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

[Janet Minshall]

Dear Steve Livingston,  Sorry, I think you haven't even read an 
accurate biography of Lomborg or the several confirmations of his 
activism from other Greenpeace activists. I would expect 
environmentalists whose work he questions to retaliate.

I am glad that you are open to market-based approaches to cleaning up 
the environment.  Would that others were so open.  Best Regards, 
Janet Minshall





>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