Four Problems With the Environmental Movement

Wisconsin enviromentalists wouldn’t compromise, so the state’s premiere conservation program, the Stewardship Fund, will die this summer. It’s an old, sad story and it’s one reason that green policies, once widely popular and bipartisan, are now on the ropes.

Refusal to compromise is just one of four problems plaguing a movement I was once very much a part of. Let’s review all four.

The first ailment is catastrophization. Everything is an existential crisis. After a while, the public stops listening, or worse reacts against the angst. That’s a big reason there’s so much pushback against policies that fight the very real problem of human-caused climate change. A large part of the public’s just tired of hearing that this is the latest thing that’s going to end the world and worse, that it’s their lifestyle that’s the problem.

The worst example of this was detailed by center-right columnist Jonah Goldberg in his masterful (though too easy) takedown of Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s 1968 book, the Population Bomb, was widely read and completely bought into by the movement. So much so that, even today with every one of Ehrlich’s dire predictions disproven, most environmentalists still stubbornly adhere to the notion that disaster is just around the corner.

In fact, when he addressed a joint session of the Wisconsin Legislature in 2000, former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day and a man I otherwise respected, continued to hammer away at Ehrlich’s arguments, even though by then they had long been shown to be baseless. Ehrlich predicted mass starvation even in the developed world by the 1970’s and water rationing in the U.S. by 1974. He said that by 2000 England would not exist and life expectancy would be 50 years old. None of that happened. But in the environmental movement even unfounded pessimism dies hard.

The second ailment of the environmental movement is the failure to recognize its own successes. Since 1970 when Nelson started Earth Day, our air and water have become much cleaner, millions more acres of land have been protected for habitat protection and public outdoor recreation, and we have successfully addressed acid rain and deterioration of the ozone layer. Next up is climate change. Even there our consumption of fossil fuels is much lower than it was 20 years ago even though our economy is much bigger. But you never hear environmental leaders talk about any of those victories.

That may seem odd until you realize that environmental groups, like most nonprofits, don’t raise money based on success. They raise it by spreading fear. Nobody ever made a dime by claiming that the need for their job was now over. Instead, they want to create a sense of urgency so that your $100 is made to seem like the difference between the Garden of Eden and Dante’s Inferno. So, not only can they not talk about their own successes, but they need to make the next challenge sound more dire than the last one. (See catastrophization above.)

Third, there’s partisanship. The movement is now wholly owned by the Democratic Party. There are tons of examples, but let me offer two recent ones from Wisconsin. When Democratic Gov. Tony Evers came to office in 2019 he appointed Rebecca Valcq, who had spent a career as a regulatory lawyer for WE Energies, the state’s largest utility, as chair of the Public Service Commission. A big fox was going to guard a big hen house. If a Republican governor had done that, environmentalists would have gone ballistic. But when, as a columnist for Isthmus, I contacted the head of Clean Wisconsin, the state’s biggest environmental group, he praised the appointment simply because it was made by a Democratic governor.

And the most recent example of this partisanship just happened last week. Republicans passed a bill in the Assembly that would have extended the state’s Stewardship land protection program for another four years. But they wouldn’t have funded it at the level the enviros wanted. The GOP bill set funding at $28 million a year as opposed to the $33 million in the current program and the wildly unrealistic $100 that Evers had proposed. It also focussed the funding on habitat rehabilitation and property improvements and made it harder to buy land. That’s not necessarily such a bad idea. We can’t just go on buying land without managing it. Frankly, taking a breather from more acquisitions and attending to improving habitats and the public facilities, like camp sites, hiking and biking trails, that get people outdoors and build those connections to nature is probably a good thing. And, of course, the Democrats could always come back in the next budget and bump up the funding if they regain majorities.

But the Democrats refused to provide any votes to pass the bill and there weren’t enough votes in the Republican caucus because some of those senators wanted to kill the program altogether. And so guess what? Those senators got what they wanted. With the help of Democrats, Stewardship will end in June. Instead of $28 million there will be $0.

All simply because the environmental community made common cause with Democrats who see this as an issue they can use against Republicans in November. This is made all the more pathetic by the fact that that political strategy is senseless. Stewardship is a popular program, but nobody’s going to win or lose an election on this issue.

And finally, Stewardship is an example of what I mentioned at the top: the refusal to compromise. As Lyndon Johnson liked to say, those who won’t accept a half loaf have never been hungry. Another example of this is the Line 5 fight. I’ve written about this extensively, so I won’t go into much detail here. But suffice it to say that it was a fight that anyone could see was not going to be won. A 635-mile pipeline was never going to be shutdown over a 12-mile dispute. But environmentalists could have come away with a compromise that made the line safer and helped move low-income families dependent on propane for heat to electricity. Instead, they’ve actually made things worse by forcing the pipeline company to replace 12 miles of pipeline risk with 41 miles of risk.

So how can the environmental movement regain its traction? They can start by reversing these four things. Talk about how problems can be solved, not how they’re going to bring the world crashing down around us. Explain that they can be confident about those solutions because we’ve solved so many tough problems in the past. Work with both parties on those solutions, go back to being a truly independent movement, unaffiliated with either of two deeply unpopular political parties. And finally, when you know you’re going to lose a particular fight, recognize that and take whatever progress you can get.

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