Environmentalism in the reign of the neocons
There is a malaise among United States environmentalists. We remain proud of our past victories, and certainly hope to maintain these victories into the future. The Clean Air Act has dramatically reduced SO2 air pollution in the US, substantially decreasing respiratory problems and toxic smog. The elimination of lead from gasoline has saved thousands of children from mental impairment. Even today, environmentalists make progress on some issues: the amount of wild land protected from development steadily increases every year. Still, there’s a deep sense of fear about the future, a sense of powerlessness, like the environmental movement is being derailed by something far more powerful and fundamental than mere anti-environmentalism.
Within the US, the rise of the neo-conservatives to power in the Republican Party means that little progress has been made on any environmental issue since 1994. There seems to be a prevailing belief not that limited and well-run government is wise, but that all governmental action is inevitably flawed. As Grover Norquist put it, the goal is to get government small enough to “drown it in the bathtub.” The obvious corollary is that any government action to protect or conserve the environment. In the limit, this argument could be used to get rid of almost any law: land-use regulation, the Endangered Species Act, the prohibition against illegal dumping of toxic waste, whatever. What’s new here is the existence of an anti-government tendency in the Republican Party- that’s been around for decades- but the shift from a focus on efficient, limited government to a hatred of all government. And so, we environmentalists find out movement in the US derailed, for reasons that have very little to do with the environment itself and much to with the Republican Party’s masterful political strategy over the past few decades.
The most significant environmental problems are now global, not national: Global warming, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, and urbanization are all challenges of the highest order to civilization, and must be dealt with by the international system. And yet US environmentalists find ourselves impotent on this stage as well. The neo-conservative vision seems to be that America’s military and economic power must never be limited by anything, anytime. The clear corollary for the environment is that no environmental treaty should constrain US activities, ever. This is why we can’t sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, or the Kyoto Protocol, or anything else- to sign would be to admit that there was something worthwhile about international governance. Again, there has always been a streak of isolationism in the Republican Party, but in its new form the idea is taken much further: the US is a new empire, and should act like one. And so again, we environmentalists fin the US simply absent from all the international environmental activity, for reasons that have little to do with the CBD or any other treaty, and a lot to do with the invasion of Iraq and the US opposition to the International Criminal Court. What, then, is an environmental scientist like myself to do? All the issues on which I could provide useful scientific input are non-issues, taken off the table, and in truth I feel increasingly useless. I can keep doing my science, but it doesn’t matter one damn bit as long as these larger political tenets of neo-conservatism stay unchallenged.
