Geographies of Power

N&S's Breakthrough Institute has a piece noting the challenge posed by the "Technology Fifteen"--mostly Midwestern Senators (our own Sherrod Brown gets the lead photo), from coal-dependent states--to climate legislation. They're commenting on the same NYT article I linked below, pointing out how the "green economy" agenda really has to kick in.

Breakthrough, Part 3

In what was surely a calculated provocation to right-thinking liberals, N&S contrast the environmental movement--unfavorably--to Rick-Warren-style Christian evangelicals (another link to Obama--coincidence? I think not).

Throughout this book we have criticized the ways in which environmentalists treat nature and science as a religion, which we believe lies behind environmentalism's ideological orthodoxies--its pollution paradigm, its politics of limits, and its policy literalism--and which prevents environmentalists from achieving their goals. But here [in a chapter called "Belonging and Fulfillment"] we consider the ways in which environmentalism doesn't work enough as a church. ... Outside of giving money and buying green products, few among even the most serious environmentalists ever actually do anything to manifest their environmentalist identities or to recruit others to join them. In short, while the evangelical identity is thick, the environmentalist identity is thin.
To the extent that environmentalists have meetings at all, they are more depressing than inspiring, focused more on stopping development than creating a beloved community (203)

Again, you've got to admire the shrewdness of this rhetorical gambit: too much religion, not enough church. Or better--since the chapter is a version of what Bill Clinton once called a "politics of meaning," and turns on a discussion of Robert Putnam's ideas about social capital and Richard Florida's notions of the creative class--it's an invitation to imagine environmentalism as community-building, as constructive and meaningful. It is, in some ways, what the folks at Orion have been trying to do for years--only, perhaps, too solemnly. Or maybe it's just another way of proclaiming the power of networking.

More on Breakthrough

Americans today aspire as much to uncommon greatness as they do to the common good. They aspire to be unique, not common. None of this undermines empathy, compassion or generosity. On the contrary, it is only when people are feeling in control, secure and free to create their lives that they behave expansively and generously toward the collective.
The new social contract must thus provide a basis for people to seek individuation and self-creation.

The second half of N&S's book is called "The Politics of Possibility," and I must admit to genuine ambivalence on seeing how they develop their argument. I am, on the one hand, startled and pleased to see that they invoke some of the theorists that I find most interesting: Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Bill Chaloupka--all of whom argue persuasively against the sanctification of Nature and for a much more mixed "post-natural" conception of the relations between the human and the non-human world. The ability to shake off the resentful moralism--what Bennett and Chaloupka called the "moraline drift"--behind some environmental positions does seem to allow for some fresh thought.

On the other hand, I'm made uneasy by their embrace of self-actualizing liberalism as the basis for environmental policy-making. "Farewell to the common good" seems like shaky ground for politics. N&S are, it seems, primarily political strategists, conversant with the latest in values research and public opinion polling, and there's something vaguely opportunistic about the way they smack around the old environmentalist religion and its acolytes. On the most generous reading, they're motivated by the need to address global warming/climate change, which--in their analysis--makes the "pollution paradigm" obsolete. It's not a local problem, but a global one, going to the heart of the industrial system: it's a life-politics issue. But, like George Lakoff, they seem pretty quick to declare that paradigms are "merely" about rhetoric, rather than having cognitive and ethical value in themselves.

Most persuasive--to me, anyway--is their analysis of "insecure affluence" as the problem confronting American politics: it's not material deprivation we suffer from most, but rather a pervasive insecurity (consequent on what Jacob Hacker called The Great Risk-Shift). As a result, N&S diagnose a "post-materialist materialism," where the desire for goods is driven more by status anxiety and lack of meaning than by material need (this is their response to Thomas Franks' idea about people voting against their material interests).

Consumption vs. the Green Economy?

Shout-out to Michael Maniates, for being the first to leave a comment and remind me that there might actually be some readers out there. Michael teaches at Allegheny College in Meadville, home to my old grad-school friend Ben Slote.

Soon after cracking Confronting Consumption, almost by coincidence, I picked up Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's book Breakthrough, which offers a startlingly different vision and conception of green politics. N&S are best known for their controversial essay "The Death of Environmentalism" (2004), and for backing the new Apollo Project, which calls for massive investment in a new energy infrastructure. Full of attacks on icons of the environmental establishment (including Robert Kennedy, Al Gore, place-based politics and the environmental justice movement), Breakthrough advances a starkly contrarian argument:

We may achieve some greenhouse gas emission reductions by lowering our overall consumption, but the largest reductions will come from energy efficiency and shifting to cleaner energy sources--strategies that don't require drastic changes in the way we live our lives. What's needed, in short, is not so much less as different consumption. (126)

Strong stuff--exaggerated, perhaps, for arguments sake--but ... wow. N&S represent an updated version of what's been called Prometheanism: the idea that technological creativity and ingenuity are the best way to solve environmental problems. Or, as they put it, that prosperity is not the problem, but the solution. That environmentalism can only progress by offering itself as an instrument of progress, creativity and a better future:

"The anti-ecological logic of contemporary environmentalism reduces the cause of global warming to a single thing: humans emitting too much greenhouse gas. Their goal is thus to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what if we define the causes of global warming more expansively--as the consequence of our failure to create new economies, new patterns of development, new housing, and a new consumer culture, which together are far better able to meet our material and postmaterial needs?(127)

We can see here the influence of George Lakoff's discourse on re-framing ("what if we define..."), popular, amid much liberal soul-searching, right after the 2004 election. The starting-point is the same: greens (or liberals) have failed to win the political battles because they've presented their message in the wrong terms. We need to change the terrain. Let's stop talking about "the politics of limits"--sacrifice, Collapse, doom-and-gloom--and tap into a better vision.

There's political wisdom here--N&S are strategists, after all--and it's obvious that Obama & Co. have been paying attention. (Interestingly, though, Obama is able to combine the "green infrastructure" talk with a call for sacrifice and service). The gambit is to shift the discourse from crisis to opportunity, to which even the likes of Boone Pickens can rally.

The sticking-point, though, is the suggestion that moving towards a greener economy won't require drastic changes in the way we live. That, somehow, combatting global warming is compatible with--not in conflict with--suburban development and the transit and energy-use patterns it fosters. It may not be smart to trumpet the need for sudden, drastic change--as, for example, the Transition Network or the "post-carbon" relocalization folks do--but I'm not sure it's wise to say that the road to Green Acres is an extension of Easy Street.