From Apocalypse to Way of Life

Environmental Crisis in the American Century

Frederick Buell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135953133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

From Apocalypse to Way of Life is a comprehensive and in depth survey of environmental crisis as it has been understood for the last four decades. Buell recounts the growing number of ecological and social problems critical for the environment, and the impact that the growing experience with, and understanding of, them has had on American politics, society and culture.

Part I
Contesting Crisis

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Denial

Every country had its companies lost in skepticism about climate change. But in the USA the scale of the collective denial was unique. There was something primitive, even frightening about it

Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War

Changed my view of the world, very enlightening. I believed most of the environmentalist agenda before I read this book without any critical thinking [sic]. This book has converted me from a worry wart about the environment to much optimism about the world’s future…. I highly recommend it. The logic of it makes so much sense.

—Comments by “a reader” of Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2, posted on Amazon.com, August 2, 1997

Something happened to strip environmental crisis of what seemed in the 1970s to be its self-evident inevitability. Something happened to allow environmentalism’s antagonists to stigmatize its erstwhile stewards as unstable alarmists and bad-faith prophets—and to call their warnings at best hysterical, at worst crafted lies. Indeed, something happened to allow some even to question (without appearing ridiculous) the apparently commonsensical assumption that environmentalists were the environment’s best stewards.

The most important explanation for these events isn’t hard to find. In reaction to the decade of crisis, a strong and enormously successful antienvironmental disinformation industry sprang up. It was so successful that it helped midwife a new phase in the history of U.S. environmental politics, one in which an abundance of environmental concern was nearly blocked by an equal abundance of antienvironmental contestation. Prophets rushing into the public space bearing environmental warnings like lanterns held high found themselves suddenly in a very crowded square, one now jammed with antienvironmental spokespeople also waving lanterns. If formerly too little information had hampered environmental activism, now too much information achieved the same end. According to Samuel Hays, who carefully chronicled American environmental politics between 1955 and 1985, the public drive for environmental change had been “neutralized” by the 1980s, blocked by an increasingly organized and elaborate corporate and conservative opposition.¹

Despite scientific evidence and even, in a number of cases, virtual scientific consensus to the contrary, issue after issue was contested. The ozone hole was denied and trivialized, food and population crises were debunked, and global warming was hotly denied, doubted, and dismissed as unproven. Even the most sacred of environmental cows was vigorously attacked: voices were even raised in defense of DDT, arguing that Carson-inspired hysteria eliminated a chemical essential to preserving public health from diseases like malaria.

Environmentalists, in turn, were stigmatized as extremists. Even to mention environmental crisis meant being called “Chicken Little,” or “doomster” or “doomsayer.” Ronald Bailey, in his book Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Eco-logical Apocalypse, went for this particular jugular with even more ferocity than did his predecessor and model, Julian Simon. Bailey put a different spin from Thomas Disch’s on the filiation of environmental crisis from fear of nuclear apocalypse. “Modern ecological millenarians, impatient with waiting for the flash of thermonuclear doom, now claim there is a ‘global environmental crisis’ threatening not just humanity, but all life on earth.”² Anything but respectable scientists or responsible citizens, environmentalists were both pathological fanatics (they were contemporary millenarians) and ill-motivated manipulators of the innocent public. Bailey thus coined a new term for them. They were “apocalypse abusers”—a disreputable group that presumably used and misused apocalypse like others did alcohol or dangerous drugs.

Environmentalists were also entirely wrong, Bailey asserted. Along with making ad hominem attacks, he proceeded to marshal supposedly scientific evidence to show how wrong environmentalists were. In doing so, Bailey joined a large and surprisingly well-organized movement of such writers. For, along with sneering at environmentalists, crisis debunkers began the “counterscience” movement—a movement devoted to countering the findings of environmental science with the creation of a body of antienvironmental science. It grew so galling and influential that one of its targets, Paul Ehrlich, in collaboration with his wife Anne, sought to answer it in a book significantly entitled The Betrayal of Science and Reason; and environmental scientists and organizations generally recognized that they had to grow adept at quickly refuting disinformation as well as at researching issues and uncovering new information.³

Bailey’s book showed all the earmarks of the “counterscience” movement, as the Ehrlichs described it. Filled with an abundance of statistics and apparently well documented, its facts and statistics were nonetheless highly unreliable; more revealingly, it was threadbare when it came to documentation of respectable scientific sources. It clothed its nakedness instead with references to fellow counterscience writers, most of whom were not scientists but antienvironmental journalists, economists, and ideologues. Further, it was a book gestated not in peer-reviewed academia but in the hothouse of right-wing and conservative think tanks—those recently invented and well-funded institutions dedicated not (like previous think tanks) to objective research but to the dissemination of ideologically driven “knowledge.”

Along with being extremist and wrong, environmentalists weren’t even stewards of the environment any more. Instead, a rather different sort of person was. The list of “real” environmental stewards came to include not only specific corporations—ones that claimed to be green in products and processes—but also, astonishingly, free-market capitalists and even grassroots antienvironmental activists. If you asked, in the wake of the 1970s, who was looking out for the environment, everyone’s hands went up —including those of the antienvironmental right and the nation’s most polluting corporations. And when the hands went up, it would be harder than ever before to tell who was who. For the crowd included many wolves in sheep’s clothing, folk with name tags reading “Global Climate Coalition” (an industry lobbying organization dedicated to sandbagging global-warming reforms and winner of the infamous Scorched Earth Award presented at Kyoto) or “National Wetlands Organization” (an organization of developers).⁴

All of this debunking and abuse took its toll on environmentalists. Crisis talk, surprisingly, became almost as much a problem for environmentalists as it was a weapon against environmental disregard. Thus Theodore Roszak, a writer with old commitments to the environment but also with a sharp eye for what was timely and popular, backed off from crisis talk as a real political neg ative for environmentalists. He did this even though he was angry about the “plain [sic] vicious…new antienvironmental counterattack” environmentalists were subjected to. He portrayed this uncommonly nasty attack feelingly, but then he replicated it strangely himself, asserting that environmentalists’ “habitual reliance on gloom, apocalyptic panic, and the psychology of shame takes a heavy toll in public confidence.”⁵ Having made this observation, Roszak let loose with a bashing of doomster environmentalism that might well have come from Bailey’s pen—an analysis of it as a neo-Puritan pathology—while proposing his own solution, a “new psychological sensitivity” that could dip down into “the passion and longing that underlie many of our culture’s seemingly thoughtless ecological habits.”⁶ Perhaps Roszak suffered from a subtle version of the Stockholm syndrome. But whatever the cause, Roszak’s aversion to the environmental politics of crisis as politically naïve only drove him to be still more politically naïve himself. He ended up recycling as fact an important aspect of the very conservative rhetoric of dismissal that he himself had just finished critiquing.

But conservative antienvironmental rhetoric was crafted from the start as part of a larger package. It cannot be discussed in isolation from the broader stream of right-wing political discourse. One cannot separate the antienvironmental rhetoric from rhetoric about society, culture, and the economy; for conservative antienvironmentalism in the 1980s was part of what was carefully made to seem a comprehensive movement in American political culture. I mean the new conservativism, or the right-wing, or Republican “revolution” as partisans called it; more critical observers described it as “authoritarian” or top-down “populism.” Emerging into daylight with the “Reagan Revolution,” it reached a new kind of high-water mark with the congressional “Republican Revolution” of 1994. It is important to remember just how dynamic this movement was, now that it has lost much of its angry-outsider populist edge and become, with George W.Bush’s presidency, less a movement than a main-stream, established, institutionalized political ideology.

The 1980s and nineties movement and the issues it encompassed showed all the earmarks of what was in fact a complexly compound creation. The movement was composed of a sometimes dissonant but always highly diverse set of partisans. It included mandarin intellectuals supported by conservative think tanks as well as members of angry-outsider populist groups organized often in top-down fashion and supported by expertise and aid from main-stream corporations and political organizations. It included, of course, those corporate networks and political organizations; it also folded in Christian fundamentalists and moral-majoritarians; football dads (as opposed to soccer moms); corporate libertarians and cyberlibertarians; local activists committed to a wide variety of issues, such as tax relief and withdrawing support from public schools; and talk-back radio-show hosts stirring up the likes of these about still further issues, such as the right to life and the scandalous dominance in U.S.public life of homosexuals and “hairy-legged” feminists. Right-to-life activists and extremists got in there too, and topping off the mix was the odd motorcycle gang and militia unit. The movement’s equally diversified portfolio of issues included education reform; free-market fundamentalism styled as economic revolution; advocacy of a “common culture” based on hostility to advocacy of diversity; hostility to big government; moral crusading (with a special preference for the unborn); progun legislation; and virulent antienvironmentalism.

But the movement’s peculiar rhetorical genius was to unite these issues and factions under what seemed to be a single banner, to portray itself to others and (above all) to its own constituencies as a single “movement.” Arguably as diverse as the rainbow coalition, it managed to appear, at least for a time, as a single, dynamic movement of “the people.” To be sure, this collective unity frayed at times—the division between old-fashioned conservatives, the new far right, and the diminished Republican center could become a difficult abyss to negotiate politically. But during the 1980s and into the early 1990s it cohered sufficiently for the Reagan and Republican revolutions to seem indeed revolutionary, phases of a genuine social movement dedicated to bringing about sweeping political and ideological change. It seemed a movement of the people, not politics as usual.

By arguing that the conservative movement was carefully crafted and not simply spontaneous, I do not mean to conjure up some vast right-wing conspiracy. I mean instead to give its creation its proper due, as one of the major events of U.S. political and cultural life in the last three decades. And the very notion that its hodgepodge of constituencies and issues in fact cohered into a single, spontaneous movement was itself part of this strategic accomplishment. The antienvironmentalist Ron Arnold articulated the strategy best as it emerged with Ronald Reagan and matured (with growing pains) during the time of the first Bush administration: “Then I read People, Power, Change by Luther Gurlick and Virginia Hayne, and their analysis helped me to realize that in an activist society like ours the only way to defeat a social movement is with another social movement.”⁷ To defeat the legacies of left social move ments—from the New Deal to the racial, social, and environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s—the right started one of its own—a backfire to meet and counter an existing fire. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the conservatives had captured the “social movement” field so thoroughly that theirs seemed to be the new social movement, one that replaced the previous, left-oriented ones and appropriated their mantle of future-oriented, visionary outsider-hood with a mission.

But intentionality alone, no matter how well funded, could not have launched a social movement. Enabling conditions needed to be in place, and indeed they were. Two historical factors in particular made this radical transformation of American political culture possible at the end of the 1970s. The first was a sense that the United States had suddenly entered a rapid decline—that the nation was rapidly losing pride and position externally and affluence and stability internally. This decline seemed to show up in a wide variety of areas: in global power and prestige; in global economic strength; in internal economic strength; in social stability and morality; in cultural unity and educational excellence. The second historical factor was similar: the older social movements—the ideologies and groups that had shaped policy in these areas for some time—had institutionalized themselves and aged. In the face of this new sense of crisis, many of the solutions proposed by the existing liberal-left social movements seemed no longer to be solutions but could be made to seem part of the problem.

This double whammy occurred across a wide spectrum of economic, cultural, social, and environmental fronts. Many in the United States came to feel that the nation was both slipping from its position of global centrality and was in disarray at home: the “American Century” was ending almost as it had begun, and the United States was in danger of slipping into Third World status. Michael Omi and Howard Winant tallied up many of these anxieties. The United States “suffered the humiliating ‘losses’ of Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iran in the 1970s”; since the oil crisis in particular, it seemed that the United States “was being ‘held for ransom’ by the OPEC nations, which controlled ‘our’ vital energy resources.” Soon slippage from the top of the economic global heap became a chief preoccupation: “once the world’s creditor, [the United States became] its chief debtor; once the chief exporter of manufactured goods, it was now their main importer.”⁸

This loss of power was as much fretted about as an internal economic decline as a decline in international power. Along with the oil crisis, “infla tion…surged to unprecedented levels,” and the “problem of ‘stagflation,’ which Keynesian policies were helpless to overcome, came to seem a permanent feature of U.S. economic life.”⁹ Thus the New Deal legacy came to be seen as another problem, not the solution: “the state was unable to act as its New Deal lineage obliged it to do, to solve or at least ameliorate economic problems…. Thus arose the fiscal crisis of the state.” This was a crisis that “manifested itself on local, state, and national levels. The near bankruptcy of major cities, the property tax revolt (exemplified by California’s Proposition 13 tax-cutting initiative), and the soaring federal deficit provided further fuel for the crisis and growing antistatist sentiment.”¹⁰ All of this sense of disarray was ratcheted into still higher gear when, by the 1980s, Japan seemed to be replacing the United States as the world’s economic power, and the United States seemed to be slipping into a Third World identity. U.S. executives hastened to ponder The Art of War and Japanese corporate organizational techniques; a wider spectrum of folk—even many of those facing job cuts and downsizings—felt that the rhetoric of slippage and the assignment of blame for that slippage to the state (i.e., big government) was anything but exaggerated.

Next, economic crisis seemed to be coupled with social and cultural crisis. Thanks to continuing reactions against the “tide of radical collectivism” unleashed in the late 1960s by race riots and cultural nationalism (pioneered by the Black Power movement), attempts to foster cultural diversity in school curricula and through affirmative action seemed to some (mostly but not exclusively conservative whites) a problem rather than a solution. Once again, old social gains could be styled as new problems, and the New Right came to argue that:

During the 1960s and 1970s, the state was recklessly allowed to expand and intervene in every aspect of social life; it came to dictate social policy with disastrous results. In particular, it acceded to racial minority demands and gave minorities privileged access to jobs and social services. Ed Davis, a new right cult figure and former Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, put it this way: “I always felt that the government really was out to force me to hire 4-foot-11 transvestite morons”¹¹

As with post-New Deal domestic economics and with racial politics, so with environmentalism; it too aged as a social movement and came to be seen as part of the problem. As the decade of environmental crisis unfolded, environmentalism seemed to score many gains. The 1970s saw “an extraordinary range of legislative initiatives, regulatory activities, and court action,” including the passage of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA), the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (establishing Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA), 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Resource Recovery Act, the 1972 Water Pollution Control Act, the 1972 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, and the 1980 Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (better known as Superfund).¹²

These very gains, however, became the source of new problems; environmental crisis began to turn, paradoxically, into the crisis of environmentalism. As a consequence of gaining power, the environmental movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s became increasingly professionalized and less like a populist movement. Mainstream natural environmental organizations (such as “Big Ten,” a group of national environmental organizations consolidated in the early 1980s to oppose Reagan-era changes) identified themselves with the Washington policy process and lost touch with grassroots activism. For its part, grassroots activism, in the form of impatient, direct-action-oriented groups like Earth First! and passionately local antidevelopment, environmental justice, and antitoxics organizations, saw mainstream environmentalism as a problem, not an ally. As the national organizations grew in terms of staff and financial resources, they became absorbed, Robert Gottlieb notes:

by the operation and maintenance of the policy system itself. A revolving door between staff positions in the mainstream groups and government and industry positions cemented those connections, while the groups’ advocacy role, focused especially in terms of crucial lobbying and litigation functions, became more and more centered on keeping the system intact.¹³

At the same time as its successes were distancing the environmental movement from its recent radical past and its grassroots base, these successes meant increased vulnerability to attacks by opponents. Environmentalists’ gains could be made to seem to the larger public as problems, not solutions. What once seemed like creative tools to protect the environment—such as the use of the Endangered Species Act to protect whole areas and ecosystems from development—were used to make environmental protection appear wrongheaded or outrageous. When a lowly species like the snail darter threatened to stop a huge dam project, environmental protectionism was presented as extremist; the issue became still more incendiary when the spotted owl threat ened both the timber industry and local property owners desirous of tu...