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The American environmental movement has been struggling for more than a year to digest the strong critique offered by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in their widely disseminated treatise "The Death of Environmentalism." Their essay accuses organized environmentalism of framing key issues in overly narrow terms, of failing to connect with everyday public concerns, and of inadequately responding to the challenges of conservative political interests. This article briefly summarizes the essay's key arguments, retraces some relevant history pertaining to the past decade of environmental policy making, and highlights some of the areas in which this work touches on topical issues within the environmental social sciences. The article ends with a brief overview of the other contributions that make up this symposium.
Keywords: American environmentalism; environmental movement; transition management; democratic expertise; public ecology; death of environmentalism
Newspaper obituaries occasionally report on a death that occurred several months, or even years, earlier. These belated announcements may raise fleeting suspicions about the timeliness of coverage, but there is ordinarily a plausible explanation for the lapse. The news may have taken time to filter back from a distant locale or a communication mishap among surviving family members may have impeded the prompt conveyance of public information. Whatever the specific reason, the point is that we are normally not surprised when formal declarations of death lag a distance behind the actual event.
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus's (hereafter S&N; 2004) widely disseminated essay "The Death of Environmentalism" could easily be interpreted as an instance of this phenomenon. Composed as a time bomb and released at the 2004 annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the authors' essential thesis is that environmentalism, as institutionally created, is little more than a special interest and its flagship organizations misguidedly pursue an overly narrow policy agenda. At the same time, conservative politicians, commentators, and think tanks have successfully managed to paint the environmental movement as perilously out of touch with common concerns and as a danger to the well-being of ordinary people. To back up their claims, S&N cite some provocative social survey data to underscore the extent to which environmental values have lost ground in the United States.
To reverse these trends, the essay argues that major environmental organizations must become the...