"The death of environmentalism"

[ringer]

Good article in our paper today on the credibility of environmentalism that applies to this site. Based on an essay by two environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. Said that the fundamental problem is that environmental groups are alarmists with an awful track record. They have lost credibility with the public.

"The U.S. environmental movement is unable to win even it's top priorities, even though it has the advantage of mostly being right. "Some do great work, but others can be the left's equivalent of neocons; brimming with moral clarity and ideological zeal but empty of nuance". In the 1970s, the environmental movement was convinced that the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the Central Arctic caribou herd. Since then, the herd has quintupled".

"The record should teach environmentalists some humility". The problems are real, but so is the uncertainty. "The environtalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, for example, but blocking all spraying in the Third World has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths". "There are many sensible environmentalists, but overzealous ones have tarred the entire field".

It seems to me that some of the name calling and rhetoric from a few on this board fits right in and tends to turn away reasonable people with a concern for the environment. JMO.

 

[ELKCHSR]

You are right on the money ringer

There are no pre-requisites for being an environmentalist except that you have a touchy feely attitude and your heart strings are attached to your sleeve.

I dealt with so many of them that took only the most superficial things they saw on TV and intertwined their whole lives around some shallow tidbit of knowledge with no depth of the topic they were talking about and made huge issues out of it.

Of course it helped them in the short term to get things shut down or slowed down to a major crawl, but the pendulum is swinging back and I am afraid that most every thing a lot of these people did will be swept under the rug or forgotten about, even if it was a good idea, because they had taken that next step to the extreme and shoved it down peoples throats.
extreme instead of slow methodical steps that seem to stay around for a longer period.