Important Challenges
After continuing to speak to many colleagues about these issues, and after experiencing a total communications breakdown among some of my conservation role models, I have realized that I should make a crucial qualification on our recommendations, which we perhaps didn't stress enough in our paper. In recognizing and appreciating the successful strategies of the Right, we must remember those things that make the Right different from progressives and accept these barriers to the application of their lessons to our own movement. The Right is undeniably authoritarian and hierarchal. We are not. Even more than that, we refuse to become so, and we should continue in this refusal. The authoritarian hierarchal meta-structure we attribute to the Right is not a good model for us as progressives. We need to find a way to harness the power of horizontal organization and synchronized communications without creating a single Big Daddy.
Of course this is a tremendous challenge, and one that we cannot even be sure we can even accomplish. Nonetheless, I believe it is crucial to the success of environmentalists and progressives. The need for unity is still present, as are our common values. I do believe our next steps must include learning how to communicate with each other in all of our diversity, coordinating ourselves to speak a common language, and developing an intense awareness of the values that motivate us, so that these become inseperably apparent in everything we do and say. It is up to the next generation of progressives and environmentalists to create and strengthen this process, and to develop a new style of political coalition for this country.
If anyone has any suggestions, or interest in working on this, I would be grateful to hear from you.
Thanks,
dahvi
Of course this is a tremendous challenge, and one that we cannot even be sure we can even accomplish. Nonetheless, I believe it is crucial to the success of environmentalists and progressives. The need for unity is still present, as are our common values. I do believe our next steps must include learning how to communicate with each other in all of our diversity, coordinating ourselves to speak a common language, and developing an intense awareness of the values that motivate us, so that these become inseperably apparent in everything we do and say. It is up to the next generation of progressives and environmentalists to create and strengthen this process, and to develop a new style of political coalition for this country.
If anyone has any suggestions, or interest in working on this, I would be grateful to hear from you.
Thanks,
dahvi
posted by Dahvi at 8:17 AM
3 Comments:
In your paper you are hard pressed to find a media outlet comparable to Fox News.
If you haven't learned about http://www.iwtnews.com/, please take a few minutes to check it out.
Thank you! I will check that out right now!
d
First of all, on behalf of Jeni and myself, I would like to thank you for your careful read of our paper and your thoughtful comments. Our primary goal with this piece was to add a few new constructive ideas to the dialogue now underway, and your thoughts certainly contribute to that perfectly. So thanks.
Now to respond to your comments....
1. The environmental movement has been a success. As you point out, the air and water are cleaner, awareness of issues is up, and many individuals now say they care about the environment. However, the American lifestyle (as it is now lived out) is still highly consumptive, wasteful, and inefficient. We use of a tremendous supply of resources, generate an astronomical amount of trash, and we seem to have no real sense of how all of this affects our international relations or our future survival. In other words, while we recycle more than we ever did before, we continue to live in a totally unsustainable way. From our point of view, it is this larger problem that we now need to address. While it is true that people are more aware of environmental issues, they have also demonstrated that they will ignore these issues in both presidential elections and their daily consumer behavior. This is insufficient. We believe that when we consider the long term well-being of our nation and our global community, it becomes clear that we must make some large scale changes, the likes of which we seem incapable of enacting in the current climate. In this sense we have failed; we have not instilled a deeply motivating environmental ethic in the citizens of this country.
2. Things like air and water are better now than they were 30-50 years ago, and I believe it is true that this is part of the reason that people don't have strong feelings about these issues now. However, we are now becoming aware of significant environmental threats that are more insidious. They require anticipation and some careful reasoning to recognize. They do not smell like sewage or look like smog. They are not catching on fire and flowing through our backyards. Nonetheless, they are real. We believe we must begin to address these kinds of problems now, before their symptoms do become apparent in our daily lives, and before it is too late to prevent or slow them. In my opinion, this IS a quality of life issue. As environmentalists, I believe we are asking Americans to make some choices about what kind of future they want, and we are trying to offer them an accurate picture of the effects their choices may have. I believe that Earth and life upon it will continue regardless of whether there are humans here or not. I believe we have been misguided in our attempts to persuade people that they are ruining the planet. I think, rather, that the threat to our environment represents a deeply HUMAN concern. Right now, our actions manifest an unconscious choice to destroy our own habitat, eliminate the spiritual, mental, and physical values of wild natural places, and incapacitate ourselves and our society from functioning into the distant future. In my mind, this is irresponsible and short-sighted, and I am afraid we are creating a world in which I (and many others with me, I believe) do not want to live. I believe this is still a very major thing to be worrying about, even though it may be somewhat invisible now, and it is for this reason that I believe we MUST change our strategies.
(As for the civil rights analogy, much of the civil rights work undertaken in the 60s was very successful. Our country definitely looks different now than it did in the times of slavery and segregation. However, our society is still FAR from racial utopia; there are MANY problems that have not yet been addressed. In fact, in many ways the civil rights movement HAS failed, because it has allowed people of privilege to believe that there are no civil rights problems anymore, that the playing field is now level, and that they have no more responsibility to improve it further. This is not the case. Injustice certainly still abounds. Racial violence reenacts itself over and over and over again all across this country. Minority representation in leadership, among the wealthy, and in academia is still below that of whites. The civil rights movement lost steam before it was able to solve these larger, deeper problems, much as the environmental movement seems incapable of solving ours. It is those final steps which seem to be the hardest, but which are no less important than those taken before...)
3. Global warming is no longer so speculative, though predictions about the results certainly are. It is nearly unanimously agreed among scientists that climate change is taking place and that anthropogenic sources are largely to blame. It will be an expensive and difficult problem to address, absolutely, and it likely would be even with a strong movement (as you mention). However, our current strategy of turning our back to it and pretending that it isn't there is an unacceptable solution. If we are going to require significant societal change to prevent this, we need to get the dialogue underway about how we are going to do so. Again, I believe this is ultimately a choice. If Americans want to agree that climate change is not a problem for us because we don't care about the effects it will have on poorer countries, we don't care about the ecological havoc it may wreck on environmental normalcy as we know it, and we believe that our current lifestyle is worth sacrificing so much for, then, I suppose, believing in democracy, I must accept that. However, I believe that most Americans consider themselves generous and would not consciously degrade the lives of those living in poorer countries. I believe many people do not understand or fully appreciate the assumptions they hold about ecological stability. And I believe that most people have never taken the time, or recognized the need, to consider whether the consumptive American lifestyle IS worth sacrificing so much for. In other words, I do not believe we are equipped to intelligently MAKE the choice we are now making, and the decision of this administration to deny the problem has not helped inform the public about any of it. I hope the next president takes some major steps, as you predict, but his (or her?) work will be much harder given the denial now instilled in Americans who trust their current president.
4. I agree with you that the crisis model, while successful for a while, has proven ineffective. We have overused the scare tactic (even if it often is true), and people do not believe us anymore. Furthermore, we have never sufficiently made the connection between the improvements we now see in air and water and the battles that have been waged by environmentalists over the last several decades. We have been a highly negative, darkly prophetic, judgmental, and alienating group of individuals. It has not benefitted us at all. Now we find that many people who claim to care about the natural world refuse to call themselves environmentalists because of all of the negative associations they have with this word. This, in my mind, is hugely representative of our failure to capture the American heart. I agree that we must begin to build more alliances than we destroy, seek out innovative and creative solutions that consider economics as well as technological advancement and regulation. However, I do not have as much faith in free market capitalism as it seems you might. While removing irrational subsidies on water and timber, for example, will absolutely help, I believe that efficiency is not the same as fairness and that some regulation will prove necessary in the name of justice and equitable distribution of resources. We cannot afford to completely alienate economists. They have proposed many creative solutions that can, without a doubt, help us in our mission. However, I believe we must attempt to influence people's hearts, their values and ethics, as well, because this, I believe, will be crucial to helping them make considerate and responsible choices in the long term.
5. I have not yet read the Sierra Club article and your response, but I will....
6. I think it is time for the environmental movement to rethink itself and recognize that it has a long way to go. We ARE asking for a significant societal change; we believe such change will be necessary to move closer to the peaceful and sustainable world we hope to leave to our children. We believe we have a deeply moral, values based message, and we are frustrated that this has been sidelined by the religiously moralistic message of the right. Jeni and I believe we no longer need to focus on telling people what they cannot or should not do, but we need to offer them a fulfilling and satisfying WAY TO LIVE. We believe many of the values that lead us to do the work we do are actually shared by the majority of Americans and that we must find a better way to reach them. We hope this type of solution does not fail to consider important economic realities and address existing inefficiencies. We hope that this solution does not continue to alienate people as our previous strategies have. We will need a diversity of ideas, backgrounds, and skills represented among us in order to affect the kind of large-scale change we hope to, economists included....We will need to focus on finding common ground in the human condition, and working from there.
I hope these thoughts address some of your critiques, and I thank you again for your thoughts.
I would also be glad to continue this conversation, as interest inspires.
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