Romantics love problems; scientists discover and analyze problems; engineers solve problems.
• That is a gross oversimplification. Stereotypes were not responsible for the burst of U.S. environmental legislation passed in the 1970s—the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. What would I call the dedicated lawyers who got those bills written, passed, and signed—“political engineers”?
Where in my character set are the duck hunters who pioneered the conservation movement in the 1930s by protecting wetlands and who are still at it seventy years later? Some 24 million acres of North American waterfowl habitat are being preserved, protected, and restored by the 775,000 well-armed members of Ducks Unlimited.
Real people, not paper cutouts, made recycling happen, cleaned the air in Los Angeles and the Thames in London, and elevated ecology to a philosophy; made ecotourism an industry, wildlife films an entertainment genre, and watershed a term of art for planners; planted countless urban trees and slowed the destruction of the Amazon rain forest; stopped acid rain and ozone depletion, saved condors and whooping cranes, built global Green organizations, created wildland parks at every governmental level from county to World Heritage Sites . . . The list could fill the rest of this book. It does fill Paul Hawken’s broadside on the proliferation of environmental activist groups, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (2007).
I’m going to stick with my stock characters, though, because they offer a way to think about some important changes that are going on. When concern about climate change went mainstream all over the world in 2007, Greens everywhere felt vindicated. “Today’s torrent of environmental progress,” declared the head of Sierra Club that summer, “rivals that in the heady years around the first Earth Day in 1970.” The world was finally coming around to the Green point of view, and all environmentalists had to do was to seize the opportunity and bear down on their agenda to win final victory.
Wrong. The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated—too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role, environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system—climate dynamics.
It may seem hardest to change course when you think you’re triumphant, but it’s actually an opportune time. Resources abound; new people with new ideas show up. With the old guard swamped by events, Young Turks can strike out in divergent directions. An unsentimental review of the past can toss out entrenched ideas that are no longer useful and poke around in long-taboo areas for potential new value. That’s the mode I’ll try to frame here, not just for my fellow mossback environmentalists but also for the new climate-driven environmentalists—the Green bio-hackers, Green technophiles, Green urbanists, and Green infrastructure rebuilders.
It was romantics—charismatic figures such as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, David Brower, Ed Abbey, Dave Foreman, and Julia Butterfly Hill—who taught us to be rings of bone, open to all of it, ready to redirect our lives based on our deepest connection to nature. The year I graduated from Stanford, Brower launched the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format series of nature photography books. His first one, This is the American Earth (1960), made with photographer Ansel Adams, set me on a path I’m still on. Desert writer Ed Abbey introduced the further romance of protest, and role models like Earth-Firster Dave Foreman and mythic tree sitter Julia Butterfly Hill played it out.
Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.
California was a great place to get over mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Such an endless parade of gurus and mystics came through, peddling their wares, that they canceled each other out. They couldn’t really compete with the drugs, and the drugs canceled each other out as well. Fervent visions, shared to excess, became clanking clichés. All that was left was daily reality, with its endless negotiation, devoid of absolutes, but alive with surprises.
In 1997 my growing distrust of romanticism in all its forms was crystallized by a book: The Idea of Decline in Western History, by Arthur Herman, which explores one question: What is behind the ever-popular narrative of decline? Decade after decade, leading intellectuals in Europe and America explain that the world is going to hell, progress is a lie, and bad people, bad ideas, and bad institutions are to blame for the irreversible degradation of all that is true and good.
Overwhelming real-world evidence to the contrary matters not at all to the calamitists.
Herman distinguishes two forms of the lament: historical pessimism (Jacob Burckhardt, Oswald Spengler, Henry Adams, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Kennedy) and a much more frightening cultural pessimism (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many contemporary Greens). Herman writes:The historical pessimist sees civilization’s virtues under attack from malign and destructive forces that it cannot overcome; cultural pessimism claims that those forces form the civilizing process from the start. The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it needs to be destroyed.
Thus spake Nietzsche: “There is an element of decay in everything that characterizes modern man.” And: “Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?”
A standard eco-pessimist could announce almost triumphantly in 1992:Modern humanity is rapidly destroying the natural world on which it depends for its survival. Everywhere on our planet, the picture is the same. Forests are being cut down, wetlands drained, coral reefs grubbed up, agricultural lands eroded, salinized, desertified, or simply paved over. Pollution is now generalized—our groundwater, streams, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans, the air we breathe, the food we eat, are all affected. Just about every living creature on earth now contains in its body traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals—many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or mutagens.
As a result of our activities, it is probable that thousands of species are being made extinct every day. Only a fraction of these are known to science. . . . By destroying the natural world in this way we are making our planet progressively less habitable. If current trends persist, in no more than a few decades it will cease to be capable of supporting complex forms of life.
(That was Edward Goldsmith’s opening salvo in The Way: An Ecological World-view. His worries are accurate individually, but they are selective, one-sided, and overaggregated into a paralyzing spasm of angst.)
• Arthur Herman traces the origin of romanticism and its decay narrative to one man and one event—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution of 1789. Rousseau embraced an imaginary primitivism and declared, “Everything degenerates in the hands of men.” His vision of a return to innocence and freedom seemed to be at hand with the overthrow of the French monarchy. The intelligentsia of Europe thrilled to the coming of a new dawn in 1789, and then watched it turn into blood and terror by 1793. With that trauma, the romantic stance became one of despair and defiance, and it has remained so ever since.
Following the deep seam of romanticism through successive centuries, Herman finds it leading through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) directly to Nazi Germany. “Hitler’s generation was the first European generation raised on cultural pessimism.”
There is a troubling Green thread in the Nazi movement. I first came across it in 1977
with an article I ran in CoEvolution on the German wandervögel (wanderbirds)—young hippielike back-to-the-land romantic strivers of the late nineteenth century who were all too easily co-opted into the Hitler Youth. I learned from Herman’s book that biologist Ernst Haeckel, coiner of the word ecology (oekologie, 1866), championed eugenics and selective euthanasia to purge an imperiled Europe of “degenerates such as Jews and Negroes.” According to Peter Coates in Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (2004), “Nazi Germany led Europe in the creation of nature reserves and the implementation of progressive forestry sensitive to what we would now call biodiversity.”
Summarizing the ongoing debate about “the Green face of Nazism,” Nils Gilman at Global Business Network wrote me that,The key and I think undebated points are these: (1) the Nazis used their green credentials to win and widen their popular support, (2) virtually no one at the time, inside or outside Germany, saw any contradiction between the Nazis’ environmentalism and the rest of their political program. In sum: while there’s obviously no necessary connection between eco-friendliness and fascism/nativism, there are lots of ways in which the two movements can and have connected historically, and may again in the future.
• How times change. Germany is once again the Greenest country in Europe, but this time the political framework is so leftist that the powerful Green party members, Die Grünen, are commonly called watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. That flip is common in the world. In the old days, conservation was conservative, the proper activity of duck hunters and Teddy Roosevelts. And progress used to belong to progressives; but then it frightened them, and they turned on it. They came to oppose what they viewed as the technological threats of progress, the despoliation of nature by progress, and the capitalist engine of progress. That in turn offended the conservatives, who were fond of capitalism, and opposing the newly antiprogress progressives meant opposing their environmental programs as well. The flip was complete.
It has become a problem. Worldwide, the political stereotype these days is that Green equals left, left equals Green, and right equals anti-Green. That may be helpful for liberals, grounding them in the science and practice of natural systems, but it blinds conservatives and badly hampers Green perspective. Becoming politically narrow limits Greens’ thinking and marginalizes their effectiveness, because whatever they say is automatically dismissed by anyone who has doubts about liberals. Countless conservatives refused to take climate change seriously because they couldn’t abide the idea of Al Gore being right.
I saw a version of this narrowness played out after 1966, when I was inspired by a rooftop LSD trip to distribute buttons that read, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Everyone in the New Left opposed Kennedy’s space program, seeing it (correctly) as a cold war episode that they thought (incorrectly) was being carried out to no good purpose by crew-cut military squares. (Only Abbie Hoffman disagreed with his compatriots: “Are you kidding? We’re going to the fucking MOON!”) Environmentalists joined the leftist opposition to the space program: “We have to clean up the Earth before we can leave it.”
The exception was Jacques Cousteau, the pioneer of underwater exploration. In a 1976 interview for CoEvolution, he told me that in the 1960s his fellow ocean specialists were scandalized by the expense and irrelevance of the U.S. space program, but he supported it for philosophical reasons that quickly became practical. Cousteau realized that satellites were the only way to monitor the health of the oceans.
Despite their best efforts to shut it down or ignore it, environmentalists gained more from the space program than anyone else, and sooner. Directly inspired by the 1969 photos of Earth from space, the first Earth Day in 1970 attracted 20 million Americans to the rallies, and the environmental movement took off, with a planetary icon and a coherence it has maintained ever since. Robert Poole wrote in Earthrise (2008): “As soon as the Earth became visible . . . it began to acquire friends, starting in 1969 with Friends of the Earth. The years 1969-72 saw no fewer than seven major national environmental organizations come into being.”
What made Cousteau prescient about what the perspective from space would bring? He had no allergy to new technology: He was the inventor of the scuba gear that made underwater exploration possible. His explorer’s heart saw space as the next ocean, and his scientific perspective made him ask what satellites could do for him. Being apolitical, he was free of loyalties to any narrow agenda. To disagree with his scientific peers was not a violation of solidarity but part of his job as a scientist.
Solidarity is a leftover idea of the left—“Which Side Are You On?” was a union song—that has no place in the environmental movement. It led Friends of the Earth in Britain to throw away their trustee Hugh Montefiore over nuclear power. (He supported nuclear to head off climate change.) The man who fired Montefiore, FOE director Tony Juniper, said that debate was welcome within the organization but not in public. That strikes me as a self-defeating practice. It is more important for an organization or a movement to be right than to be consistent, and figuring out what is right takes debate, as open as possible, because what is right keeps on changing as circumstances change.
• A romantic stance, or a political agenda, is fine for giving people a sense of identity and motivating their efforts; but it’s poor at solving problems. “One of the points of pragmatism is that there is no escape from the need to wrestle seriously with the particulars of a given problem,” writes Daniel Farber in his law book Eco-pragmatism (2000).
Paul Hawken has one of the great business-card stories:I have given nearly one thousand talks about the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society. They looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice.
Hawken kept the growing pile of cards until they provoked him into action. As he researched his book Blessed Unrest and set about building an online database of such organizations, he began to realize that there are over a million of them loose in the world. They are flourishing because of their specificity, because they wrestle with particulars. They are invisible for the same reason, and effective for the same reason. As Hawken notes, “Feedback loops are short, learning is accelerated.” Unfettered by ideology, slogans, fame, or even an aggregate name, the organizations live by improvisation and focus on results. Their story is about improvement, not decline.
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
In stark contrast to romantic cultural pessimism, science is imbued with a double optimism. One part is the scientific process itself, driven by accelerating capability: science makes science go faster and better. The other part is the content—much of what is discovered is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever-deepening knowledge, tools, and techniques. Because the findings of science are not just matters of opinion, they sweep past systems of thought based only on opinion. The swarming edges of science pose ever more and better questions, better put. They’re phrased to elicit hard answers, the answers get found, and the questioners move on.
No wonder static, self-obsessed romanticism acts so threat
ened by science. It is. A romantic loves the tree, not its genome. A scientist loves both.
Literary agent John Brockman points out another angle on the news from science:Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for space travel. Nobody ever voted for nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, the Web, Google, cloning, the sequencing of the entire human genome.
Science proposes, society disposes.
• Environmentalists do best when they follow where science leads, as they did with climate change. They do worst when they get nervous about where science leads, as they did with genetic engineering. You can see the romantic affliction at work right there. Climate change fit in with the romantic idea of decline and disaster. Genetic engineering looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s sin against nature in Mary Shelley’s classic romantic story.
I would like to see the environmental movement—and indeed everybody—become fearless about following science. Part of that process lies in learning which scientists and which research to track most closely.
Our first duty is to be wary of confirmation bias—the inclination to notice and believe whatever supports our current theory, and ignore or disbelieve everything that doesn’t support our views. It takes harsh self-discipline to overcome. “Darwin writes in his autobiography,” reports Bell Labs researcher Richard Hamming, “that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind.”
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