[saymaListserv] Does This Sound Familiar? (Relevant to the Testimony on Truth and the Proposed Testimony on Care of the Ear

[Steve Livingston]

Dear Friends,

In reading the two opening paragraphs of this essay, I found several 
statements which did not ring true to me. Environmentalism "just another 
special interest"? I don't think so. Environmentalists to blame for "losing 
the battle over Arctic drilling"? Not true! "Failure to spark the public 
imagination over global warming"? Au contraire! My skepticism was 
already on red alert, though, due to the reference to Bjorn Lomborg as 
"a former Greenpeace activist". To me, that sounded a bit like referring 
to Paul Wolfowitz as "a former Socialist". 

The "painful truths" revealed by Dr. Lomborg have been categorically 
debunked by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson, Climatologist 
Stephen H. Schneider, National Academy of Sciences member Norman 
Myers (who said of the scope of Lomborg's knowledge of biodiversity 
that "he lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in 
question"), Lester Brown (concerning population control, said that 
Lomborg's analysis was "so fundamentally flawed that other 
professionals would do well to disassociate themselves from his work"), 
Emily Matthews of the World Resources Institute (who reports that 
Lomborg "fudges data" to reach predetermined conclusions), Al 
Hammond, a senior scientist at the World Resources Institute (who 
accuses Lomborg of "exaggeration, sweeping generalizations, the 
presentation of false choices, selective use of data, and outright errors 
of fact"), and David Nemtzow, president of the Alliance to Save Energy 
(who says "Lomborg wastes his time battling a straw man"). It does not 
seem to me that Lomborg's work has passed the test of being "accurate 
and well-founded".

The same can be said for the essay in question, "The Death of 
Environmentalism" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. It has 
in fact sparked a good, healthy debate among leading 
envirnomentalists, but by no means is there a consensus of opinion that 
the environmental movement, such as it is, is dead in the water, or has, 
in the words of the authors, become "just another special interest". In 
our current Orwellian national media climate, it seems to me that every 
movement that puts the well-being of people and the planet ahead of 
profit-making has been demeaned as "just another special interest".

In a speech to this year's annual meeting of the Alliance for Global 
Sustainability, Martin S. Kaplan, whose environmental credentials are 
similarly impeccable as Shellenberger and Nordhaus, had these 
observations to make, which I find particularly appropriate to Friends:

"I would note that the conservation movement is only 100 years old and 
the environmental movement perhaps 50 years old. We are fortunate 
indeed that these three writers [referring additionally to Nicholas Kristof 
of the New York Times] did not evaluate the status of other historical 
movements midway in their terms. For example, would they have urged 
people to give up the fight to abolish slavery because it took a couple of 
hundred years? Would they have urged giving up the goal of women's 
suffrage, perhaps around 1900, nearly a quarter of a century before 
women achieved the right to vote?

". . . . Given their philosophy of causation and responsibility, I suppose 
in the 1850s they would have blamed the failure to abolish slavery on 
the abolition movement rather than the slaveholders and the economic 
interests tied to them. Perhaps around 1900 they would have blamed 
the failure to achieve the right to vote for women on the strategy and 
tactics of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, rather than on 
men who controlled the society. And not one of those . . . denunciations 
of the environmental movement includes any equivalent attack on the 
entrenched opposition of the economic interests that sell oil, mercury, 
and even arsenic.

"I find it quite outrageous, too, that the phrase 'special interest' has been 
transmuted from reflecting those who have a financial benefit at stake to 
those who are pursuing a goal of benefiting the entire society rather 
than themselves individually. This misuse of the phrase 'special interest' 
flies in the face of how that term was used during the Progressive 
Movement at the beginning of the 20th century."

As a Friend with a more than passing concern for the stewardship of our 
planet, and as one who will immediately attest to my own seemingly 
intractable complicity in the systematic degradation of the environment, I 
am open to hearing and considering market-based approaches to 
reducing the impact of our lifestyle upon the well-being of the less 
fortunate members of our species as well as others with whom we share 
this blue-green spaceship. At the same time, I am not willing to dismiss 
the cautionary wisdom that has been accumulated by the environmental 
movement over the past fifty or more years because it may negatively 
impact market-based approaches. 

I want to hear all sides of the debate, and I am particularly attuned to 
those arguments that are based on something other than self-interest, 
as that appeals to the peculiar faith that I practice. It is enough that such 
arguments are given, with concern and regret, but when they are 
relegated to the morgue, or the slag-heap of "special interests", they 
pique my attention even more.

Steve