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overly-educated, usually liberal, environmentalists.
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Like the parents of teen-age
children, the more environmentalists talk and threaten, the less effective we become. We
should not spend time, money or intellectual capital on sounding the call of
environmental crisis or disaster. Second, we don’t need to. Peak oil is doing this work
for us. Let the mainstream press, $56/barrel oil, the collapse of the middle class, and loss
of pension plans, etc. do the talking about the arrival of peak oil and the crumbling of
democratic and civic infrastructures. Not to be too cynical or pessimistic, but peak oil
has finally given us the brick wall we environmental types have been looking for, and it
frees us to work on solutions rather than ever more ways to describe the reasons why
such solutions are necessary.
Third, and most importantly, environmentalism—even the civic variety—does not go
far enough. Our work must go beyond protecting ecosystems or greening businesses and
political systems. The required system overhaul is much bigger than what is typically
covered by the term “environmentalism.” Environmentalism needs to become invisible
in the larger social fabric and to hitch a ride on the larger movements, institutions, and
concepts that do most of the heavy lifting in the world. In this invisibility guise, we will
help prepare the ground for the revolution
or revolutions
in one or more of the larger
systems. But it won’t be an environmental revolution per se.
Simply put, if environmentalism wants to make a contribution to lasting change, it will
need to lower its voice, become quietly subversive, gain entrée into larger social systems,
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I briefly outline this “ineffectiveness” argument in The Journal of Conservation Biology, (December
2004: “Abandon Environmentalism for the Sake of the Revolution.”
http://www.blackwell-
synergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=synergy&synergyAction=showTOC&journalCode=cbi&volume=18&
issue=6&year=2004&part=null
). See also Michael Shellenberger’s and Ted Nordhaus’s The Death of
Environmentalism (
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/
).
Convention