Death of Environmentalism

The “death of environmentalism” refers to a controversial idea within the environmental movement first articulated in a 2004 essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. The authors are both veteran activists who have worked professionally for several environmental and labor nongovernmental organizations in California. The pair helped cofound the Apollo Alliance, a network of environmental, private enterprise, organized labor, and civil rights advocates whose primary goal is the creation of three million new green jobs and the weaning of American reliance on foreign oil. Their essay argued that conventional conceptions of environmentalism are outdated and have outlived their usefulness. This is made apparent, they argue, by the unique challenges put forward by global climate change. As such, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are not arguing that environmentalism has died but, rather, that it can no longer deliver on its goals of sustainable society–nature relationships in confronting ecological crises, which will require substantial transformations affecting the lives of billions of people.

While recognizing the significant gains of environmentalism and acknowledging future progress as contingent on that history, they see it as a noble but ultimately inadequate effort today. They particularly focus on its recent weakness over the last few decades, assessing the movement as regressing from its successful status during the 1960s and 1970s (when a myriad of environmental legislation was secured) and critiquing the manner in which environmentalists claim authority to speak for nature by purportedly relaying what the Earth is communicating in an objective framework, resulting in a narrow conceptual divide between what does and does not get defined as environmental. For example, Shellenberger and Nordhaus attack the tactics emphasizing technical policy solutions battling over fuel economy or pollution emission caps, characterizing them as failing to express the graveness of climate change consequences, leaving the movement in a regressed state when compared with earlier decades. This type of environmentalism succeeded in building broad political respect for the environment, but one too shallow to foster the dramatic social, economic, and cultural transformations necessary to answer the challenge of climate change—such as transitioning away from an economy dependent on finite but cheap supplies of fossil fuels, which will require new relations among labor, consumers, and the environment. As a consequence, environmental activists often compensate for shallow support by emphasizing the dire nature of ecological crisis, which Shellenberger and [Page 92]Nordhaus see as paralyzing, rather than empowering, individuals. The authors referred to “policy literalism” to critique the culture of mainstream environmentalism, which they see as trapped within the realm of technical policy, resulting from the heavy reliance on science to define environmental problems, while ignoring the politics that create the opportunities for such policy. Against the spirit of policy literalism, Shellenberger and Nordhaus attempted to avoid the “death of environmentalism” thesis from having prescriptive components, insisting that solutions will not come from individuals but, rather, from team efforts. Their essay largely rests on placing a politics of limits up against a politics of possibility, where the former may prompt action regulating carbon or other greenhouse gas emissions and the latter focuses on public–private relationships centered around green investment. Defenders of a politics of limits argue that tactics such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems bypass the messy politics of choosing an alternative energy “winner” while simultaneously raising money to pay for such projects. In this, critics see a politics of possibility that strategizes around green investment as an admirable but ultimately impractical implementation of sustainable goals.

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