Can There Be Such a Thing as Smart Greens?

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

12/13/12

 

We’ve often had cause to content on the peculiar blindness that makes committed greens some of the worst policy wonks in the world: one high profile initiative after another blows up in highly embarrassing ways. Green policy is often marred by its obliviousness to political and economic realities—think comprehensive global treaties and ambitious carbon-trading schemes that always seem to land with a thud, and Malthusian predictions from the Club of Rome follies of the 1970s to the recent panic over “peak oil” even as a new age of global abundance was dawning.

 

We’ve often wondered whether or when a ‘smart green’ movement would spring up, of people so concerned about the environment that they took the trouble to think about it in a sensible way. A growing number of dissidents from within the movement are challenging green orthodoxy may point to a more hopeful future both for the movement and for the world. In an excellent new piece in Slate, Keith Kloor profiles what he dubs the “modern” greens, environmentalists who downplay the doomsaying and quasi-nature worship of the green mainstream in favor of, among other things, genetically modified crops, population growth, and economic development:

 

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At Via Meadia we don’t actually enjoy castigating climate and other environmental activists as clueless marplots who couldn’t organize a game of tic-tac-toe, much less develop a workable system of global economic regulation that could produce global prosperity while reducing the costs of humanity’s footprint on the biosphere. But we do it because it’s an important subject and because the mainstream media is so in the tank on the issue that genuine critical analysis of green incompetence is hard to find. But we’d much rather cheer on post-blue, post-Malthusian smart greens than grumble about how dumb the old ones are.

 

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[Valin]

Let Us Now Praise Enviro-Dissidents

Steven Hayward

12/15/12

 

What’s the opposite of the *Green Weenie? Not sure, but we we’re going to have to come up with one for the folks in the environmental camp who break with orthodoxy or think critically about the subject, risking the wrath of the environmental establishment in the process. We’ve mentioned Keith Kloor here on Power Line before (“Definitely Not a Green Weenie”), and he’s got an important story about what I call “environmental dissidents” up right now on Slate.com, “The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement.”

 

I’ve been saying for years that conservative criticisms of environmentalism wouldn’t make much difference to the environmental movement, and that the environmental movement needs its own “Protestant Reformation,” and a Martin Luther-like moment or leaders who nail their 95 Theses of dissent on the Green Church door. Kloor begins his account with what I thought was the beginning of an internal reformation of environmentalism from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, left-leaning authors of the infamous “death of environmentalism” thesis. (I like Kloor’s characterization of their argument: “The environmental movement, they said in a provocative essay, had grown stale and ineffectual. It was beholden to a wooly-headed, tree-hugging worldview that was as dated as lava lamps, bellbottoms and Billy Jack.”)

 

In his current Slate essay, Kloor brings in a few new figures such as Emma Marris, author of a terrific recent book, The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, that challenges many environmental orthodoxies about how we think about nature and ecosystems, especially the romantic and highly unscientific idea dear to many environmentalists that nature is unchanging in the absence of human disruption, and that, to the contrary, active human management of ecosystems is the cornerstone of environmental protection. This means that our typical “balance of nature” policies are obsolete if not wrongheaded. (Sample from Marris: “This faith that native ecosystems are better than changed ecosystems is so pervasive in fields like ecology that it has become an unquestioned assumption. One often finds it built into experiments, which sometimes automatically classify any human change as ‘degradation.’”) I got to meet Emma recently at a PERC conference; do read her book if you are interested in ecology.

 

(Snip)

 

* Green Weenie Award