A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

It’s almost impossible for anyone under thirty-five to imagine a time when the United States was an international leader on environmental matters, much less that it achieved this status under Republican administrations, even when economic and political costs were significant. Nevertheless, that was the case, once upon a time. In the past, environmentalism was sometimes forward thinking, and at other times, a response to imminent catastrophe. Overall, motivations were generally good and so were the results. It was only during Boomer hegemony that American policy became recklessly indifferent to threats that are simultaneously more dangerous and, paradoxically, that we have vastly greater resources to confront. Those who argue that climate change, the major existential threat of our time, cannot be tackled by a national system prone to partisanship, indifference, and inability to wrangle multilateral solutions ignore a long and successful history of American environmental leadership in equally difficult circumstances.