Environmental Justice from a Progressive
Faith-Based Perspective
From Death Comes the Soul
The New York Times called them two "little-known, earnest environmentalists in their 30's" and their "friends" in the environmental movement were often vitriolic, one calling them "Dockers-wearing pinheads." They offered little in the way of solutions, but their thesis generated a ground-storm of controversy and long-needed introspection.
And in many ways, they were right on target.
Critics and supporters alike called it "challenging," to say the least. With the thesis foretold in the subtitle, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus was published in the fall of 2004. The "death of environmentalism" is demonstrated by the fact that the environmental community has strikingly little to show for its efforts over the last fifteen or so years, and that environmental leaders both then and now are not articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis facing humanity.
Perhaps guilty of overstating their case a bit, the authors contended that "In their public campaigns, not one of America's environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards — proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political alliances the community needs to deal with the problem." As they put it,
Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power. When you look at the long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement's approach to problems and policies hasn't worked particularly well. And yet there is nothing about the behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our interviews with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a community are ready to think differently about our work.
What Shellenberger and Nordhaus proposed was to abolish the category of environmentalism and embrace a wider spectrum of liberal issues to release the power of progressivism. But cry "Unfair!" and complain as they did, detractors had little to offer in refuting their claims other than shrill denials, which ironically, probably helped strengthen the death thesis.
One response, however, did make a solid contribution. Written by a team of environmentalists, lawyers, and academics, and again foretelling the thesis in the subtitle, The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering Transformational Politics in the 21st Century argued that environmentalism and other progressive movements in the United States are not dead, but they are crippled by denial.
As the authors state, The Death of Environmentalism does an admirable job of starting a debate over how environmental organizations should change their strategies. But what we really need is a death of denial. Environmentalism, like poetry, has a soul deeper and more eternal than the one described by its examiners. It's a soul tied deeply to human rights and social justice, and this tie has been nurtured by the environmental justice and sustainability movements for the past twenty years. "We are writing," they said, "To explore this soul, to break the unwritten gag rule about race and class, and to examine the intermingled roots of social change movements. These roots, these rules, and this soul together hold the key to environmentalism's new life."
We agree. As the authors noted, the environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s as a way to reenergize the grassroots activism started by the Civil Rights Movement, offering a home for activists "who weren't comfortable separating their concern over the state of the planet from their concerns about social justice." But, some twenty years later, the mainstream environmental movement has been unable to engage those on the environmental justice side of things, not because of overt discrimination but because of differences in vision: "Many environmentalists of color admire the mainstream movement's goals, but they also know firsthand that social justice is routinely ignored in the mainstream movement's decision-making. Despite its limitations, environmentalism as we know it today wasn't just the marriage of liberalism and conservation. It was committed activists, engaged in struggle and riffing on every tool they could see around them. Like Elvis, the environmental movement had soul — and soul is one thing you can't kill.
The authors offered up a short list of solutions to restore the soul of environmentalism:
It includes the idea of community responsibility and what we owe our children. It includes the personal responsibility to vote and control our destiny politically, socially, and in our choices of whom to love. It includes how we carve up our land, and what residential apartheid is doing to our planet and our politics. It includes making "be all that you can be" a term attributable more to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen than to the U.S. Army. It includes a different definition of what it means to be rich on this earth and in the hereafter.
The conclusion to The Soul of Environmentalism deserves repeating in whole:
In its details, winning means having ideas that fight the big fights, raise the value of community, and build from small victories to dominant frames. Winning also means new actions, like investing at least 15% in deep change strategies, fostering new leadership that transcends boundaries, and building transformative alliances.
Writ large, the soul of environmentalism shares with the Civil Rights Movement and many others one central characteristic: empathy. Empathy is what makes us reach out when we see a wounded bird. It is what calls to us when a child suffers from poverty or asthma. It is how we know our children will miss the snow when the latitudes of climate change have passed us by.
Empathy is also the central component of every point in the short list of big solutions. It is a central component in moving our country away from destructive individualism and toward a regenerative idea of community. It is a big part of what winning means to progressives.
Finally, political empathy is an action, not an emotion. It is expressed in building coalitions, not in writing essays. It means seeking and speaking the truth, not denying one's troubled ancestry. Empathy is about whom you spend your days talking and walking with. It is how, in Martin Luther King's words, we reach the Mountaintop.
Infiltrating the Perfect Storm: The Re-Emergence of Faith
It has been said that faith-based communities no longer play a significant role in the environmental justice movement. And if the "death" and "soul" of environmentalism authors are correct, so, too, is the contention that faith no longer plays a significant role in environmental justice.
Part of the reason for the decline in faith-based interest in environmental justice is financial. In a time of dwindling attendance at mainstream churches and synagogues, dwindling resources have caused the elimination of or the significant deprioritization of many environmental justice ministry programs. Part of the reason is that other environmental issues not closely identified with environmental justice have taken center stage, primarily global warming and climate change. A third reason is that the movement has been a victim of its own strategy. Early leaders in the movement carefully decided to keep the movement a ground-up (as opposed to top-down) type of movement, with no national organizations or leaders in an attempt to differentiate it from the large national traditional environmental groups.
But just as the authors of The Soul of Environmentalism have urged a return to communitarian values and the overarching notion of empathy, the decline in faith-based interest in environmentalism need not and should not continue to be the case. Indeed, if the Soul authors are to be believed — and we, indeed, do believe them — it must not be the case.
It is not surprising that many of the leaders of the civil rights movement — Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and Al Sharpton, to name just a few — were or are ministers. Nor is it mere coincidence that many of the most prominent leaders of the political right — Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, again to name just a few — are ministers in their own right, or that it is they who are leading — often successfully — the movement against abortion and gay rights. But one would have to struggle to find religious leaders and clergy of the name-recognition of a King or a Jackson or a Falwell or a Robertson leading the support for environmental causes or many of the other ideas the Soul authors identify as needing the "big fight." For that, the progressives have had to rely largely on Hollywood or the music industry for enlightenment, and while it is viscerally pleasing to be associated with the likes of Bono or the latest movie star in their Prius sedan, the truth is that the great majority of people on this planet do not engage or rely on celebrity beyond the surface of their emotions or intellect.
Faith communities do reach deep, however, and they know a lot about the issues that both The Death of Environmentalism and The Soul of Environmentalism care about.