I wanted to send a follow up post this week to share the text of Steve Hayward's talk looking back on the death of Environmentalism from a conservative perspective.
By Steve F. Hayward
Remarks prepared for Breakthrough Dialogues
Cavallo Point
June 21, 2024
In thinking about a theme around which I could organize a short retrospective on how to think about the original “Death of Environmentalism” essay, I first considered dilating Joseph Campbell’s general idea of death and rebirth from his magisterial series The Masks of God, because I think that great author can help us break free of taking the essay’s use of “death” too literally and purely politically.
But instead I hit upon an old book I recently re-read for another purpose: historian George Dangerfield’s classic work from 1935, The Strange Death of Liberal England, which sought to explain how Britain’s Liberal Party went from a commanding position in British politics to oblivion in the space of about five years. Anticipating the much-deserved wipe out of the British Tory Party in the general election next month gave me a feeling of déjà vu all over again, and thus the usefulness of Dangerfield’s great narrative of political suicide.
Yet the strange thing about The Strange Death of Liberal England is that Dangerfield never really did get around to offering a coherent or detailed explanation, though it is possible to draw some parallels between the rich narrative Dangerfield laid out, and the argument and action of The Death of Environmentalism and its sequels.
But Dangerfield’s colorful prose offers some useful hints: “The burden of Liberalism grew more and more irksome; it began to give out a dismal, rattling sound; it was just as if some unfortunate miracle had been performed upon its contents, turning them into nothing more that bits of old iron, fragments of intimate crockery, and other relics of a domestic past… [The Liberal Party] died. . . from disillusion over the inefficacy of the word 'Reform.'" Keep in mind that the old Liberal Party was a small-p “progressive” party that believed in modern liberal ideas like the welfare state, gradual colonial freedom, wider political participation (even from women!), and so forth.
Right away we can pause and ponder the implications of the word “reform” in our context. More than 40 years ago the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote that “It is entirely possible that when the history of the 20th century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism.” He added, “Environmentalism is now well on its way to becoming the third great wave of redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity and the second modern socialism.”
This poses a threshold question: is environmentalism a reform movement, or a redemptive movement? The answer is Yes. My own way of putting it is that environmentalism has always had two sides, which I call Romance and Sludge. The “sludge” side is easy to make out: it involves all of the discrete political and policy questions such as tailpipe standards and how to decarbonize energy. What I call the “Romance” side of environmentalism is what makes it a social movement and not just a reform movement: it’s philosophical or even metaphysical challenge about the meaning and status of nature. When I call it “romantic” I do not mean it any pejorative way, as references to romanticism sometimes do. Indeed this aspect of environmentalism is its most compelling aspect, even if I have some major criticisms of it.
It is the inability to resolve these two disparate aspects that was behind the Death of Environmentalism, and if you review the text of Death of Environmentalism I think you can see a rough parallel with The Strange Death of Liberal England: the expression of frustration that despite its early glittering successes such as the landmark statutes of the 1970s, the creation of the EPA, its substantial financial resources and organizational capacities built up steadily over the previous two generations, environmentalism seemed to have stalled out, most conspicuously on the central issue of our time—climate change. The mode of incremental reform through technical improvements, government environmental rulemaking, and litigation was no longer sufficient to the nature and scale of the problem, and a breakthrough—allusion intended here—seems out of reach.
What you take away from Dangerfield’s account of the Liberal Party’s agony is that it was simply overmatched by the rapidly growing crosscurrents of the trade union movement, the Suffragette movement, the Irish question once again on the brink of civil war, and the coming of the Great War—problems that none of the Liberal Party’s successors could master any better. Welcome to the 20th century. (The British suffragettes, incidentally, were always more violent and radical than American suffragettes. Dangerfield narrates: “Women began chaining themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace. A portrait of the King in the Scottish Royal Academy was badly damaged. . . the slashing of the Rokeby Venus had been followed by the mutilation of Sargent’s portrait of Henry James.” Sounds pretty familiar just now.)
I think it is fair to say that the environmental movement has become overmatched by climate change. Or, as I sometimes put it in a critical mood, climate change has eaten environmentalism alive.
I have to begin a more complete analysis with noting a sublime irony of this remembrance. I vividly recall the moment in the fall of 2004 when a conservative philanthropist of my acquaintance, whose sincere interest in the environment was a source of frustration since there were so few serious engagements with the issue by conservatives, told me he was thinking of attending the upcoming annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association in Hawaii. “Complete waste of time!”, I said. It would be utterly conventional, chiefly left-leaning, and drearily uniform in its range of views and possibilities. I had just then had an extremely acrimonious and unpleasant interaction with the Society of Environmental Journalists, who had invited me and then uninvited me to their annual meeting, offering yet another demonstration for my thesis that most environmental journalists are mere stenographers for environmental activism.
Well, morningafterwise I read the “Death of Environmentalism” essay and presentation by Ted and Michael, and thought, I did not see this coming! This is certainly unexpected.
Although I wasn’t much taken with the main recommendations of Death of Environmentalism—integrating environmentalism within a broader spectrum of progressive politics, and coalescing around the nascent Apollo Project (not to mention the fixation with the “far right,” as I thought, “Hey wait a minute! I resemble that remark!”)—I was much impressed with the spirit of self-criticism that animated the piece.
There was, first of all, the quality of the writing, and clear writing usually indicates clarity of thought. There was not a hint of cliché anywhere in the essay. One of the most tiresome aspects of our age is how just about every faction or cause, at every point of the ideological spectrum, lapses into letting clichés do their thinking for them, which means that thinking actually ceases to occur. It might be a bigger problem on the right today—what does “make America great again” mean in concrete terms? The progressive cliché that bothers me the most is “the side of History,” which is lazy, dime-store Hegelianism. I’ve always understood Hegel’s historicism to be a secular version of Christian divine providence, but Christian divine providence is fundamentally mysterious, inaccessible to human reason and unchangeable by human will. The progressive “side of History” turns all of this on its head, and sanctifies a benevolent human will that has been too often falsified by events. History just doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.
In any case, nothing is more captivating or moving to me than to see real thinking taking place, even if I may disagree with it. I did have the conscious thought—the Death of Environmentalism is interesting; let’s see where this goes.
Second, it began to dawn on me that this burst of self-criticism was not a flash in the pan when I took in especially the angry response of the person I always referred to as Pope Carl, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club. Carl Pope’s response was not longer than the original essay, but it seemed like it, as its essence could be reduced to single sentence (or primal scream): Ted and Michael had committed an act of lese majeste against their betters. The subtext here did not require esoteric reading skills: who are these punks?
But beyond the dispute about certain facts and characterizations of the environmental movement, there was an important point of agreement, though not necessarily grasped in its fullness—namely, that climate change was not simply a conventional air pollution problem writ large, to be addressed with the existing policy architecture. That’s not quite how the original essay or its critics put it, but it was about this time that certain thinkers—here I have in mind Steve Rayner and Gwin Pryns—began describing climate change as a “wicked problem,” a term very familiar to faithful attendees of these Dialogues. Welcome to the 21st century.
When the full-length book came out three years later, I reviewed it very favorably in National Review, William F. Buckley’s flagship magazine of the conservative movement. Ted and Michael did not see that coming! (I should add, though, that if anyone ever did a content analysis of conservative periodicals over the last couple generations, they would likely find that National Review was the most favorable to environmentalism. Recall in particular a cover story from the late 1970s defending the Endangered Species Act, by James Buckley, Bill’s brother, who was one of the co-sponsors of the ESA during his single term in the Senate. Worth mentioning also that Barry Goldwater, at the time of his presidential run in 1964, was a member of the Sierra Club.)
That review led finally to meeting Ted and Michael, and then to a very hands-on collaboration on a major project in 2010—the “Post-Partisan Power” report, and I must tell you that it was one of the most fruitful and rewarding projects in my long career in public policy. I took some heat for it from conservative friends, though not nearly as much as when I wrote, in the brand-new Breakthrough Journal in 2011, that conservatives ought to consider supporting higher taxes.
Needless to say there isn’t time to get into any of the ways the policy architecture of climate change has shifted in these last 20 years, and I expect will continue to shift further. (The recent declaration of Secretary Granholm that we need to triple our nuclear power output, and consider reopening nuclear plants that we have shut down over the last decade, ought to be an eight-point earthquake on the energy-environment Richter scale if she—and European leaders who have made similar noises in recent months—follow through on it. Stay tuned.)
I want to draw to a close instead by looking closer at one of the sentences from Death of Environmentalism that may have rankled critics the most: “Today environmentalism is just another special interest.” This is actually a more searing criticism than any of the other contentions such as that environmentalists failed to question their assumptions and that a lot of environmental activism and policy tools were obsolete or outdated.
Ted and Michael were right to suggest that becoming perceived by the larger public as yet another special interest group is damaging to any social or reform movement. Becoming regarded just another special interest in American politics means that you have surrendered some of the moral authority or moral capital that propelled your rise in the first place.
But Ted and Michael’s critics have a strong rejoinder, which is that single-mindedness is an essential, necessary trait for all social movements. All “special interest” groups have in common a narrow single-mindedness that resists considering tradeoffs and making large compromises. That is not necessarily a bar to political or policy success. Just look at the NRA, currently in bankruptcy and mired in scandal, yet wildly successful in its agenda over the last 40 years—although in some cases this has been in spite of the NRA, not because of it, and therein lies a lesson—and perhaps a useful case study for environmentalists to conduct.
But social movements tend to peter out when one of two things happen and sometimes both: when they achieve their main objectives, or when they become regarded as a special interest group with diminished claim of general moral authority. Sometimes this happens concurrently. There is no suffragette movement any more; the 19th Amendment ended it, and modern feminism is only a partial successor.
There is no more temperance movement, for after a century of persistent agitation it achieved its aim with the 20th Amendment, which we quickly decided was a great mistake. The Temperance movement died, and its erstwhile successor, the war on drugs, suffers some of the same difficulties as the environmental crusade on climate change. I’ve never cared for the “addiction to fossil fuels” language (we’re “addicted” to air and food, too), though in this analogy it is apt.
Will Rogers remarked in the 1920s that, “Well, at least Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.” My suspicion is that some day down the road, we may well update this line with the observation that, “Well, at least Net-Zero is better than no fossil fuels at all.” That’s if we still use the term “Net-Zero,” and I think it may well suffer the same decline as “sustainable development,” and we will have lots of post-mortems about policy mistakes made along the way.
This is meant as a shorthand summary for the deeper meaning of the Death of Environmentalism, and the rich and detailed discussions that have taken place here at the Breakthrough Dialogues for more than a decade.
It is impossible to summarize all the main themes involved here, let alone offer a thumbnail of a conservative perspective on the scene, so let me attempt to offer one by way of highlighting what I call the Tragedy or Dilemma of Al Gore. One of the objectives of the Breakthrough Dialogues from the beginning is to “achieve disagreement”—a phrase first originated I think by the forgotten Jesuit philosopher John Courtney Murray. The case of Gore is a great window for understanding basic conservative hesitation, if not opposition, to much of environmentalism. And it boils down to the sharply different theories of change between left and right. These differences cannot be harmonized, but it might be useful if they are better understood.
The dilemma or tragedy of Al Gore can be summarized thus: he employed a lot of radical language about the environment, as far back as his book Earth in the Balance. Gore’s dilemma or tragedy has been widely noted, even if not put in these terms: as an office holder, and candidate for president, his radical rhetoric disappeared, and he was an utterly conventional politician. He has often been criticized for this from the left, and he has acknowledged some regrets on this point.
President Biden and lot of liberals today never cease reminding us that climate change is a crisis, and perhaps the greatest existential challenge to humanity ever. In Earth in the Balance, Gore’s capacious description of the wider problem eventually lands on the need for a “wrenching transformation” to save civilization. If liberal political figures mean this literally, then, faced with the need for someone to lead a wrenching transformation, the cause needed its Lincoln, to make climate the centerpiece of American politics. Out of office, Gore sounds like the climate equivalent of William Lloyd Garrison, impatient with normal politics and compromise. In office or as a candidate, Gore turned out to be a pale imitation of Stephen Douglas. Climate hawks are right to be disappointed. But perhaps Gore was right in that calculation, even as Lincoln trimmed in vital respects on the great question of slavery, whose initial eradication indeed required a wrenching transformation, which in this case is a euphemism for civil war.
It is just here that conservatives draw short: most “wrenching transformations” (better understood as revolutions) are disastrous. Conservatives are above all suspicious of utopian idealism. The best one sentence summary of this disposition comes from the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott: “The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.” Hence the affinity for Burke’s anti-revolutionary outlook, though keep in mind he was a reform-minded Whig, not at all opposed to change, as he is often mistakenly characterized.
The conservative theory change is best stated by the economist Thomas Sowell: sustainable long-term change comes not through grand visionary designs or “wrenching transformations,” but rather from “continuously variable incremental decisions.” Now there’s a slogan to stir the soul and put on a bumper sticker! “I stand for ‘continuously variable incremental decisions’! Let’s march!” No, no one is ever going to get excited by that banner, which is why conservatives will never be recognizable allies to most environmentalists.
But I think that is a description of what is actually happening with climate change action, and more broadly why I have been saying conservatives can embrace Ecomodernism with little hesitation. And this is why I conclude that the Death of Environmentalism can legitimately claim to anticipated the changes of the last 20 years, and to have played a significant part in it, especially catalyzing “ecomodernism,” but also its challenger, “Degrowth.” Competition in ideas is a good thing. None of this was specifically anticipated in the original essay, which is why my one sentence summary of its legacy is that while written in the subjunctive mood of advocacy, it holds up better as a work of prophecy—a general hint of things to come.
And so I end up repairing to Joseph Campbell’s work on the mythology of death and rebirth cycles. The Death of Environmentalism is something to be embraced and celebrated, because it will always be followed by rebirth.
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I think “environmentalism’s” problem with climate change is the fear of transparently asking the public for a bit of sacrifice. And part of the fear is that environmentalists do not realize how small the sacrifice would be if the instrument were taxation of net CO2 emissions. Mainly from self-delusion (not malice) they have exaggerated the costs of climate change and this has misled them to exaggerate the efforts to avert the ill effects and in turn led then to try to hide even the minimum costs, and much more the non-minimum costs. When costs can no longer be hidden, progress stops.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." - Eric Hoffer in Temper of Our Time.
Just look at all the groups benefiting from the purported "climate crisis"; each pushing their own agenda, many of which could never be instituted without scaring the citizens with a "crisis". A confluence of interedts.