From Environmental Activism to Social Change

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Environment

"Walking North on a Southbound Train" by David Orr was recently published in Rachel's Environment and Health News.

When Orr says we're "losing the epic struggle to preserve the habitability of the earth" he is expressing an obvious yet little understood truth. My question: if we're losing the struggle, who are we struggling with? Certainly two of the more visible opponents are corporate greed and individual inactivity. Corporations, for example, are leaving a poisoned legacy for our environment. Bees dying in France, Germany and elsewhere, toxic fluoride in the water supply, fish disappearing and genetically modified food threatening to change the ecological balance forever.

We can complain about the corporations' actions but each one of us has a personal and individual responsibility we cannot shun. It is really up to us humans living on this planet to care for the environment and to force corporations to adopt a more acceptable course of action. After all, it's our future.

In the second part of his article, Orr asks what can be done to turn things around. He does not find a one-shot answer but correctly takes the struggle into the political arena with the words: "We do not have an environmental crisis so much as a political crisis." Orr also recognizes the need for "an active, engaged, and sometimes enraged citizenry." A positive answer is needed. he says - "a positive strategy that fires the public imagination".

Presuming one could map out such an overall positive strategy, individual action becomes necessary to translate the strategy into actual change. A way you can use to stimulate effective action for positive social change is the Communication Agents initiative of Robin Good. This is a developing initiative designed to allow you to become more effective in your activism, to jump off the southbound train and start going north, maybe even to catch a train that will bring you there without having to do a lot of walking.

WALKING NORTH ON A SOUTHBOUND TRAIN
by David W. Orr

An old farmer once told me a story of a wily fox that he came to know well, and its interactions with his unfortunate dog.

One day, as he tells it, the fox began to run in circles just outside the radius of the dog's tether, followed by the frantically barking dog. After a few laps the tether was wrapped around the post, at which point the fox strutted in to devour the dog's food while the helpless mutt looked on.

Something like that has happened to all of us who believe that nature and ecosystems are worth preserving and that this is a matter of obligation, spirit, true economy, and common sense.

Someone or something has run us in circles, tied us up, and is eating our lunch. It is time to ask who and why and how we might respond. Here is what we know

(1) Despite occasional success, overall we are losing the epic struggle to preserve the habitability of the earth. The overwhelming fact is that virtually all important ecological indicators are in decline. The human population increased three-fold in the twentieth century and will likely grow further before leveling off at 8-11 billion. The loss of species continues and will likely increase in coming decades.

Human-driven climatic change is occurring more rapidly than many scientists thought possible even a few years ago. There is no political or economic movement presently underway sufficient to stop the process short of a doubling or tripling of the background rate of 280 ppm CO2. On the horizon are other threats in the form of self-replicating technologies that may place humankind and natural systems in even greater jeopardy.

(2) The forces of denial in the United States are more militant and brazen than ever. Every day millions in this country alone hear that those concerned about the environment are "extremists," "wackos," or worse. A former Wyoming senator charges that the environmental movement is "a front for these terrorists," and no significant Washington politician utters any objection.[1] And people holding such opinions have been appointed to strategic positions throughout the federal government.

(3) The movement to preserve a habitable planet is caught in the crossfire between fundamentalists of the corporate-dominated global economy and those of atavistic religious movements. It is far easier to see the latter than the former, but in a longer perspective the forces of perpetual economic expansion will be perceived to be at least as dangerous as those of a purely religious sort. That danger is now magnified by a new rightwing doctrine gaining the status of national policy that permits the United States to strike preemptively at any country deemed to be an enemy without resort to international law, morality, common sense, or public debate. In the words of one analyst, this is "a strategy to use American military force to permit the continued offloading onto the rest of the world of the ecological costs of the existing U.S. economy -- without any short-term sacrifices on the part of U.S. capitalism, the U.S. political elite or U.S. voters".[2]

(4) Fundamentalists either economic or religious require dependably loathsome enemies. For Osama bin Laden, the United States and George W. Bush admirably serve that purpose. It is no less true that the foundering presidency of Mr. Bush was revitalized by the activities of Mr. Bin Laden and subsequently by the less agreeable attributes of Saddam Hussein. Each is fulfilled and defined by an utterly vile enemy.

(5) There has been a steep erosion of democracy and civil liberties in the United States, driven by what former president Jimmy Carter describes as "a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism."[3] There is a strong antidemocratic movement on the right wing of American politics that would limit voting rights, reduce access to information, prevent full disclosure of the conduct of public business, and reduce public control of military affairs.

(6) In the 1990s, massive amounts of wealth were transferred from the poor and middle classes to the richest. By one estimate "the financial wealth of the top 1% exceeds the combined household financial wealth of the bottom 95%."[4] Much of this transfer of wealth was simply theft. In the California energy "crisis" alone, an estimated $30 billion was diverted by those utilities that effectively defrauded the state and its citizens.

(7) For nearly a quarter century, government at all levels has been under constant attack by the extreme right wing, with the clear intention of eroding our capacity to forge collective solutions. The assumption is now common that markets are "moral" but that publicly created political solutions are not.

The result is a continuation of what a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, once described as "a riot of individualistic materialism, under which complete freedom for the individual...turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak" (quoted by C. Meine, unpublished manuscript).

(8) The U.S. government's strategy, once revealed by Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of the Budget, David Stockman, has been to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy and increase military spending, there by creating a severe fiscal crisis that requires cutting expenditures for health, education, mass transit, the environment, and cities.

(9) Our problems are systemic in nature and will have to be solved at the system level.

(10) There are yet good possibilities for averting the worst of what may lie ahead.

In short, the movement to preserve the habitability of the earth is failing, and we ought to ask why. The reasons can be found neither in the lack of effort or good intention by thousands of scientists, activists, and concerned citizens nor in a lack of information, data, logic, and scientific evidence.

On these counts the movement has grown impressively, as has the quality and quantity of scientific evidence and rational discourse on which it rests. But we must look more deeply at how this movement is manifest in the larger arena in which public attitudes are formed and the way in which it influences the conduct of the public business.

We are failing, first, because for 20 years or longer we have tried to be reasonable on the terms of the opposition, in the belief that we could persuade the powerful if we only offered enough reason, data, evidence, and logic. We have quantified the decline of species, ecosystems, and now planetary systems in exhaustive detail. We bent over backward to accommodate the style and intellectual predilections of self-described "conservatives" and those for whom the economy is far more important than the environment, in the belief that politeness and good evidence stated in their terms would win the day.

Accordingly, we put the case for the earth and coming generations in the language of economics, science, and law.

With remarkably few exceptions we have been reasonable, erudite, clever, cautiously informative, and -- relative to the magnitude of the challenges before us -- ineffective. In short, we do science, write books, publish articles, develop professional societies, attend conferences, and converse learnedly. But they do politics, take over the courts,[5] control the media, and manipulate the fears and resentments endemic to a rapidly changing society.

The movement to preserve a habitable Earth is failing, too, because it is fractured into different factions, groups, and arcane philosophies. In this respect it has come to resemble the nineteenth century European socialist movement, which became bitterly divided into warring factions, each more eager to be right than right and effective. When the world was finally ready for better ideas about how to decently organize industrial society, that movement delivered Bolshevism, and the rest, as they say, is history. The left historically has exhausted itself in bloody internecine quarrels, the strategy, as David Brower once described it, of drawing the wagons into a circle and shooting inward. The right generally suffers no such fracturing, in large part because their agenda is formed around less complicated aims having to do with pecuniary advantage.

Further, I think Jack Turner is right in saying that we are failing because all too often we are complacent and lack passion. "We are," in his words, "a nation of environmental cowards... willing to accept substitutes, imitations, semblances, and fakes -- a diminished wild. We accept abstract information in place of p