Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Peter Suderman makes a lot of good points in this post, in which he claims that in a wealthy, secular world in which external sources of meaning (religion, loyalty to the state etc) are dwindling, that people have turned to the environment as a source for meaning.  The implication for politics, so Suderman claims, is that, “environmentalism…becomes a form of antipolitics, one intended to supersede both the collective and individual choices that are part of modern politics.” He is mentioning global warming, and especially fear-driven, crisis based discussions of it, in which the threat is portrayed as so imminent and the magnitude so great, that political norms and processes(not to mention individual rights) must be ignored.   Suderman is very convincing, but also, I think, mistaken, so let’s deal with his claims in some detail.

Suderman claims  that due to mass prosperity, people who are no longer struggling to survive and thus are looking for meaning.  Some of these people, who Suderman compares to ” the40 year old in the suburbs who drifts slowly into a funk, ” have turned to environmentalism.  This is both true and false.  It’s true insomuch I know a lot of people who are very secular, and yet have found meaning in caring for the environment.  At my school, we know that our solar panels and recycling and composting and energy efficient lightbulbs and green construction won’t actually do much to roll back global warming.  Similarly for my teachers who drive bio-diesel cars, it’s really more of an ethic of caring for the environment and being conscious of your impact that motivates these actions, not an actual calculation about how these actions will do  anything meaningful about climate change. If you wanted to, you could compare composting and driving a bio-diesel car to sacraments, and you woudln’t be too far off.

But, is it really so weird that people find meaning in the environment?  Humans are, after all, natural creatures who are very much part of their ecosystems, no matter how far we’ve removed ourselves from it.  For this reason, people have been finding meaning in the natural world for as long as there have been people.  But Suderman is correct on the macro-policy angle.  People only care enough about the environment to actually slow some growth and progress when their basic needs have been meant.  In this macro-analysis, Suderman’s (and also Brink Lindsey’s) story of prosperity leading to environmentalism as a political movement is empirically true. Only rich countries are going to implement something like the Endangered Species Act or establish the EPA.

But is environmentalism, when it interacts with politics, really some “totalizing ideology” that wants to avoid politics?  Well, in its pure form, yes it is.  Environmentalists, who are solely that(there are very few of these people), probably don’t care much for political norms, they just want to protect the environment.  But isn’t that true for some ideologues and people committed to the cause.  Isn’t everyone who has a specific, deep interest in a certain set of policies feel constrained and limited by democratic norms?  Where Suderman’s argument gets fishier is discussing how environmentalists actually interact with the democratic process.  Sure, environmentalists resort to “fear politics” and, to use some more academic terminology, securitize the issues.  But doesn’t everyone do that?  Because last time I checked, it’s hard to get any type of action on an issue because sea levels will rise over the next 100 years in Bangladesh.  For better or for worse, urgency is what people respond to.  Now, Suderman would say that this only proves his point.  And maybe it does, but it’s hard to see the connection between environmentalists deploying fear to get their political agenda through and environmentalism being some uniquely “totalizing” ideology on par with dialectical materialism that we should be especially wary of.  Joseph Romm and David Roberts aren’t Slavoj Zizek, demanding a return to Lenin and a Revolution at the Gates.  Instead, they’re like any other advocates, using the tools at their disposal to get their agenda through.

If I may be cynical for a moment, I think there might be more to Suderman’s argument than what he presents.  He says at the beginning of his post that he doesn’t want to discuss the “economics” of the issue.  By the economics, I imagine he means that calculations of the magnitude of the bad stuff of global warming, the timeframe in which those events happen and probability of those events.  Also, there’s a discussion of the trade-offs and impacts of certain policies to address climate change.  In short, it’s the whole policy discussion.  What’s so weird is that many environmentalists are very much on the policy road.  George Monbiot, though quite the strident and extreme environmentalist-socialist, has a detailed policy agenda for how to address global warming.  Joseph Romm, David Roberts,  all of these people are  engulfed in the political process, and while like many advocates they find it frustrating, it’s hard to say that the gang at Climate Progress or Grist Mill think that the threat of global warming has rendered politics illegitimate.  What Suderman is doing by casting environmentalism, and by association those who advocate drastic measures to alleviate climate change and prevent the damage it will cause if nothing is done, as a “totalizing ideology” akin to Communism is saying that we can side step the discussion of the “economics” of climate change and just point to certain advocates who have a messed up political point of view and use troubling rhetoric and ignore what everyone who disagrees says.  This approach, I feel, is irresponsible.  Surely those, like me, who want a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade and think that we should pursue an aggressive climate change agenda aren’t all advancing some “totalizing ideology” that leads to us wanting to throw away political norms and individual rights.  Can’t we just discuss the trade-offs of various climate change policies rather than having some distracting meta-conversation?  Unless, of course, there’s a reason you’d want to have such a distracting conversation…