Lack of Vision ~ The Failure of the Environmental Movement

A Lack of Vision

by PD Allen

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The Failure of the Environmental Movement

(pdallen.com) As has been noted by others, a movement is a popular vehicle to address inequities that ultimately results in social change. As examples of at least partially successful movements, we have the labor movement, which resulted in labor laws and the development of the US middle class. Then there was the suffrage movement that brought woman the right to vote and ultimately resulted in the sexual revolution. And finally, there is the civil rights movement, which brought an end to overt racial discrimination.

Some say that movements achieve their end result through legislation, ultimately through the recognition of new constitutional rights. However, there has been no constitutional recognition of labor rights, and the labor laws that are on the books are always subject to reinterpretation. There are even strong indications that the US middle class is failing and will soon be no more. Women’s rights have never been protected by the constitution. Every attempt to pass the Equal Rights amendment has failed. And while women have opened the doors to the universities and to the workplaces, they do so at unequal pay. And domestic abuse is still a rampant problem. And most blacks would tell you that racism is alive and well in the US, and even on the rebound.

Legislation, and even constitutional amendments, can be reversed in time, and are always subject to interpretation. But everyone must recognize that these movements did result in some fundamental social change. The legal change is secondary; the primary change is the way we view each other and the world around us. Each of these movements resulted in a spreading awareness of equality. And, although this awareness is thwarted by general ignorance and by a socio-economic system dependent on inequality, it has firmly taken root in the public psyche, and with every passing year the perception of equality grows stronger.

What, then, has been the result of the environmental movement? True, it has resulted in some dawning awareness of unjust inequality. A mere fifty years ago, no one—not even biologists—recognized animals as possessing consciousness and feelings. Now, I would hazard to say, a majority of the people in the US are aware that animals are aware and emotional beings. Those who have truly awoken to environmental inequality have probably entertained the idea that everything that exists has a right to do so untampered. But there is an unresolved dilemma here because our civilization is built from the harvest of natural resources. We must take life—even if it is only plant life—to feed ourselves.

There are those who say we should only take from nature what is absolutely necessary for our survival. On the other hand, there are many who believe that it is our right (too many would say our divine right) to use anything we find on this planet as we see fit. Unfortunately, most people are not interested in this debate, so long as it does not interfere with their own technological comforts and consumer desires.

While there has been a spreading awareness of animal and environmental rights, it has been very piecemeal, and remains largely ineffectual. For over half a century now, there has been confusion within the environmental movement. There are many different factions within the movement, from militant primitivists who want to do away with technology entirely, to mainstream environmental apologists who seek only to curb our most environmentally destructive practices.

It is really improper of me to say that the environmental movement is a failure and that it lacks vision. It has achieved limited success on a number of specific issues. And there are many in the movement who have attempted to give us a positive vision, from Earnest Callenbech’s Ecotopia, to the development of permaculture and ecovillages. But the exposure of this vision has been largely minimized in our society.

All movements are thwarted by the established order. And this is particularly true of the environmental movement, which addresses basic inequities and injustices within our socio-economic system, and whose ultimate goal is a radical departure from that socio-economic system to one based on sustainability. Unbeknown to most environmentalists, the environmental movement was masterfully checked back in the 1970s, while it was still in its infancy. And there are too many who believe that the very mechanism of its checking was the greatest triumph of the movement.

Tricky Dick’s Greatest Deception

Many hailed Richard Nixon’s establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act as a victory for the environmental movement. Only a few at the time recognized that the agency and the act both lacked teeth. At the time, environmental awareness was spreading throughout the population; the majority of US citizens recognized that we had to protect the environment for our own health, and for the future. Riding high on the spirit of the sixties, the movement was developing a vision of sustainability and going back to nature that would perhaps ultimately express itself in the novel Ecotopia.

The establishment of the EPA and the Endangered Species Act served to divide the movement and rob it of its vision. Instead of fundamentally questioning the basis of our socio-economic system and pointing toward a sustainable alternative, these federal initiatives protected the established system, offering only to regulate business as usual. Certainly, the EPA has acted to curb some polluters, but the majority of environmental destruction is either ignored or addressed through weak compromises. For the most part, polluters are only identified after the damage is done, when they are slapped on the wrists and asked to help clean up their mess. Corporations and conglomerates have found ingenious ways of escaping any responsibility for their pollution.

What is more, regulations are always subject to adjustment, reinterpretation, de-emphasis, under funding and outright reversal. And through nearly four decades of republican and democrat administration, the EPA and the Endangered Species Act have been successively weakened to the point of worthlessness. In a system predicated on economic inequality, any legislation or regulations will be tilted in favor of the rich and powerful, if not at the time of inception, then through subsequent revision.

Richard Nixon and those who crafted the EPA and the environmental regulations of the 1970s knew this. They were acting to head off a movement, not to repair any basic inequities in the system. This is why they left so many loopholes for polluters. And they did not fret much about the teeth they did leave in the regulations because they knew these teeth would be extracted over time.

The greatest triumph of the environmental regulations lay in the basic concept that environmental problems should be regulated, as opposed to the radical transformation of society to something more sustainable. A new brand of environmentalist quickly evolved, who would work with industry to solve these problems. Many environmental organizations were compromised, first through the adoption of regulations as the answer to the environmental problem, then by corruption of monetary influence provided by the industries they were supposed to be fighting against. Some of them have ultimately become PR firms for the supposed “greening” of various “environmentally concerned” corporations.

Meanwhile, those environmentalists dedicated to fundamental social change have been marginalized. They have become kooky radicals, militants, and even eco-terrorists. Or, at best, they are considered unrealistic visionaries.

Bringing the Environmental Movement Home

The established system had something else working in its favor that allowed it to succeed in promoting a regulatory solution to environmental problems. The inequities that spawned the workers’ movement, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement resulted in injustices that were experienced personally by large segments of society. It was this personal injustice that awoke people and brought them together in the struggle for change.

Unfortunately, environmental problems have not deeply affected a significant portion of the population as of yet. There are some who have had their lives changed, but for most of us, environmental problems have not impinged directly upon our lives. Or if they have, it is only in some minor way, or the problem impacting us is viewed as a localized problem and not a part of some overshadowing social injustice.

True, most people do favor a clean environment and the protection of wilderness, but not if it calls for personal sacrifice. We continue to buy consumer goods without considering the damage they do to the environment, and we continue to consume meats and vegetables without regard for the manner in which they were produced. The system we live in has isolated the consumer from the responsibility of his or her consumption. And that has left environmental causes as comfortable charities we can contribute to as a way to make ourselves feel good and morally superior, without perceiving any personal culpability or the necessity of changing our way of life.

However, the insulation is wearing thin, and soon the damage of over-consumption will intrude on our lives in a very personal level. For many decades we have been warned that our way of life is unsustainable. We have been told that pollution will eventually overcome the environment’s natural capacity to remediate it, that nonrenewable resources will eventually be exhausted, that we are exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity, and that ecosystems could collapse as a result.

Now the day is fast approaching when we will reap what we have sown. Global climate change is accelerating and may even become a runaway reaction. As a result, more and more people are suffering from adverse meteorological conditions, from increasingly violent hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and flooding. We are living in the middle of one of the worst mass extinction events in the history of the planet, and the only mass extinction that is entirely due to the actions of one species. All over the world, scientists are warning that ecosystems are stressed, many of them approaching the point of collapse. Industrial agriculture faces a major crisis and will soon be unable to feed our growing population, if it does not collapse completely. And we are on the verge of entering a new age of energy depletion, which could have disastrous effects on all facets of our technological civilization and our economy, and which could aggravate all the other pending crises—in particular the collapse of modern agriculture.

Those who live in the decades ahead will know these environmental crises on a very personal level. Now is the time to build a real environmental movement with a goal of social change and a vision of a sustainable civilization. But first, we need to recognize that our current socio-economic system is unsustainable and that it must be replaced. And we need to work on replacing it with a system based on equality and sustainability. Perhaps most importantly, we need to understand—at an intimate level—the right of everyone and everything to exist untampered. Finally, we need to learn how to make balanced personal judgments on what usages are fair and necessary. We need to accept responsibility for the resources we use, and use them in a way that fully respects the rights of the resource. This is what William Blake meant when he said, “The cut worm forgives the plow.”