I Care About the Environment. You Are an Environmentalist. We Are Not the Same.

By Alex Trembath

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir (Adobe)

In his latest for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney compares the Trump Administration’s environmental policies to the abundance movement’s critique of procedural sclerosis. Both, he suggests, are “anti-environmental.”

Mulvaney argues that environmental policymaking under Trump recalls the “Wise Use” movement, a tradition from the Reagan era that “viewed the natural world as a resource to be dominated.” But Mulvaney is not just concerned about Trump. He draws a direct connection from the President to “the self-proclaimed abundance movement popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.”

“The discourse of abundance adds fuel to DOGE’s fire,” he writes, “by putting the blame on government regulation and public lands restrictions.”

What are the specific anti-environmental things Mulvaney is worried about? The list is long and includes oil and gas drilling, terrestrial and seabed mining, timber clearing and other forestry projects, de-extinction, public lands sales, and renewable energy development.

To describe all these things as “blatantly anti-environmental” is to conflate quite a bit, a telltale sign that someone is excoriating, not explaining.

So allow me to explain.

On the Difference Between “Anti-Environmental” and “Anti-Environmentalism”

Mulvaney traces the idea of “wise use” of the environment back to Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt. But the idea that Americans might want to produce commodities from nature as well as protect it dates back at least to the arguments between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, and the “conservation vs. preservation” debates of the early 20th century.

Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, argued for the wholesale preservation of natural areas like the California Sierras, while Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), argued that “It is the duty of the Forest Service to see to it that the timber, water-powers, mines, and every other resource of the forests is used for the benefit of the people.” Their most famous dispute was over the flooding and damming of Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite’s sister valley, to provide municipal water for the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course, the Interior Department would go on to oversee the construction of the dam at Hetch Hetchy, while Yosemite was and remains protected from major development, suggesting that we can “conserve” some parts of the environment while “preserving” others.

Mulvaney ignores this long-standing divide within environmental policymaking, choosing instead to describe really all kinds of production as inherently “anti-environmental.”

I would offer a small but crucial correction. The activities Mulvaney describes are not "anti-environmental," but rather anti-environmentalist. “Environmental” is a neutral term broadly describing non-human nature. “Environmentalism” is an ideological movement.

And environmentalism is, indeed, just one of many philosophies for understanding the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. Mulvaney even admits this, at one point referring to “Wise Use” as “neo-environmental,” suggesting the existence of a plurality of environmental frameworks. A century ago the argument was between preservationists and conservationists. Today, at least according to Mulvaney, the argument is between environmentalism and abundance.

This is a distinction that I know many abundance advocates would rather elide. But I would encourage my allies in the abundance coalition to notice when folks like Mulvaney keep insisting that abundance and environmentalism are opposites. Because there really is a difference between simply caring about the environment and being an environmentalist.

Lithium Mines and Solar Panels and Dire Wolves, Oh My

Just consider all the things Mulvaney describes as “anti-environmental.”

He warns about the ecological and environmental justice dangers of mining lithium, uranium, and other geologic commodities, echoing longstanding environmentalist anxieties over mining. But mines occupy less than 1% of the Earth’s ice-free land, and the minerals they produce are only more and more important in the era of clean energy development and climate action. Would it be anti-environmental to use a trivial portion of the Earth’s landscapes to produce an abundance of clean energy? Not obviously so.

And what about that clean energy? Mulvaney takes a dig at the solar industry for “rebranding itself” under the moniker of energy dominance since Trump’s re-election, writing that “solar projects on public lands in the West tend to cause more environmental degradation and ecosystem impact than projects sited elsewhere.” Not in Mulvaney’s Back Yard, I guess.

Of course the mounting land-use disputes over solar and wind development are legion, and somewhat inevitable for technologies with such an inherently large land footprint. But it’s curious that in an article otherwise exercised over the environmental sins of the Trump Administration, Mulvaney actually takes Trump’s side here. Trump, after all, continues to push his Treasury and Interior Departments to erect as many bureaucratic obstacles as possible to solar and wind development. Does that make Trump pro-environmental, in Mulvaney’s understanding? He doesn’t exactly say.

Or consider the forests. Mulvaney warns about the Trump Administration’s orders to limit environmental review of timber harvesting, and for the USFS itself to increase timber production by 25 percent. Environmentalists have long cast timber producers as villains, neglecting the fact that agriculture, not logging, is the chief driver of deforestation. Indeed, timber is actually a case study of the absolute decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts—absolute global wood consumption peaked in the early 1990s, even as global populations have risen by over three billion people. More to the point, Mulvaney ignores that foresters now understand mechanical thinning of forests as essential to mitigating the megafire risk that has accumulated over a century of fire suppression. Today, the biggest opponents of responsible forest management come from the institutional environmental movement, who use laws like NEPA to obstruct forest management projects until wildfires burn down the forest anyway.

The list goes on. Mulvaney decries the recent de-extinction of the dire wolf, something I for one consider to be a remarkable victory for conservationists. He says that harvesting seafloor nodules could be an “environmental disaster,” while research suggests that seafloors are less biotically sensitive ecosystems than those on the land.

What counts as pro-environmentally friendly in all of these cases is deeply contested, and depends on which environments we’re talking about, and what the benefits are to the local and global commons. While Muir wanted to protect Hetch Hetchy Valley, Pinchot wanted to consolidate reservoir construction in one geography while minimizing it elsewhere. While environmentalists like Mulvaney describe all technological development in conspiratorial terms, we ecomodernists and abundance advocates understand that technological innovation and decoupling can actually strengthen the protection of the natural world.

So if you want to see more solar energy, critical minerals production, responsible forest management, and de-extinct species, you might not be anti-environmental, but you may be anti-environmentalist. And that’s not a bad thing.