic past in which humans lived in harmony with Nature.
To an older generation of environmentalists, these observations will seem antithetical to everything environmentalism stands for. If in 2004 we argued that environmentalism needed to die, today it's clear that it did. What killed it was neither our essay, nor fossil-funded skeptics, nor this or that tactical failing by green leaders or Democratic politicians. Rather, environmentalism died of old age. The world in which we live, economically, technologically, politically, and most importantly ecologically, has so profoundly changed that the very foundations upon which contemporary environmental politics was constructed no longer hold.