Does Environmentalism Have a Future?

There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary American environmentalism. On the one hand, its organizations are generally larger, stronger, better funded, and more knowledgeable than ever before. Membership has grown in recent years; there are now more than eight million dues-paying members of the major national organizations-- and many more in local and statewide organizations—compared to about two million in 1980. Moreover, polls consistently show very high levels of public support for environmental protection, levels that would be the envy of many progressive movements. And yet: environmentalists find themselves playing defense far more than offense, devoting time and resources to fighting proposals such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rather than forging new responses to crises such as climate change. Indeed, nothing that these large and expert organizations accomplished during the Clinton-Gore years—to say nothing of the present Bush years—compares to such landmark victories as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, which a much more inchoate movement won a generation ago. The same polls that regularly show high levels of public support also reveal this support to be quite shallow. The environment rarely rises to the upper levels of concern. This may help explain why, despite the gulf between George W. Bush’s and John Kerry’s policy proposals, environmental issues generated almost no attention during the presidential campaign.