Trashing the Greens

The pair accused environmental leaders of treating defeats like victories, of "promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards" rather than "articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis [presented by climate change]." Proposing to destroy the movement in order to save it, they urged leaders to, if not just resign in favor of others who got "the vision thing," then to "step back to rethink everything."

Most observers agree that it was the lurid phrase "death of environmentalism" that helped the essay draw mainstream media attention, including network television appearances (well, a round on the Dennis Miller show), lengthy Q&A interviews on prominent websites and a New York Times cover piece and op-ed.

Not to be outdone, former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach (just 23 when he took the helm) delivered a San Francisco speech declaring that environmentalism was dead and that his task was to perform the autopsy. Like Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Werbach used global warming as a metaphor for environmental failure. And like them, he said that by framing climate change as "an environmental problem" rather than an economic and rule-changing one, the movement was allowing people to relegate it to the background of their lives. "No wonder the public doesn’t want to hear the truth about global warming: Nobody’s offering them a vision for the future that matches the magnitude of the problem," Werbach declared.

In separate interviews, Shellenberger comes off as very confident and a touch arrogant, and Nordhaus more reflective. They’re both very articulate about their vision, and they’ve had some effect. While the report circulated, former Vice President Al Gore held an online press conference in which he described President Bush’s refusal to do anything substantive about climate change "a stunning display of moral cowardice." In the final stages of his Presidential campaign, John Kerry talked a lot about "values."

But Shellenberger says this is just window dressing. "It’s great that liberals are thinking of what they’re doing in moral terms," he says, "but it has to go beyond just using the words. We have to get to the core of American values. This is an up-from-the-bootstraps culture, and environmentalists are telling people what they can’t have. It cuts against American aspirationalism."

What’s more, Shellenberger says, environmentalists are tone deaf to the changes happening around them. "They’re not paying attention to how different the values environment is today," he says. "The U.S. is looking like Texas and the Deep South; it’s increasingly anti-environmental. The groups aren’t paying attention to values and vision. They’re rigid about their proposals and strategies, but compromise on their core values. It shows how far we’ve fallen."

There’s definitely some truth in this. Many major groups have offices in Washington and are sticking to inside-the-beltway mentality about dealing with environmental problems when both the legislature and the federal judiciary are increasingly hostile territory. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for instance, writes in a recent open letter, "Litigation has always been a cornerstone of NRDC’s success in protecting the environment. But now more than ever we must rely on the courts, for there we meet the administration and the big corporations it favors on a level playing field." But is it really a "level playing field" when the Bush administration packs the courts with conservative judges?

Shellenberger sneers at greens who talk about global warming and then urge people to buy hybrid cars or compact fluorescent bulbs as a solution to it. "Thirty or 40 years ago the environmental problems were cleaning up the air and water, very straightforward and simple to deal with. It didn’t require major changes to the economy. But now we’re talking about mass extinction, global warming, an oceans crisis, and it does mean a massive overhaul of the economy."

In "The Death of Environmentalism," Exhibit A for a green group that "gets it" is the Apollo Alliance, which uses "big solutions to frame the problem," and is intent on building alliances with labor to build jobs and end the stranglehold of big oil in a new energy economy. But many of the big groups were already working with the Apollo Alliance, or using its work as a model.

(?)5S? cites the Sierra Club’s unsuccessful strategy for reforming the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules as an example of the movement’s failed approach. "The more things change, the more the strategy remains the same," he says. "The Sierra Club has been trying to increase the fuel-efficiency standards since 1990 and it has been an utter failure."

The "Death" essay is based on a central premise: That only a quarter to a third of the American people are now firmly in the environmental camp—a dramatic drop from the 75 to 80 percent support that most green groups routinely cite. When asked for the data to support this, Nordhaus responded: "We have research that shows that only about that percentage of the American public strongly holds the value that we call ecological concern. That is different than supporting environmental goals. Most Americans will tell you they support clean air and clean water, they just don’t support it very strongly. When we ask them open ended to n

ame the most important problems facing the country, fewer than five percent will generally offer any kind of environmental problem."

LCV’s Callahan denies that the movement needed to be told to build coalitions, since in its 2004 electoral effort the group made common cause with labor, women’s organizations and African-American groups. "Their report was self-serving and contained no fresh ideas," she says.

John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, wants Shellenberger and Nordhaus to, in effect, show him the money. "If their data is that good, they should burn it on 1,000 CDs and turn it into shareware," he says. "I want to see the data."

The Reaction Cometh

Since the "Death of Environmentalism" proposals emerged not from grey eminences but from two guys nobody had ever heard of, the reaction was swift and indignant. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, which worked hard and in wide coalitions to defeat Bush, pronounced himself "deeply disappointed and angered" with their "very troublesome and divisive set of conclusions" in a lengthy rebuttal. Environmentalism, he said, "is a broad, diverse and robust movement," and that diversity was nowhere represented in the authors" essay. Pope pointed out that the paper’s conclusion that the movement is wonkish and lacking in vision was preordained, since it was based on just 25 interviews with what he called "policy people," ignoring such movement "poets" as Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Leopold. "They have erected, and then blown aside, a straw man," Pope wrote.

Also interviewed for the essay was the Sierra Club’s Dan Becker, who heads the global warming and CAFE campaign the authors deride. "Their first big accusation is that the environmental movement is not handling global warming the right way, and nobody should be surprised by that or disagree," Becker says. "Their second indictment is that there’s nothing new under the environmental sun, and that’s simply not true. Contrary to what they say, we’ve taken the fight out of Washington and gone directly to the automakers to demand clean cars. Our campaign has created buzz about hybrid cars among sheriffs in Florida, nuns in Missouri and bankers in Ohio. We’ve educated people about available technology, and when blocked on emission rules at the federal level we’ve helped create tough state laws and possibly a Canadian law. And there’s analogous creativity in other parts of the national movement. Not everything we do is going to work, but we’re not going to give up and go away."

By focusing on two campaigns that greens admit are still very much unfinished business—on global warming and CAFE—the "Death" authors make the movement look like losers with nothing to show for 30 years of work. But there are many success stories they ignore. For instance, as Mark Hertsgaard wrote in The Nation, activists have enjoyed huge success by targeting bad behavior by large corporations. "Since Bush’s victory in November, two of America’s best-known brands—Ford and Victoria’s Secret—have been badly stung by such campaigns, and more are planned," he wrote. Among the concrete achievements: Staples and Office Depot are now competing "to be the greenest company in the office supply industry."

Passacantando agrees with Pope that the "Death" authors like to set up straw men, and in this case it’s the CAFE campaign. "But CAFE was never the be-all and end-all of the movement," he says. "It’s a campaign that Dan Becker has led very forcefully, but it is one campaign out of dozens out there, and it still may have its day. In a movement like this, most of our tactics are going to fail."

And despite the federal vacuum on global warming, states and municipalities—prodded by both local and national environmental groups—are adopting policies and guidelines comparable to the best Kyoto tactics emerging from Europe.

Even the most vociferous critics of the "Death" essay admit that Shellenberger and Nordhaus make many good points. Environmental leaders admit—and admitted before being prodded—that they’ve been consistently outmaneuvered by conservatives and need to rethink their approach. "We’re policy experts at our core, but we realized that you can’t get the policy right without the politics," says incoming NRDC President Frances Beinecke. "That’s when we began facing the challenge of conducting a broader conversation with the public about why these issues are important."

Have greens allowed others to "frame" the debate? That’s the part of the "Death" essay that hits home the hardest. But some leaders insist, with ample evidence, that they’ve been working on this issue for some time. Passacantando points out that the movement has long embraced and worked with the strategic thinking of the Berkeley linguistic professor George Lakoff, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant! "Lakoff has a fascinating analysis, and the movement is absorbing it in all the ways it can," Passacantando says. "He talks about how the brain is wired, how people view the world through a preconceived lens."

Curious George

George Lakoff puts political movements on the couch. In addition to Elephant, he is the author of such books as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. He founded the Rockridge Institute because he thought Republicans were winning the war of words. As he noted in an Alternet interview, "A lot of liberals believe that the facts will set you free. It is our inheritance from the Enlightenment
.And the Republicans have learned that it’s false. They’ve set up a frame, they set up a narrative, and they set it up in terms of their values. And they get it as part of normal, everyday language and normal everyday thought. Once they’ve done that, the facts are irrelevant unless the Democrats can learn to re-frame the issues from their point of view, and then make the facts fit other frames."

On the Rockridge Institute website, Lakoff urges activists to think strategically, and to go on the cultural offensive. "Conservatives have parodied liberals as angry (hence not in control of their emotions), weak, softhearted, unpatriotic, uninformed and elitist. Don’t give them any opportunities to stereotype you in any of these ways
.Avoid the usual mistakes. Remember, don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just by stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts. His frames will stay and the facts will bounce off. Always reframe."

Many of the ideas in the "Death" essay have roots in Lakoff’s work, but he doesn’t use bombastic language, and he says he urged Shellenberger and Nordhaus not to call their essay "The Death of Environmentalism." His alternative title: "The Rebirth of Environmentalism." Lakoff readily admits, however, that his version wouldn’t have drawn as much press. "Shellenberger’s a publicist," he chuckles. "Getting press is his job." The authors acknowledge their debt to Lakoff,

who Nordhaus concedes "has been a major influence."

In an interview, Lakoff said that "many of the things that [Shellenberger and Nordhaus] point out are in agreement with the heads of the major environmental organizations, who understand that environmentalism is not separate from issues of work and jobs, business, health, foreign policy, religion and so on. They’ve been thinking about this for a while, though they’ve been lax in bringing the ideas forward. So it’s the correct critique, but it’s not new."

Lakoff also says that the notion that green groups spend all their time "working out scientific details and publishing scientific papers that have very little effect, though they may be true" is accurate because the groups have not built a frame around the information. "So Michael and Ted conclude that creating papers is a waste of time," Lakoff says. "I say it is worthwhile but you need to add serious framing."

And there’s a division on tactics as well. Lakoff points out that many environmental groups have large Republican constituencies, including fiscal conservatives who hunt and fish, support open space, love national parks or see a business strategy in sustainable development. While the "Death" authors think the movement can only move forward if it becomes a big tent of progressive causes (an idealistic approach), the environmental groups believe they also have to include their "partially progressive" membership (a pragmatic one). "I think both strategies can be followed without messing each other up," says Lakoff. "The short-term strategy is to enlist the partials and the long-term goal is to build a progressive movement."

Lakoff’s work as a consultant to the environmental movement has gotten off to a rocky start. According to Grist, the much-in-demand Lakoff has been slow to fulfill a commitment he made for a long-term reframing project with the Green Group, a coalition of 20 big-ticket national groups. He was to have been paid $350,000 for a three-phase project whose results were due in May, but by early April progress appeared to have stalled.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have their own George Lakoff, a pollster and opinion researcher by the name of Frank Luntz. It was Luntz, the pollster for the "Contract with America," who pointed out that Democrats have science on their side when it comes to global warming, but they will still lose if they go into battle with off-putting scientific jargon and complicated climate models. Meanwhile, the Republicans, using words like "healthy," "clean" and "safe" to describe policies that are none of the above (ie, Healthy Forests Restoration Act, Clear Skies Initiative) will triumph. And as Lakoff points out in Don’t Think of an Elephant!, the right enforces "message discipline," which includes repeating words and phrases like "love," "from the heart" and "for the children" when talking to women audiences.

Luntz sounds just like Lakoff when he says things like, "When you’re talking issues like the environment, a straight recitation of facts is going to fall on deaf ears." And he’s on the same track when he adds, "Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it’s something that’s inside you. How you think is on the outside, how you feel is on the inside, so that’s what I need to understand."

So it definitely comes down to a battle over both minds and hearts, with environmentalists needing to get much better at winning the latter. When they were talking about that, Shellenberger and Nordhaus were definitely hitting the target. But many green leaders say they were already marching to that tune.

CONTACT: Breakthrough Institute, http://thebreak through.org (the essay can be downloaded at http://thebreak through.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf); Rockridge Institute, (510)204-0646, www.rockridgeinstitute.org.

JIM MOTAVALLI is editor of E.