Bill Berkowitz
OAKLAND, USA, May 24 (IPS) - Mainstream U.S. environmental groups, injured by
political defeats, public indifference and budget cuts, are weighing alliances
with neo-conservatives -- improbable rightwing bedfellows in the struggle to
rein in global warming who want to reduce U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. In
the process, some greens are reconsidering their longstanding opposition to
nuclear power.
This realignment comes at a time when environmental-friendly initiatives of the
administration of former U.S. President Bill Clinton have been reversed,
enforcement of environmental regulations has been stymied, and privatisation of
U.S. public lands is proceeding apace.
Further, the administration of President George W. Bush appears to have seized
the initiative in the environmental debate with such slogans as ''common sense
environmentalism'', ''Healthy Forests'', and ''Clear Skies'' to describe its key
positions and programmes.
''The Death of Environmentalism,'' written by political pollster Ted Nordhaus
and public relations consultant Michael Shellenberger and originally released at
an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association of U.S.
philanthropies that support green causes, credited the movement with a number of
successes. These included enactment of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air
and Clean Waters Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.
But the assessment said there was ''strikingly little to show'' for the
''hundreds of millions of dollars poured into combating global warming,''
charged the movement with being out of touch with the public, and challenged it
to ''rethink everything'' -- alliances, strategies, positions, messages -- and
come up with new, imaginative and public-friendly ways to solve the global
warming crisis.
And for all their earlier successes, recent times have brought budget cuts,
public indifference, and a string of political defeats. These include
legislation opening up parts of the Alaska wilderness to oil exploration and
rollbacks on environmental regulations.
All of which has caused consternation.
Several leading environmentalists, including Fred Krupp, executive director of
Environmental Defence, Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources
Institute, and James Gustave Speth, dean of Yale University's school of forestry
and environmental studies, are encouraging research into the economic, safety
and security, waste storage, and proliferation issues surrounding nuclear power.
In a piece published this month's issue of the journal Technology Review,
entitled ''Environmental Heresies,'' Stewart Brand, the longtime
environmentalist who founded the ''Whole Earth Catalogue -- a telephone
directory-type consumer guide to the goods and services needed to forge an
alternative lifestyle -- argued that perhaps the only solution to global
warming, a reality the Bush administration has not openly embraced, is nuclear
power.
Earlier in the year, Robert Bryce, the author of ''Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and
the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate'', reported in the online publication
Slate on a developing alliance between greens and neo-conservatives. Former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney,
president of the ultra-right Centre for Security Policy, two big-time advocates
for President Bush's war with Iraq, enthusiastically advocate fuel-efficient
vehicles as a way of reducing dependence on Middle East oil.
The coupling of such top ''neo-cons'' -- the architects of the Iraq war -- with
environmentalists -- many of whom have voiced concern about the devastating
effects the war has had on the Iraqi environment -- materialised sometime late
last year when they backed a proposal from the Institute for the Analysis of
Global Security, a Washington-based think tank tracking energy and security
issues. The neo-cons are ''going green for geopolitical reasons, not
environmental ones,'' Bryce concluded.
A bill that would give ''significant financial incentives for the development of
three new nuclear technologies,'' sponsored by Arizona Republican Senator John
McCain and Connecticut Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman is being circulated
in draft form.
''As the world approaches peak oil and a future of rapidly escalating energy
costs, increasing support for nuclear power amongst some environmentalists was
predictable,'' Scott Silver, executive director of the Oregon-based grassroots
environmental group Wild Wilderness, said in an interview.
''The unwritten mission of many organisations is 'sustainable growth' which
translates into supporting economic growth while minimising associated
ecological damage,'' Silver told IPS. ''In keeping with this mission, the fight
against global warming will not be waged by attempting to decrease the
ecological footprint of man or by reducing the demands we put upon this planet,
but by growth.
''By tightly framing the issue in terms of 'too much carbon dioxide', nuclear
power becomes an obvious solution,'' Silver added. ''For industry and the
neo-cons, the problem has nothing to do with climate. For the neo-cons, the
problem is one of sustaining economic growth during a period of energy
scarcity.''
In a May 16 Pacific News Service commentary entitled ''Why I Am Not an
Environmentalist,'' Orson Aguilar brought the contentious issue of ''economic
development'' to the table.
Aguilar, associate executive director of The Greenlining Institute, which works
to persuade banks and other financial institutions to invest in low-income and
minority communities, especially in inner cities, said that for far too long,
top-tier environmental groups neglected urban concerns.
Aguilar, who grew up in East Los Angeles, said that his community worried more
about ''the lack of good housing and jobs, scraping together money for
groceries, failing schools and all-too-common police brutality,'' than about
''air pollution'' or ''the smells coming from the incinerator directly south of
our housing complex.''
Environmentalists, Aguilar charged, were preoccupied with ''preserving places
most of us will never see.'' When the movement finally became conscious of the
toxic nightmare plaguing the inner cities in America, he added, it ''avoided
addressing my community's desperate need for economic development.''
In the late 1990s, Aguilar's organisation was deeply involved in trying secure
legislation aimed at making it easier to revitalise inner city ''brownfields,''
or polluted plots of land. They met opposition from major environmental groups
including the Sierra Club, he recalled.
By contrast, the idea of making it easier to revitalise brownfields had been
kicking around at right-wing think tanks for several years, and it became a
central theme of Bush's environmental agenda --albeit primarily because it meant
enabling corporations to sidestep environmental regulations.
So, Aguilar said, he is not dismayed by the ''death of environmentalism''; he
sees it as an opportunity: ''While there are many who feel sadness and anger
that environmentalism is dead, I am optimistic that in dying, environmentalism
might give birth to a new politics that offers a better future to both my
community and the planet. Those environmentalists who are ready to evolve will
find many new allies like me ready to join them in building a new and more
expansive movement on the other side.''
Silver was not so quick to rhapsodise. This campaign ''appears to have been
invented for the purpose of killing off traditional, naturally-evolved,
grassroots-based environmentalism and replacing it with a synthetic,
pro-development, focus-group tested collaborative partnership between 'new
environmentalists,' industry, and those who hope to collect crumbs thrown off
from unfettered growth,'' he said. (END/2005)
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