In 1970, Environmentalism Was Poised to ‘Bring Us All Together'. What Happened?
The Nation
April 2015
(excerpt)
Marine and Coffey did not foresee the dismantling of campaign-finance laws and the flood of corporate money that now greases the American political system. (Indeed, the eruption of the Watergate scandal, which brought such issues to national attention, was still two years away.) Along with the rise of fact-optional right-wing media, that has had devastating implications for a movement that must “attack some mighty profit makers” (in Gene Marine’s phrase) in order to score legislative victories. Nor could they have realized how thoroughly the idea of investment in the collective good—which is what environmental action is, fundamentally—would lose political currency in the following decade. Now, however, it isn’t just the political system that is ill-equipped to deal with our most pressing ecological concerns. Most Americans still feel insulated from the slow violence of climate change, and therefore, as in 1970, care more about immediate crises. We still have trouble imagining that an economic system not dependent on endless consumption is possible, and therefore worth fighting for.
Just whose movement is this? That urgent question pervades Marine’s and Coffey’s dispatches from the front-lines of early environmentalism. For all the diverse persons, groups and interests that Marine claimed to see united in the interest of ecology, in hindsight it is easier to see that those who comprised the environmental movement in its first stage were by and large an elite group of students and educated professionals. Coffey reported that black students were boycotting the April teach-in because it was “just a ‘new toy’ that helped white middle-class students ignore the fact that fewer than 1,000 of Michigan’s 35,000 students are black.”
The question is still essential, because the answer says a lot about how much we can expect to accomplish in the name of the environment. The institutionalization of environmentalism—in think tanks, advocacy groups, corporate PR campaigns—has in fact led to the co-optation of more radical voices that Coffey warned about at the dawn of the movement 45 years ago. ...
http://www.thenation.com/blog/204681/1970-environmentalism-was-poised-bring-us-all-together-what-happened
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