Introduction

To not think of dying is to not think of living.
-- Jann Arden

Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us.

The clean water we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilderness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The two of us have worked for most of the country's leading environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the environmental community. They have worked hard and accomplished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful.

At the same time, we believe that the best way to honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis.

Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.

We have strikingly little to show for it.

From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties, environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, people in the environmental movement today find themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half decades ago.

Yet in lengthy conversations, the vast majority of leaders from the largest environmental organizations and foundations in the country insisted to us that we are on the right track.

Nearly all of the more than two-dozen environmentalists we interviewed underscored that climate change demands that we remake the global economy in ways that will transform the lives of six billion people. All recognize that it's an undertaking of monumental size and complexity. And all acknowledged that we must reduce emissions by up to 70 percent as soon as possible.

But in their public campaigns, not one of America's environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards -- proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political alliances the community needs to deal with the problem.

By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war -- in particular the war they fought and won for basic environmental protections more than 30 years ago. It was then that the community's political strategy became defined around using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical policy proposals as solutions.

The greatest achievements to reduce global warming are today happening in Europe. Britain has agreed to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent over 50 years, Holland by 80 percent in 40 years, and Germany by 50 percent in 50 years. Russia may soon ratify Kyoto. And even China -- which is seen fearfully for the amount of dirty coal it intends to burn -- recently established fuel economy standards for its cars and trucks that are much tougher than ours in the US.

Environmentalists are learning all the wrong lessons from Europe. We closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible.

Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power. When you look at the long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement's approach to problems and policies hasn't worked particularly well. And yet there is nothing about the behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our interviews with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a community are ready to think differently about our work.

What the environmental movement needs more than anything else right now is to take a collective step back to rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things around as long as we understand our failures as essentially tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical.

In Part II we make the case for what could happen if progressives created new institutions and proposals around a big vision and a core set of values. Much of this section is aimed at showing how a more powerful movement depends on letting go of old identities, categories and assumptions, so that we can be truly open to embracing a better model.

We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of this report to say more about what we think must now be done because we believe that the most important next steps will emerge from teams, not individuals. Over the coming months we will be meeting with existing and emerging teams of practitioners and funders to develop a common vision and strategy for moving forward.

One tool we have to offer to that process is the research we are doing as part of our Strategic Values Project, which is adapting corporate marketing research for use by the progressive community. This project draws on a 600 question, 2,500-person survey done in the U.S. and Canada every four years since 1992. In contrast to conventional opinion research, this research identifies the core values and beliefs that inform how individuals develop a range of opinions on everything from the economy to abortion to what's the best SUV on the market. This research both shows a clear conservative shift in America's values since 1992 and illuminates many positive openings for progressives and environmentalists.

We believe that this new values science will prove to be invaluable in creating a road map to guide the development of a set of proposals that simultaneously energizes our base, wins over new allies, divides our opponents, achieves policy victories and makes America's values environment more progressive. Readers of this report who are interested in learning more about the Strategic Values Project -- and want to engage in a dialogue about the future of environmentalism and progressive politics -- should feel welcome to contact us.


PART I


Environmentalism as a Special Interest

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-- Norman Cousins

Those of us who were children during the birth of the modern environmental movement have no idea what it feels like to really win big.

Our parents and elders experienced something during the 1960s and 70s that today seems like a dream: the passage of a series of powerful environmental laws too numerous to list, from the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts to the National Environmental Policy Act.

Experiencing such epic victories had a searing impact on the minds of the movement's founders. It established a way of thinking about the environment and politics that has lasted until today.

It was also then, at the height of the movement's success, that the seeds of failure were planted. The environmental community's success created a strong confidence -- and in some cases bald arrogance -- that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level. The environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of "the environment" has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level.

We believe that the environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn't as "environmental." Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing.

Environmentalism is today more about protecting a supposed "thing" -- "the environment" -- than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who nearly a century ago observed, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Thinking of the environment as a "thing" has had enormous implications for how environmentalists conduct their politics. The three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making hasn't changed in 40 years: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as "environmental." Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g., cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators through a variety of tactics, such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, advertising, and public relations.

When we asked environmental leaders how we could accelerate our efforts against global warming, most pointed to this or that tactic -- more analysis, more grassroots organizing, more PR.

Few things epitomize the environmental community's tactical orientation to politics more than its search for better words and imagery to "reframe" global warming. Lately the advice has included: a) don't call it "climate change" because Americans like change; b) don't call it "global warming" because the word "warming" sounds nice; c) refer to global warming as a "heat trapping blanket" so people can understand it; d) focus attention on technological solutions -- like fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars.

What each of these recommendations has in common is the shared assumption that a) the problem should be framed as "environmental" and b) our legislative proposals should be technical.1

Even the question of alliances, which goes to the core of political strategy, is treated within environmental circles as a tactical question -- an opportunity to get this or that constituency -- religious leaders! business leaders! celebrities! youth! Latinos! -- to take up the fight against global warming. The implication is that if only X group were involved in the global warming fight then things would really start to happen.

The arrogance here is that environmentalists ask not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists. As a result, while public support for action on global warming is wide it is also frighteningly shallow.

The environmental movement's incuriosity about the interests of potential allies depends on it never challenging the most basic assumptions about what does and doesn't get counted as "environmental." Because we define environmental problems so narrowly, environmental leaders come up with equally narrow solutions. In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C.

The entire landscape in which politics plays out has changed radically in the last 30 years, yet the environmental movement acts as though proposals based on "sound science" will be sufficient to overcome ideological and industry opposition. Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not. It's a war over our core values as Americans and over our vision for the future, and it won't be won by appealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-interest.

We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live. Those of us who pay so much attention to nature's cycles know better than to fear death, which is inseparable from life. In the words of the Tao Ti Ching, "If you aren't afraid of dying there is nothing you can't achieve."


Environmental Group Think

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
-- Karl Popper

One of the reasons environmental leaders can whistle past the graveyard of global warming politics is that the membership rolls and the income of the big environmental organizations have grown enormously over the past 30 years -- especially since the election of George W. Bush in 2000.

The institutions that define what environmentalism means boast large professional staffs and receive tens of millions of dollars every year from foundations and individuals. Given these rewards, it's no surprise that most environmental leaders neither craft nor support proposals that could be tagged "non-environmental." Doing otherwise would do more than threaten their status; it would undermine their brand.

Environmentalists are particularly upbeat about the direction of public opinion thanks in large part to the polling they conduct that shows wide support for their proposals. Yet America is a vastly more right-wing country than it was three decades ago. The domination of American politics by the far-right is a central obstacle to achieving action on global warming. Yet almost none of the environmentalists we interviewed thought to mention it.

Part of what's behind America's political turn to the right is the skill with which conservative think tanks, intellectuals and political leaders have crafted proposals that build their power through setting the terms of the debate. Their work has paid off. According to a survey of 1,500 Americans by the market research firm Environics, the number of Americans who agree with the statement, "To preserve people's jobs in this country, we must accept higher levels of pollution in the future," increased from 17 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2000. The number of Americans who agreed that, "Most of the people actively involved in environmental groups are extremists, not reasonable people," leapt from 32 percent in 1996 to 41 percent in 2000.

The truth is that for the vast majority of Americans, the environment never makes it into their top ten list of things to worry about. Protecting the environment is indeed supported by a large majority -- it's just not supported very strongly. Once you understand this, it's much easier to understand why it's been so easy for anti-environmental interests to gut 30 years of environmental protections.

The conventional criticism of the environmental movement articulated by outsiders and many funders is that it is too divided to get the job done. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan argues in his new book Boiling Point, "Despite occasional spasms of cooperation, the major environmental groups have been unwilling to join together around a unified climate agenda, pool resources, and mobilize a united campaign on the climate."

Yet what was striking to us in our research was the high degree of consensus among environmental leaders about what the problems and solutions are. We came away from our interviews less concerned about internal divisions than the lack of feedback mechanisms.

Engineers use a technical term to describe systems without feedback mechanisms: "stupid."

As individuals, environmental leaders are anything but stupid. Many hold multiple advanced degrees in science, engineering, and law from the best schools in the country. But as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by "the environment" -- a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate "thing" and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the "natural world."

The concepts of "nature" and "environment" have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large. If one understands the notion of the "environment" to include humans, then the way the environmental community designates certain problems as environmental and others as not is completely arbitrary.

Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like global warming -- which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century -- considered "environmental"? Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is? What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem -- and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to "environmentalists"?

Some believe that this framing is a political, and not just conceptual, problem. "When we use the term 'environment' it makes it seem as if the problem is 'out there' and we need to 'fix it,'" said Susan Clark, Executive Director of the Columbia Foundation, who believes the Environmental Grantmakers Association should change its name. "The problem is not external to us; it's us. It's a human problem having to do with how we organize our society. This old way of thinking isn't anyone's fault, but it is all of our responsibility to change."

Not everyone agrees. "We need to remember that we're the environmental movement and that our job is to protect the environment," said the Sierra Club's Global Warming Director, Dan Becker. "If we stray from that, we risk losing our focus, and there's no one else to protect the environment if we don't do it. We're not a union or the Labor Department. Our job is to protect the environment, not to create an industrial policy for the United States. That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting workers."

Most environmentalists don't think of "the environment" as a mental category at all -- they think of it as a real "thing" to be protected and defended. They think of themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing. Environmentalists do their work as though these are literal rather than figurative truths. They tend to see language in general as representative rather than constitutive of reality. This is typical of liberals who are, at their core, children of the enlightenment who believe that they arrived at their identity and politics through a rational and considered process. They expect others in politics should do the same and are constantly surprised and disappointed when they don't.

The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis2 -- the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal "truth to power." Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care. "If you want people to act on global warming" stressed Becker, "you need to convince them that action is needed on global warming and not on some ulterior goal."


What We Worry About When We Worry About Global Warming

Calculative thinking computes ... it races from one prospect to the next. It never stops, never collects itself. It is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning that reigns in everything there is ... Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what, at first sight, does not go together.
-- Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address

What do we worry about when we worry about global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn't our focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster preparedness?

Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced agricultural production? If so, shouldn't our focus be on increasing food production?

Is it the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario suggests, world war?

Most environmental leaders would scoff at such framings of the problem and retort, "Disaster preparedness is not an environmental problem." It is a hallmark of environmental rationality to believe that we environmentalists search for "root causes" not "symptoms." What, then, is the cause of global warming?

For most within the environmental community, the answer is easy: too much carbon in the atmosphere. Framed this way, the solution is logical: we need to pass legislation that reduces carbon emissions. But what are the obstacles to removing carbon from the atmosphere?

Consider what would happen if we identified the obstacles as:


The radical right's control of all three branches of the US government.
Trade policies that undermine environmental protections.
Our failure to articulate an inspiring and positive vision.
Overpopulation.
The influence of money in American politics.
Our inability to craft legislative proposals that shape the debate around core American values.
Poverty.
Old assumptions about what the problem is and what it isn't.
The point here is not just that global warming has many causes but also that the solutions we dream up depend on how we structure the problem.

The environmental movement's failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to deal with global warming is directly related to the movement's reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g., "too much carbon in the atmosphere") of any given environmental problem. The problem is that once you identify something as the root cause, you have little reason to look for even deeper causes or connections with other root causes. NRDC attorney David Hawkins, who has worked on environmental policy for three decades, defines global warming as essentially a "pollution" problem like acid rain, which was addressed by the 1990 Clean Air Act amendment. The acid rain bill set a national cap on the total amount of acid rain pollution allowed by law and allowed companies to buy pollution credits from other companies that had successfully reduced their emissions beyond the cap. This "cap-and-trade" policy worked well for acid rain, Hawkins reasons, so it should work for global warming, too. The McCain-Lieberman "Climate Stewardship Act" is based on a similar mechanism to cap carbon emissions and allow companies to trade pollution rights.

Not everyone agrees that the acid rain victory offers the right mental model. "This is not a problem that will be solved like acid rain," said Phil Clapp, who founded National Environmental Trust a decade ago with foundations that recognized the need for more effective public campaigns by environmentalists.

"Acid rain dealt with a specific number of facilities in one industry that was already regulated," Clapp argued. "It took just 8 years, from 1982 to 1990, to pass. Global warming is not an issue that will be resolved by the passage of one statute. This is nothing short of the beginning of an effort to transform the world energy economy, vastly improving efficiency and diversifying it away from its virtually exclusive reliance on fossil fuels. The campaign to get carbon emissions capped and then reduced is literally a 50-year non-stop campaign. This is not one that everybody will be able to declare victory, shut up shop, and go home."

That lesson was driven home to Clapp, Hawkins, and other leaders during the 1990s when the big environmental groups and funders put all of their global warming eggs in the Kyoto basket. The problem was that they had no well-designed political strategy to get the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty, which would have reduced greenhouse gas reductions to under 1990 levels. The environmental community not only failed to get the Senate to ratify Kyoto, industry strategists -- in a deft act of legislative judo -- crafted an anti-Kyoto Senate resolution that passed 95 -- 0.

The size of this defeat can't be overstated. In exiting the Clinton years with no law to reduce carbon emissions -- even by a miniscule amount -- the environmental community has no more power or influence than it had when Kyoto was negotiated. We asked environmental leaders: what went wrong?

"Our advocacy in the 1990s was inadequate in the sense that the scale of our objectives in defining victory was not calibrated to the global warming need," answered Hawkins. "Instead it was defined by whatever was possible. We criticized Clinton's proposal for a voluntary program to implement the Rio convention agreement [that preceded Kyoto] but we didn't keep up a public campaign. We redirected our attention to the international arena and spent all of our efforts trying to upgrade President Bush Sr.'s Rio convention commitments rather than trying to turn the existing commitments into law. We should have done both."

Responding to the complaint that, in going 10 years without any action on global warming the environmental movement is in a worse place than if it had negotiated an initial agreement under Clinton, Clapp said, "In retrospect, for political positioning we probably would have been better off if, under the Kyoto protocol, we had accepted 1990 levels by 2012 since that was what Bush, Sr. agreed to in Rio. I don't exempt myself from that mistake."

After the Kyoto Senate defeat, Clapp and others focused their wrath on Vice President Al Gore, who was one of the country's strongest and most eloquent environmentalists. But Gore had witnessed Kyoto's 95 -- 0 assassination in the Senate and feared that the tag "Ozone Man" -- pinned on him for his successful advocacy of the Montreal Protocol's ban on ozone-destroying CFCs -- would hurt his 2000 presidential campaign.

The environmental hit on Al Gore culminated in an April 26, 1999 Time magazine article titled, "Is Al Gore a Hero Or a Traitor?" In it the Time reporter describes a meeting where environmental leaders insisted that Gore do more to phase out dirty old coal power plants. Gore shot back, "Losing on impractical proposals that are completely out of tune with what is achievable does not necessarily advance your cause at all."

The public campaign against Gore generated headlines but inspired neither greater risk-taking by politicians nor emboldened the Vice President. Instead, the author of Earth in the Balance spent much of the 2000 race downplaying his green credentials in the false hope that in doing so he would win over undecided voters.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about.


Everybody Loses on Fuel Efficiency

Great doubt: great awakening.
Little doubt: little awakening.
No doubt: no awakening.
-- Zen koan

By the end of the 1990s, environmentalists hadn't just failed to win a legislative agreement on carbon, they had also let a deal on higher vehicle fuel efficiency standards slip through their fingers.

Since the 1970s environmentalists have defined the problem of oil dependency as a consequence of inadequate fuel efficiency standards. Their strategy has rested on trying to overpower industry and labor unions on environmental and national security grounds. The result has been massive failure: over the last 20 years, as automobile technologies have improved exponentially, overall mileage rates have gone down, not up.

Few beat around the bush when discussing this fact. "If the question is whether we've done anything to address the problem since 1985, the answer is no," said Bob Nordhaus, the Washington, D.C. attorney who served as General Counsel for the Department of Energy under President Clinton and who helped draft the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or "CAFE" (pronounced "café") legislation and the Clean Air Act. (Nordhaus is also the father of one of the authors of this report.)

The first CAFE amendment in 1975 grabbed the low-hanging fruit of efficiency to set into place standards that experts say were much easier for industry to meet than the standards environmentalists are demanding now. The UAW and automakers agreed to the 1975 CAFE amendment out of a clearly defined self-interest: to slow the advance of Japanese imports.

"CAFE [in 1975] was backed by the UAW and [Michigan Democrat Rep. John] Dingell," said Shelly Fiddler, who was Chief of Staff for former Rep. Phil Sharp who authored the CAFE amendment before becoming Chief of Staff for the Clinton White House's Council on Environmental Quality. "It got done by Ford and a bunch of renegade staffers in Congress, not by environmentalists. The environmental community didn't originate CAFE and they had serious reservations about it."

Thanks to action by US automakers and inaction by US environmental groups, CAFE's efficiency gains stalled in the mid-1980s. It's not clear who did more damage to CAFE, the auto industry, the UAW or the environmental movement.

Having gathered 59 votes -- one short of what's needed to stop a filibuster -- Senator Richard Bryan nearly passed legislation to raise fuel economy standards in 1990. But one year later, when Bryan had a very good shot at getting the 60 votes he needed, the environmental movement cut a deal with the automakers. In exchange for the auto industry's opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentalists agreed to drop its support for the Bryan bill. "[I]t was scuppered by the environmentalists, of all people, " New York Times auto industry reporter Keith Bradsher notes bitterly.3

Tragically, had Bryan and environmentalists succeeded in 1991, they would have dramatically slowed the rise of SUVs in the coming decade and reduced the pressure on the Refuge -- a patch of wilderness that the Republicans again used to smack around environmentalists under President George W. Bush. The environmental community's failure in 1991 was compounded by the fact that the Bryan bill "helped scare Japanese automakers into producing larger models," a shift that ultimately diminished the power of both the UAW and environmentalists.

"Where was the environmental movement?" asks Bradsher in his marvelous history of the SUV, High and Mighty. "[A]s a slow and steady transformation began taking place on the American road, the environmental movement stayed silent on SUVs all the way into the mid-1990s, and did not campaign in earnest for changes to SUV regulations until 1999."

Finally, in 2002, Senator John Kerry and Senator John McCain popped up with another attempt to raise CAFE standards. Once again environmentalists failed to negotiate a deal with UAW. As a result, the bill lost by a far larger margin than it had in 1990. The Senate voted 62-38 to kill it.

From the perspective of even the youngest and greenest Hill staffer, the political power of environmental groups appeared at an all-time low.

Environmental spokespersons tried to position their 2002 loss as a victory, arguing that it provided them with momentum going forward. But privately almost every environmental leader we interviewed told us that CAFE -- in its 2002 incarnation -- is dead.

Given CAFE's initial 10 years of success, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it made sense that environmentalists saw CAFE as a good technical tool for reducing our dependence on oil and cutting carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the best technical solutions don't always make for the best politics. Senators don't vote according to the technical specifications of a proposal. They make decisions based on a variety of factors, especially how the proposal and its opposition are framed. And no amount of public relations can help a badly framed proposal.

Bradsher argues pointedly that "Environmentalists and their Congressional allies have wasted their time since the days of the Bryan bill by repeatedly bringing overly ambitious legislation to the floors of the House and Senate without first striking compromises with the UAW. The sad truth is that by tilting the playing field in favor of SUVs for a quarter of a century, government regulations have left the economy of the Upper Midwest addicted to the production of dangerous substitutes for cars. Any fuel-economy policy must recognize this huge social and economic problem."

In light of this string of legislative disasters one might expect environmental leaders to reevaluate their assumptions and craft a new proposal.4 Instead, over the last two years, the environmental movement has made only the tactical judgment to bring in new allies, everyone from religious leaders to Hollywood celebrities, to reinforce the notion that CAFE is the only way to free America from foreign oil.

The conventional wisdom today is that the auto industry and the UAW "won" the CAFE fight. This logic implies that industry executives represent what's best for shareholders, that union executives represent what's best for workers, and that environmentalists represent what's best for the environment. All of these assumptions merit questioning. Today the American auto industry is in a state of gradual collapse. Japanese automakers are eating away at American market share with cleaner, more efficient, and outright better vehicles. And American companies are drawing up plans to move their factories overseas. None of the so-called special interests are representing their members' interests especially well.

There is no better example of how environmental categories sabotage environmental politics than CAFE. When it was crafted in 1975, it was done so as a way to save the American auto industry, not to save the environment. That was the right framing then and has been the right framing ever since. Yet the environmental movement, in all of its literal-sclerosis, not only felt the need to brand CAFE as an "environmental" proposal, it failed to find a solution that also worked for industry and labor.

By thinking only of their own narrowly defined interests, environmental groups don't concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry. As a consequence, we miss major opportunities for alliance building. Consider the fact that the biggest threat to the American auto industry appears to have nothing to do with "the environment." The high cost of health care for its retired employees is a big part of what hurts the competitiveness of American companies.

"G.M. covers the health care costs of 1.1 million Americans, or close to half a percent of the total population," wrote the New York Times' Danny Hakim recently.5 "For G.M., which earned $1.2 billion [in profits] last year, annual health spending has risen to $4.8 billion from $3 billion since 1996 ... Today, with global competition and the United States health care system putting the burden largely on employers, retiree medical costs are one reason Toyota's $10.2 billion profit in its most recent fiscal year was more than double the combined profit of the Big Three."

Because Japan has national health care, its auto companies aren't stuck with the bill for its retirees. And yet if you were to propose that environmental groups should have a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards, you'd likely be laughed out of the room, or scolded by your colleagues because, "Health care is not an environmental issue."

The health care cost disadvantage for US producers is a threat that won't be overcome with tax incentives for capital investments into new factories, or consumer rebates for hybrids. The problem isn't just that tax credits and rebates won't achieve what we need them to achieve, which is save the American auto industry by helping it build better, more efficient cars. The problem is also that these policies, which the environmental community only agreed to after more than two decades of failure, have been thrown into the old CAFE proposal like so many trimmings for a turkey.

Environmentalists -- including presidential candidate John Kerry, whose platform includes the new turkey trimmings -- as well as industry and labor leaders, have yet to rethink their assumptions about the future of the American auto industry in ways that might reframe their proposal. Some environmental "realists" argue that the death of the American auto industry -- and the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying union jobs -- isn't necessarily a bad thing for the environment if it means more market share for more efficient Japanese vehicles. Others say saving the American auto industry is central to maintaining the Midwest's middle class.

"I don't like to bribe everyone into good behavior, but it's not bad to help the unions," said Hal Harvey. "We need jobs in this country. Union members are swing voters in a lot of states. And a livable wage is ethically important."

Like Harvey, most environmental leaders are progressives who support the union movement on principle. And though many have met with labor leaders about how to resolve the CAFE quagmire, the environmental movement is not articulating how building a stronger American auto industry and union movement is central to winning action on global warming. Rather, like everything else that's not seen as explicitly "environmental," the future of the union movement is treated as a tactical, not a strategic, consideration.

California's recent decision to require reductions in vehicle greenhouse gas emissions over the next 11 years was widely reported as a victory for environmental efforts against global warming. In fact, coming after over two decades of failure to reverse the gradual decline of fuel efficiency, the decision is a sign of our weakness, not strength. Automakers are rightly confident that they will be able to defeat the California law in court. If they can't, there is a real danger that the industry will persuade Congress to repeal California's special right to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. If that happens, California will lose its power to limit vehicle pollution altogether.

Today's fleet-wide fuel efficiency average is the same as it was in 1980, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This quarter century of failure is not due to one or two tactical errors (though there were plenty of those, as we describe above). Rather, the roots of the environmental community's failure can be found in the way it designates certain problems as environmental and others as not. Automakers and the UAW are, of course, just as responsible as environmentalists for failing to form a strategic alliance. The lose-lose-lose that is the current situation on automobiles is the logical result of defining labor, environmental and industry self-interests so narrowly.

Before his death, David Brower tried to think more creatively about win-win solutions. He spoke often about the need for the environmental community to invest more energy in changing the tax code, a point reporter Keith Bradsher emphasized in High and Mighty. "Environmentalists have a history of not taking notice of tax legislation, and paid no attention whatsoever to the depreciation and luxury tax provisions for large light trucks. More egregiously, environmental groups ignored SUVs in the 1990 battle over the Bryan bill, and even disregarded the air-pollution loopholes for light trucks in the 1990 clean air legislation."6

Some in the environmental community are trying to learn from the failures of the last 25 years and think differently about the problem. Jason Mark of the Union of Concerned Scientists told us that he has begun the search for more carrots to the Pavley stick. "We need to negotiate from a position of strength. Now is the time for us to propose incentive policies that make sense. We've been working on tax credits for hybrids. Now we need to come up with tax credits for R&D into reduced emissions, and something to ease the industry's pension and health burdens. No one has yet put a big pension deal on the table for them. None of this has yet been explored."

In the end, all sides are responsible for failing to craft a deal that trades greater efficiency for targeted federal tax credits into R&D. One consequence of Japan's public policies that reward R&D with tax credits, suggests Mark, is that Japanese automakers are run by innovation-driven engineers whereas American automakers are run by narrowly focused accountants. For Pavley to inspire a win-win-win deal by industry, environmentalists and the UAW, all three interests will need to start thinking outside of their conceptual boxes.


Winning While Losing vs. Losing While Losing

Failure is an opportunity.
-- Tao Ti Ching

In politics, a legislative defeat can either be a win or a loss. A legislative loss can be considered a win if it has increased a movement's power, energy, and influence over the long-term. Witness the religious right's successful effort to ban partial-birth abortions. The proposal succeeded only after several failed attempts. Because it was anchored to core values, not technical policy specs, the initial defeats of the ban on partial-birth abortions paved the way for eventual victory.

The serial losses on Rio, Kyoto, CAFE, and McCain-Lieberman were not framed in ways that increase the environmental community's power through each successive defeat. That's because, when those proposals were crafted, environmentalists weren't thinking about what we get out of each defeat. We were only thinking about what we get out of them if they succeed. It's this mentality that must be overthrown if we are to craft proposals that generate the power we need to succeed at a legislative level.

The thing everyone from the Pew Charitable Trusts to Rainforest Action Network agrees on is the size of the problem. "What we are trying to achieve is a fundamental shift in the way this country (and the world) produces and consumes energy," said Pew's Environment Director Josh Reichert. "I am confident that we will get there, primarily because I believe that we have no choice. But how long it will take, and how much will be sacrificed because of the delay, remains to be seen."

Greg Wetstone of the NRDC concurred. "There's an awareness in the scientific community and the public that this is the most important and difficult environmental challenge we've ever faced. We're not, unfortunately, seeing progress yet in Congress or the Bush Administration."

After the Senate voted against McCain-Lieberman 55 to 43 in October 2003, Kevin Curtis of the National Environmental Trust spoke for the community when he told Grist Magazine that "It's a start. This may seem to be a defeat now, but in the end it's a victory. A bill that gets at least 40 votes has a fair chance of passing if it's reintroduced."

Not everyone agrees that McCain-Lieberman is helping the environmental community. Shelley Fiddler said, "It is completely spurious for anyone to call this loss a victory."

Even though Senators McCain and Lieberman have watered down the carbon caps to win more votes, it's not clear that environmentalists can muster the strength to pass the Climate Stewardship Act through the Congress. Reichert predicts that McCain Lieberman will pass the Senate by the end of 2005, but acknowledges that the House will be much harder.

The political calculation environmentalists are making now is how subsidies for cleaner coal and carbon sequestration could win over the coal and electric industries, as well as the United Mineworkers. While we believe that the situation in China and other developing countries makes investments into cleaner coal technologies and sequestration an urgent priority, it is a disturbing sign that, once again, environmentalists are putting the technical policy cart before the vision-and-values horse. Investments in cleaner coal should be framed as part of an overall vision for creating jobs in the energy industries of the future, not simply as a technical fix.

In some ways McCain-Lieberman offers the worst of all worlds. Not only does it fail to inspire a compelling vision that could change the debate and grow the political power of environmentalists, it also disappoints at the policy level. "Even if McCain-Lieberman were enacted it wouldn't do a hell of a lot of good," said one well-known Washington energy attorney. "It's a minor decrease in carbon. If you look at what's necessary, which is stabilizing emissions, McCain-Lieberman isn't going to make a dent. We need 50 -- 70 percent reductions. Part of the job is to stay the course and keep pushing. But another part of the job is to come up with a more thought-through program."

Passing McCain-Lieberman will require more than buying off or out-flanking industry opponents. It will also require beating savvy neocon strategists who have successfully turned the regulation of carbon emissions into the bête noire of the conservative movement.

And if the political prospects for action on global warming appear daunting in the U.S., don't look to China for uplift: the 1.2 billion person country, growing at 20 percent a year, intends to quadruple the size of its economy in 30 years and bring 300 gigawatts -- nearly half of what we use each year in the US -- of dirty coal energy on-line.

The challenge for American environmentalists is not just to get the US to dramatically overhaul its energy strategy but also to help developing countries like China, India, Russia and South Africa do so as well. That means environmental groups will need to advocate policies like technology transfer, ethical trade agreements, and win-win joint ventures. The carbon threat from China and other developing countries drives home the point that a whole series of major policies not traditionally defined as "environmental," from industrial policy to trade policy, will be needed to deal with global warming.

The question that must be put to proposals like McCain-Lieberman is this: will its continuing defeat -- or its eventual passage -- provide us with the momentum we need to introduce and pass a whole series of proposals to reshape the global energy economy? If not, then what will?


Environmentalism as Though Politics Didn't Matter

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
-- Abraham Lincoln

Ross Gelbspan captured the pragmatic sentiment held by most environmentalists when he told us, "I view McCain-Lieberman like Kyoto: ineffectual but hugely important and indispensable for setting up a mechanism to regulate carbon."

When we told him that Eric Heitz, executive director of the Energy Foundation, predicted to us that the US will have a "serious federal carbon regime in five years," Gelbspan replied, "It can't wait even a couple of years. The climate is changing too quickly. We have to start faster."

In Boiling Point Gelbspan accuses environmental leaders of "being too timid to raise alarms about so nightmarish a climate threat" and for settling for too little. "Take the critical issue of climate stabilization -- the level at which the world agrees to cap the buildup of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere," Gelbspan writes. "The major national environmental groups focusing on climate -- groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Federation -- have agreed to accept what they see as a politically feasible target for 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide ... [That] may be politically realistic, it would likely be environmentally catastrophic."

In our interview, Gelbspan told us that environmentalists' failure to achieve more is "because they operate in Washington and they accept incremental progress. If they can get two more miles on a CAFE standard that would be a huge accomplishment for them. But compared to the need to cut emissions 70 or 80 percent it's nothing. They're scared they'll be marginalized by calling for big cuts. They are taking the expedient route even as we see the scientists sounding the alarms and saying it's too late to avoid the significant disruptions."

The alternative Gelbspan advocates is the unfortunately titled "WEMP" proposal -- the World Energy Modernization Plan -- to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent worldwide in three ways: 1) shifting subsidies from polluting industries to clean industries; 2) creating a fund to transfer clean technology to the developing world; and 3) ratcheting up a "Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard" by five percent per year. It's a program Gelbspan says is strong enough to deal with the global warming crisis while creating millions of good jobs around the world. It might even, he writes, help "create conditions supportive of a real peace process in Israel" (though he acknowledges that the latter is a "highly improbable fantasy").

Intrigued by this big vision, we asked him about the political strategy for passing WEMP.

"It's not a hard one," he answered. "You have to get money out of politics. If you did that you would have no issue. I don't see an answer short of real campaign finance reform. I know that sounds implausible, but the alternative is massive climate change."

We asked, "Are you saying we have to get campaign finance reform before we can get action on global warming?" At this Gelbspan backed down. "I don't know what the answer to that is. I really don't."

What is so appealing about Boiling Point is Gelbspan's straight-talk when it comes to the size of the crisis: we must cut carbon emissions by 70 percent as soon as possible or it's the end of the world as we know it. In his book Gelbspan positions himself as something of a Paul Revere attempting to wake the legions of sleeping environmentalists. Yet none of the environmental leaders we interviewed expressed any denial about what we're facing. On the contrary, they all believe the situation is urgent and that big steps must be taken -- at least eventually. Their point is that you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run.

What's frustrating about Boiling Point and so many other visionary environmental books -- from Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins to Plan B by Lester Brown to The End of Oil by Paul Roberts -- is the way the authors advocate technical policy solutions as though politics didn't matter. Who cares if a carbon tax or a sky trust or a cap-and-trade system is the most simple and elegant policy mechanism to increase demand for clean energy sources if it's a political loser?

The environmental movement's technical policy orientation has created a kind of myopia: everyone is looking for short-term policy pay-off. We could find nobody who is crafting political proposals that, through the alternative vision and values they introduce, create the context for electoral and legislative victories down the road. Almost every environmental leader we interviewed is focused on short-term policy work, not long-term strategies.

Political proposals that provide a long-term punch by their very nature set up political conflicts and controversy on terms that advance the environmental movement's transformative vision and values. But many within the environmental movement are uncomfortable thinking about their proposals in a transformative political context. When we asked Hal Harvey how he would craft his energy proposals so that the resulting political controversy would build the power of environmentalists to pass legislation, Harvey replied, "I don't know if I want a lot of controversy in these packages. I want astonishment."


PART II


Going Beyond Special Interests and Single Issues

To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful, and tragic contingencies of the world.
-- Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center

The marriage between vision, values, and policy has proved elusive for environmentalists. Most environmental leaders, even the most vision-oriented, are struggling to articulate proposals that have coherence. This is a crisis because environmentalism will never be able to muster the strength it needs to deal with the global warming problem as long as it is seen as a "special interest." And it will continue to be seen as a special interest as long as it narrowly identifies the problem as "environmental" and the solutions as technical.

In early 2003 we joined with the Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the Common Assets Defense Fund, and the Institute for America's Future to create a proposal for a "New Apollo Project" aimed at freeing the US from oil and creating millions of good new jobs over 10 years. Our strategy was to create something inspiring. Something that would remind people of the American dream: that we are a can-do people capable of achieving great things when we put our minds to it.

Apollo's focus on big investments into clean energy, transportation and efficiency is part of a hopeful and patriotic story that we are all in this economy together. It allows politicians to inject big ideas into contested political spaces, define the debate, attract allies, and legislate. And it uses big solutions to frame the problem -- not the other way around.

Until now the Apollo Alliance has focused not on crafting legislative solutions but rather on building a coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allies who share a common vision for the future and a common set of values. The Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the country's leading labor unions and environmental groups ranging from NRDC to Rainforest Action Network.

Whether or not you believe that the New Apollo Project is on the mark, it is at the very least a sincere attempt to undermine the assumptions beneath special interest environmentalism. Just two years old, Apollo offers a vision that can set the context for a myriad of national and local Apollo proposals, all of which will aim to treat labor unions, civil rights groups, and businesses not simply as means to an end but as true allies whose interests in economic development can be aligned with strong action on global warming.

Van Jones, the up-and-coming civil rights leader and co-founder of the California Apollo Project, likens these four groups to the four wheels on the car needed to make "an ecological U-turn." Van has extended the metaphor elegantly: "We need all four wheels to be turning at the same time and at the same speed. Otherwise the car won't go anywhere."

Our point is not that Apollo is the answer to the environmental movement's losing streak on global warming. Rather we are arguing that all proposals aimed at dealing with global warming -- Kyoto, McCain-Lieberman, CAFE, carbon taxes, WEMP, and Apollo -- must be evaluated not only for whether they will get us the environmental protections we need but also whether they will define the debate, divide our opponents and build our political power over time.

It is our contention that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its vision for the future and the values it carries within it than on its technical policy specifications. What's so powerful about Apollo is not its 10-point plan or its detailed set of policies but rather its inclusive and hopeful vision for America's future.

"There was a brief period of time when my colleagues thought I was crazy to grab onto Apollo," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, a co-chair of the Apollo Alliance. "They kept looking at Apollo as a policy outcome and I viewed it as a way of reframing the issue. They kept asking, "How do you know [Teamsters President] Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. is going to get the issue?' I answered, 'Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. isn't! I'm not doing policy mark-up here, I'm trying to get the people that work for Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. to do something different.'"

Getting labor to do something different is no easier than getting environmentalists to. Its problems are similar to those of the environmental movement: lack of a vision, a coherent set of values, and policy proposals that build its power. There's no guarantee that the environmental movement can fix labor's woes or vice versa. But if we would focus on how our interests are aligned we might craft something more creative together than apart. By signifying a unified concern for people and the climate, Apollo aims to deconstruct the assumptions underneath the categories "labor" and "the environment."

Apollo was created differently from proposals like McCain-Lieberman. We started by getting clear about our vision and values and then created a coalition of environmentalists, unions, and civil rights groups before reaching out to Reagan Democrats and other blue-collar constituents who have been financially wrecked by the last 20 years of economic and trade policies. These working families were a key part of the New Deal coalition that governed America through the middle of the last century. Though ostensibly liberal on economic issues, Reagan Democrats have become increasingly suspicious of American government and conservative on social issues, including environmentalism, due in no small part to the success of conservatives in consistently targeting this group with strategic initiatives. And yet more than 80 percent of Reagan Democrats, our polling discovered, support Apollo -- higher rates even than college-educated Democrats.

Irrespective of its short-term impact on US energy policy, Apollo will be successful if it elevates the key progressive values noted above among this critical constituency of opportunity. Viewed as part of a larger effort to build a true, values-based progressive majority in the United States, Apollo should be conceived of as one among several initiatives designed to create bridge values for this constituency to move, over time, toward holding consistent and coherent views that look more and more like those of America's progressive and environmental base.

Despite Apollo's political strengths, it irked many environmental leaders who believe that if we don't talk about regulation we won't get regulation. Nowhere does policy literalism rear its head more than in arguments against Apollo's focus on investment. That's because instead of emphasizing the need for command-and-control regulations, Apollo stresses the need for greater public-private investments to establish American leadership in the clean energy revolution -- investments like those America made in the railroads, the highways, the electronics industry and the Internet. "We've been positive publicly about Apollo," Hawkins said, "but not positive policy-wise because it doesn't have binding limits, either on CAFE or carbon."

Van Jones believes Apollo represents a third wave of environmentalism.

"The first wave of environmentalism was framed around conservation and the second around regulation," Jones said. "We believe the third wave will be framed around investment."

The New Apollo Project recognizes that we can no longer afford to address the world's problems separately. Most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce what they have to worry about. Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it. We want the public to care about and focus not only on global warming and rainforests but also species extinction, non-native plant invasives, agribusiness, overfishing, mercury, and toxic dumps.

Talking at the public about this laundry lists of concerns is what environmentalists refer to as "public education." The assumption here is that the American electorate consists of 100 million policy wonks eager to digest the bleak news we have to deliver.

Whereas neocons make proposals using their core values as a strategy for building a political majority, liberals, especially environmentalists, try to win on one issue at a time. We come together only around elections when our candidates run on our issue lists and technical policy solutions. The problem, of course, isn't just that environmentalism has become a special interest. The problem is that all liberal politics have become special interests. And whether or not you agree that Apollo is a step in the right direction, it has, we believed, challenged old ways of thinking about the problem.


Getting Back on the Offensive

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

Industry and conservative lobbyists prevent action on global warming proposals by framing their attacks around an issue of far greater salience for the American people: jobs. The industry opposition claims that action on global warming will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. They repeat this claim, ad nauseum, through bogus studies, advertisements, lobbying, public relations, and alliance building among businesses and labor unions.

The environmental leaders we interviewed tended to reinforce the industry position by responding to it, in typical literal fashion, rather than attack industry for opposing proposals that will create millions of good new jobs.

In a written statement, Pew's Josh Reichert said, "Ultimately, the labor movement in this country needs to become positively engaged in efforts to address climate change. They need to recognize that, if done properly, reducing greenhouse gases will not be detrimental to labor. On the contrary, it will spawn industries and create jobs that we don't have now."

The unspoken assumptions here are a) the problem, or "root cause," is "greenhouse gases", b) labor must accept the environmental movement's framing of the problem as greenhouse gases, and c) it's the responsibility of labor to get with the program on global warming.

The problem is that environmental leaders have persuaded themselves that it's their job to worry about "environmental" problems and that it's the labor movement's job to worry about "labor" problems. If there's overlap, they say, great. But we should never ever forget who we really are.

"Global warming is an apt example of why environmentalists must break out of their ghetto," said Lance Lindblom, President and CEO of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. "Our opponents use our inability to form effective alliances to drive a wedge through our potential coalition. Some of this is a cultural problem. Environmentalists think, 'You're talking to me about your job -- I'm talking about saving the world!' Developing new energy industries will clearly help working families and increase national security, but there's still no intuition that all of these are consistent concerns."

The tendency to put the environment into an airtight container away from the concerns of others is at the heart of the environmental movement's defensiveness on economic issues. Our defensiveness on the economy elevates the frame that action on global warming will kill jobs and raise electricity bills. The notion that environmentalists should answer industry charges instead of attacking those very industries for blocking investment into the good new jobs of the future is yet another symptom of literal-scleroris.

Answering charges with the literal "truth" is a bit like responding to the Republican "Swift Boats for Truth" ad campaign with the facts about John Kerry's war record. The way to win is not to defend -- it's to attack.

Given the movement's adherence to fixed and arbitrary categories it's not surprising that even its best political allies fall into the same traps. At a Pew Center on Global Climate Change conference last June, Senator John McCain awkwardly and unsuccessfully tried to flip the economic argument on his opponents: "I think the economic impact [of climate change] would be devastating. Our way of life is in danger. This is a serious problem. Relief is not on the way."

Senator Lieberman did an even worse job, as one might expect from someone who makes conservative arguments for liberal initiatives: "Confronting global warming need not be wrenching to our economy if we take simple sensible steps now."

There is no shortage of examples of environmentalists struggling to explain the supposed costs of taking action on global warming. A June poll conducted for environmental backers of McCain-Lieberman found that 70 percent of Americans support the goals of the Climate Stewardship Act "despite the likelihood it may raise energy costs by more than $15 a month per household." In the online magazine Grist, Thad Miller approvingly cites a study done by MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change that "predicts household energy expenditures under the bill would increase by a modest $89."

More good news from the environmental community: not only won't we kill as many jobs as you think, we only want to raise your energy bill a little bit!

For nearly every environmental leader we spoke to, the job cr

There Is Something Different About Global Warming

Dear Environmental Grant-Maker:

You may have recently received a memorandum entitled "The Death of Environmentalism" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. Carl Pope.I was one of the twenty-five people interviewed for this piece. While I personally was treated fairly, I am still deeply disappointed and angered by it. I share the thesis that some fundamental changes are needed in the way environmentalists approach the challenge of global warming. But I believe that their paper, because it is unfair, unclear and divisive, has actually muddied the water and made the task of figuring out a comprehensive and effective set of strategies more difficult.


Summed up, Shellenberger and Nordhaus (S&N) argue three relatively established points:

a) We are making inadequate progress on global warming.

b) We have inadequately mobilized public concerns and values to create political pressure. As a result decision makers have not been forced to confront the need for fundamental changes in the way our society uses carbon (and other greenhouse gasses).

c) This inadequacy is related to a common set of failings and weaknesses which afflict progressive social movements in general, by contrast with the reinvigorated and more strategically integrated efforts of the hard right.

I agree with these three points; indeed, it is hard to find anyone who doesn't agree with them. These concerns are widely and broadly shared among both environmental advocates and funders. The results of the election undoubtedly reinforced this consensus. There is nothing particularly new or striking, or controversial, about these points.

Where We Diverge

But Shellenberger and Nordhaus frame these three points within a very troublesome and divisive set of conclusions about the broader environmental movement. These conclusions do not flow from their interviews. They are not documented or justified in their paper. My fear is that these conclusions are so fundamentally flawed that they may distract us from the real work at hand -- to craft a set of understandings and approaches that will move us forward towards global warming solutions.


What They Overlook

Environmentalism is a broad, diverse and robust movement. It has provided some of the deepest and most questioning analysis of our ethical relationship to other species of our era. It deploys a wide variety of advocacy paradigms -- policy based interest group analysis is one, but there are also placed-based, values-driven and rights-rooted traditions and models to draw upon.

Environmentalists have found it difficult to mobilize public support around global warming issues -- even in times and places when public outrage over issues like mercury poisoning or clear-cutting has been boiling over. There is something different about global warming.

Environmentalism is part of a broader progressive movement, which the right has invested enormously in undercutting for the past thirty years. As part of that broader movement, we do have some work to do -- but dying does not seem a particularly helpful form of that work.


Their Argument

Their overall thrust, unfortunately, is summarized by the title of their paper, "The Death of Environmentalism." The arguments are internally contradictory, but the logic runs something like this:

i) The leadership of the environmental movement, overall, are a bunch of narrowly focused and politically blinded policy wonks -- individually smart but collectively stupid.

ii) This blindness is the result of the very definition of environmentalism. "The environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of "the environment" has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level."

iii) The environmental movement is in denial about the challenges it is facing. "In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C."

iv) The history of both Kyoto and CAFE standards reveals a consistent failure on the part of the environmental movement to comprehend that effective strategies to decarbonize the economy must take into account the priorities and needs of other players -- the American auto industry, auto workers, labor in general, and the broader progressive community.

v) The environmental movement is incapable of responding to the challenge because its leaders are mired in the successes of the 1970's. "It was then, at the height of the movement's success, that the seeds of failure were planted. The environmental community's success created a strong confidence -- and in some cases bald arrogance -- that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level."

vi) As a result, we must consider junking the institutional framework of the environmental movement. "We need to take a hard look at the institutions the movement has built over the last 30 years. Are existing environmental institutions up to the task of imagining the post-global warming world? Or do we now need a set of new institutions founded around a more expansive vision and set of values?"

vii) The existing leadership is bankrupt and incapable of responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century. They should step aside to allow a new generation of leaders to take over. "Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing."

viii) Indeed, the environmental movement itself should pass from the scene. It's time has come and gone. "We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live."


Do Shellenberger and Nordhaus Make Their Case?

This second set of arguments makes a very large set of claims, indeed. Given that they wrote their piece in a few months after only 25 interviews, it may not be surprising that Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to adequately buttress such a far-reaching set of assertions. It is not clear what possessed them to try to build such an ambitious premise on such a flimsy foundation. Boldness and hubris are closely related.

Their case is not only flimsy, it is internally contradictory and misleading. I still think it is important to address their arguments because, unchallenged, they may distract us from a set of very real challenges which require extending and rethinking our approach to global warming advocacy, not junking modern environmentalism.


Who Are Environmentalists?

S&N assert, "the environment is a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate "thing" and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the "natural world". The two major ethical streams in modern environmentalism are deep ecology and environmental justice. Neither accepts either of these notions. Who were they thinking of when they made these statements? They offer not a single quote to suggest that anyone they interviewed believes that human beings are "separate from and superior to the natural world." Not one.

It would be hard to think of a social movement struggling harder to free itself from these two "notions" than environmentalism. But it is environmentalism whose death they advocate.

In other places, S&N appear to define the environmental movement as the 25 people they interviewed. When they urge that "environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be," they utterly ignore such leaders as Wendell Berry, Paul Shepherd, Thomas Barry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Leopold. They interviewed 25 policy people, and then complain that they got only policy expertise from their interviews. Environmentalism has both poets and wonks; you don't go to your legislative counsel for a sonnet, nor to your troubadour for a reply brief.


Is the Definition the Problem?

S&N complain that "Most environmentalists don't think of 'the environment' as a mental category at all -- they think of it as a real "thing" to be protected and defended. They think of themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing."

So?

Without being too precious, the environment is a real thing. There is a global carbon cycle, human interventions are a small if meaningful part of the evolutionary process, homo sapiens depend upon a complex web of both geochemical and biological processes. Natural processes -- eutrophication, competition, speciation, nutrient cycling, sequestration -- continue around us according to their own dynamics. We influence, but do not control, the climate. Of course our understanding of these phenomena proceeds through mental constructs which are not the phenomena themselves -- we've known that since Kant.

But I don't think that the definition of what constitutes an environmental problem is the arbitrary and troublesome source of weakness that S&N suggest. They have erected, and then blown aside, a straw man. For example, they assert that "the environmental movement's failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to deal with global warming is directly related to the movement's reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g., "too much carbon in the atmosphere") of any given environmental problem."

This charge does not explain why this same inadequate definition of what constitutes environmentalism has proven potent when applied to wilderness preservation, mercury in our waterways, or sewage in our basements. Environmentalism has failed with regard to global warming precisely in contrast to its success in mobilizing public passions on these other problems. This strongly suggests that we need to look not at what these problems have in common -- the movement's definitions of the environment -- but what is unique or different about global warming.


Are Environmental Leaders Clueless and Naive?

S&N argue that environmentalists are living in lotus land about how they are faring. In addition to the claim that our movement believes that better light bulbs will solve the global warming problem, they maintain that "environmentalists are particularly upbeat about the direction of public opinion thanks in large part to the polling they conduct that shows wide support for their proposals. Yet America is a vastly more right-wing country than it was three decades ago. The domination of American politics by the far-right is a central obstacle to achieving action on global warming. Yet almost none of the environmentalists we interviewed thought to mention it."

I spend a great deal of my time with environmental leaders. I know of none that I would describe as "sanguine" that technical solutions will solve the problem of global warming. I have participated in dozens of debates about the meaning of public opinion polls, none of which were particularly "upbeat." I can testify that environmental leaders like those S&N interviewed think about the power and success of the right almost obsessively. I seriously doubt that S&N asked any one of their interviewees if they thought this was a problem and got the answer, "No, nothing to worry about."


A Flawed Argument From History

S&N then make an argument from history, saying that there have been no epoch making big wins in recent decades like those of the late 60's and early 70's. They specifically criticize environmentalists for a series of strategic and movement building failures, narrating the history of global warming advocacy since the 1980's. But again they fail to show why if the problem is environmentalism, labor and social justice movements have also done very poorly since 1980.

On the specifics of global warming, their historical narrative is sadly incomplete and riddled with inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies. I and the Sierra Club have been part of the CAFE battle longer than any of the sources S&N cite in their history. But in our interview they never asked me any questions about the history of the environmental movement's engagement with either the auto companies or the UAW on fuel efficiency. As a result, they got the story almost entirely wrong.

For example, the Sierra Club has consistently understood CAFE as a program which needed to be used to preserve and enhance the US auto industry, the very point they attack environmentalists for ignoring. As early as the Carter Administration the Sierra Club sought an alliance with the UAW on domestic content legislation to free the union up to become again an advocate for change among the domestic manufacturers. Environmentalists have also continuously and intensely explored ways to make the program work for both the unions and the domestic manufacturers by offering tax credits or other mechanisms to finance the necessary catch-up by Detroit.

The authors claim that in the 1990's, "having gathered 59 votes -- one short of what's needed to stop a filibuster -- Senator Richard Bryan nearly passed legislation to raise fuel economy standards in 1990. But one year later, when Bryan had a very good shot at getting the 60 votes he needed, the environmental movement cut a deal with the automakers. In exchange for the auto industry's opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentalists agreed to drop their support for the Bryan bill."

This is rubbish. This statement appears to be based on a quote in Keith Bradsher's book drawn in turn from an earlier work by Jack Doyle. The reality is that Senator Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, to get an omnibus energy bill which included drilling the Arctic beyond a Senate filibuster and into conference with the House, included a 37 mpg CAFE standard as part of that bill. Auto companies opposed the bill, making it clear that the CAFE proposal would not survive conference with the House. Environmental groups opposed it because it was clear that drilling the Arctic would survive such a conference and would end up on the President's desk to be signed. Senator Bryan, far from being abandoned by environmentalists, was one of the first Senators to sign up for the filibuster against the Johnston-Wallop bill.

Johnston offered repeated carrots in exchange for drilling the Arctic; there was never any evidence that he had the capacity or intention to deliver on any of them; environmentalists, wisely in my view, rejected them all.

Not only is this rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. Because already, two weeks after the 2004 election, there are discussions that once again environmentalists should abandon their battle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for some forward progress on reducing carbon emissions.

What none of these discussions acknowledge is this: It is the carbon lobby that wants to drill the refuge. It is the carbon lobby that does not want to reduce carbon emissions. If the oil industry, the Bush Administration and the state of Alaska have the votes to drill the Arctic, they will do so -- they have no reason to give environmentalists something in exchange.

If environmentalists had the votes to do something to reduce carbon emissions, they should do so. They wouldn't need to trade the Arctic, and they shouldn't. This is not a market where one party owns the Arctic and can sell it in exchange for more fuel efficient trucks. The policy logic of drilling the Arctic and the policy logic of reducing carbon emissions are diametrically opposed. So this is not a rational public policy debate about how to craft a better energy policy by combining different priorities.

This is a power struggle about which way to go -- more carbon or less.


Are We Mired In the Past?

The authors assert repeatedly, but never document, that the environmental movement is still approaching things as it learned to do in the early 1970's. All that the authors offer to buttress this crucial claim is the following:

"By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war -- in particular the war they fought and won for basic environmental protections more than 30 years ago. It was then that the community's political strategy became defined around using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical policy proposals as solutions.

"The greatest achievements to reduce global warming are today happening in Europe.....

"Environmentalists are learning all the wrong lessons from Europe. We closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible."

We do need to examine the European experience. But when we do, we find the same definition of global warming as an environmental problem, and the same technical policy solutions. What is different is the politics of carbon. European nations have been carbon importers for much longer than the U.S., and most have nationalized those industries so that they are no longer independent political actors.


Should We Junk Our Institutions?

Here's where shoddy research is so damaging.

S&N assert there is a void needing to be filled. "If, for example, environmentalists don't consider the high cost of health care, R&D tax credits, and the overall competitiveness of the American auto industry to be "environmental issues," then who will think creatively about a proposal that works for industry, workers, communities and the environment? If framing proposals around narrow technical solutions is an ingrained habit of the environmental movement, then who will craft proposals framed around vision and values?"

Good questions -- IF. But the full record, as I mention above, shows that environmental groups have incorporated competitiveness into their thinking for 26 years. They continue to do so. In the summer of 2002 the Sierra Club joined the Steelworkers in calling for federal action to relieve steel companies of their legacy pension and health costs. This action, which the authors call unthinkable, was fairly routine for us. Contrary to the author's stated assumption, no one in the environmental movement was critical of the Club for taking this stance. In fact, we got a lot of praise.

The perception that the movement is overly obsessed with technical solutions appears to be an artifact of S&N having focused their interviews on the movement's technicians. Again, to make such a claim about leaders like Randy Hayes or Dave Foreman is absurd -- but neither of them was interviewed. The author's entire edifice thus rests on sand. The tide is still coming in and out, and the environmental movement, leaders and institutions both, are still growing and changing like the ecosystem they are.


Is the Problem Generational?

The authors start out with an almost ritualized obeisance to earlier generations of environmentalists:

"Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us. The clean water we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilderness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The two of us have worked for most of the country's leading environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the environmental community. They have worked hard and accomplished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful."

They then move on to an almost equally ritualized sacrifice.

"Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing."

An anthropologist would be thrilled to find patricide still servings its ritual purpose.

Having framed the basic issues as generational, they spend the rest of the paper savaging their "parents and elders." (It's not clear who delegated the two of them to speak for the children in this generationally divided family they have hypothesized.)

Yet there's simply no evidence in the paper that there are any consistent differences on the crucial issues between different generations within the environmental movement. I freely grant that there are, and should be, different generational leadership styles, different understandings of how to advance environmental change, different political strategies. But there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever in the S&N paper that on the key issues they raise the differences are generational. Do younger environmental ethicists see issues differently than their predecessors? Is there less interest in the technical issues of carbon trading among younger economists within the environmental movement? Do older environmental justice advocates fail to see the need to be more inclusive?

S&N have taken the normal, important, and inevitable segmentation within the environmental movement, and pretended that it can be explained as a matter of generational succession -- without an iota of evidence.


The End of Environmentalism?

Perhaps the most self-serving and damaging paragraph in the paper is the following:

"At the same time, we believe that the best way to honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis."

I say self serving because, given that the chosen audience of the paper was the funders, it will be hard for many readers to avoid the suspicion that the not so hidden message was "fund us instead."

And I say damaging because by mingling the issue of the need for deeper and more effective global warming strategies with an ill-thought out assault on environmentalism, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are likely to create defensiveness, not receptivity; resistance, not movement; back-lash, not progress.


Do They Offer a Better Way?

If the paper offered a clear and constructive path forward, the internal contradictions of the analysis would matter less. They would be offering a better reasoned "what" instead of merely suggesting themselves as "who." Instead, they have offered a hodge podge. They are clear, as others have been, that focusing just on tactics is not enough, that we need to engage people as moral beings and tap into their deepest values. They join the chorus which has pointed out that alliances need to be based on true mutuality, and that environmentalists and progressives need to follow the example of the hard right in doing long range thinking and work. These are all very useful, if not strikingly new concepts. But in their zeal to deconstruct the concept of modern environmentalism, and to proclaim their readiness to offer a better way forward, Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to provide their own answers to some very basic and troublesome questions.

They do not seem to have sorted out whether they think we should abandon or embrace the "tell the world how many of its problems are due to global warming frame" or what role technological optimism should play in our efforts and communications strategies. They do not touch the thorny question of how they stand on the long dialogue among social change theorists about whether incremental behavioral change leads to newer and eventually larger changes in thinking, which then enables new behavioral change or whether it is essential to first create new mental maps which enable behavioral change.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus defend their failure to come up with a new vision by saying it would be premature and presumptuous:

"We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of this report to say more about what we think must now be done because we believe that the most important next steps will emerge from teams, not individuals. Over the coming months we will be meeting with existing and emerging teams of practitioners and funders to develop a common vision and strategy for moving forward."

Unfortunately, by failing to offer their own ideas for scrutiny they rendered their report nihilistic -- able to destroy but not create.


An Alternative View

Shellenberger and Nordhaus do make one extremely compelling point:

"Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."

And buried in their paper's misguided deconstruction of environmentalism are some extremely useful clues they picked up from their interviews about where we might go:

1) Environmental advocacy has been dramatically less effective dealing with global warming than with clean air, clean water, wilderness or wildlife. That suggests that part of the problem is not a generic feature of environmentalism, but some specific differences between global warming and these other problems. Such differences are not difficult to identify. The environmental challenges which gave rise to the reforms of the early 1970's, on which the progress of the next 30 years rests, had tangible, local, and immediate consequences for the public. Lake Erie was dying under the boats of fishermen, the Cuyahoga River could be seen to burn by Clevelanders, New Yorkers had to change their shirt in the middle of the day, and children in Los Angeles could not go out and play hundreds of days a year.

The problems that environmentalism has failed to get a grasp on, or develop a deep public commitment and attention to, by contrast, are intangible, global and future oriented. Global warming, habitat fragmentation, and the loading of global ecosystems with persistent but toxic and disruptive industrial chemicals are simply harder for an opportunistic, reactive primate species to understand as threats.

2) Environmental advocacy has been less potent in the 1990's than in previous decades. So has advocacy for the broader progressive community agenda -- for justice. We have made some progress on the individualistic side of the progressive ledger -- public tolerance for racial diversity has increased, the gay and lesbian community has made dramatic strides.

But on questions of justice progressives have been losing. The labor movement, advocates for health care reform, tax justice advocates have all fared as badly as or worse than environmentalists. So whatever ails environmentalism ails these other movements as well.

The landscape on which politics has played out has changed radically. Faced with what one commentator called America's first "anti-enlightenment President" sound science alone will not carry the day. We ARE in a culture war, and rational collective self interest IS an inadequate approach.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are thus, it seems to me, correct when they say that environmentalism is falling short because it shares with the rest of the progressive movement a set of increasingly outmoded organizing, advocacy and political approaches. It is strategically disadvantaged when confronted with value based, longer range, and more carefully framed hard-right advocacy. But this is a case for modernizing the left, not for killing environmentalism.

3) One element of the left's weakness is its emphasis on technical policy analysis, not values. This weakness goes right back to the technocratic emphasis of the Progressive Movement, and of early conservationists. This approach -- interest group politics -- was codified in the 1920's by Walter Lippman and refined after World War II by writers like John Kenneth Galbraith.

Interest group politics assumed that American political parties were loose coalitions, and that the congressional and presidential branches of each party were competing for power. Interest groups could thus recruit support from individual policy makers regardless of their ostensible partisan ties. As American politics, if not the American constitution, has been moved by the right in an ever more parliamentary, party-driven direction, interest group policy advocacy becomes increasingly impotent.


Some Solutions

But working backward from this last weakness, it is important to remember, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not, that policy-based interest group advocacy is only ONE of the major organizing frameworks the modern environmental movement has employed.

Much of environmental advocacy has been place based, not policy driven, and involved creating a community vision of the desired state of a landscape, and then creating institutions charged with achieving that set of goals. (The National Park System and the Wilderness Act on the one hand, and such institutions as the California Coastal Commission on the other are prototypes.)

Other environmental advocacy has been values driven, with certain "wrong" industrial practices or technologies banned or eliminated. (Most of the current work around genetic engineering is a good example of this, as was the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980's.) And some of the most successful environmental work has aimed to create new forms of rights, so that citizens could assume more control over a wide range of decisions impacting them. (The National Environmental Policy Act, citizens suits provisions, the right-to-know movement, California's Prop 65)

These other forms of environmental advocacy are full of promise for global warming.

A striking example of one strategy to transform the global warming debate using a different, but entirely familiar form of environmental advocacy, would be to apply the well established values frame of the "polluter pays" principle.

From this perspective, at its heart, the global warming debate is not complicated. It is simply very difficult because it is about who is going to pay.

Kyoto is an attempt to start down the road that everyone knows will have a very large bill, without ever deciding who will pay for the bill. Which is why, in my view, Kyoto has gone nowhere in the U.S. Confronted with a potential liability, as long as I think I won¹t have to pay the bill, I'll hire my lawyer. That's what the US carbon lobby has done. They know carbon is a liability. They don't want to pay the bill.

This understanding that global warming is mainly a problem about who is going to pay -- which in turn depends on who we assume owned the sky to begin with -- has been articulated on the left by Peter Barnes and on the right by Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago School of Law -- normally one of environmentalism's major opponents.

But if we frame global warming as pollution, and assert that the polluter should pay, then suddenly this otherwise completely abstruse, overly technical problem becomes much easier for the public to understand.

We can then get people to recognize that you shouldn¹t be electrifying villages in India by hanging copper wires between them. You should be electrifying them with methane generators and windmills -- and the polluters, the emitters of carbon, ought to be paying for them.

We know that if we lay this necessity on the table, the other side will respond with their own values frame -- one focused on accommodation, not prevention. Here S&N seem to miss the point completely. They again fall back on their lament that the problem is the definition of the environment:

"What do we worry about when we worry about global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn't our focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster preparedness? Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced agricultural production? If so, shouldn't our focus be on increasing food production? Is it the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario suggests, world war?

"Most environmental leaders would scoff at such framings of the problem and retort, 'Disaster preparedness is not an environmental problem.'"

In fact, in refusing to accept accommodation as a proper response, environmentalists have been doing exactly what S&N advocate -- organizing around values. In rejecting accommodation, environmentalists are choosing prevention over compensation, prudence over risk. Environmentalists have repeatedly pointed out that the right's choice of "accommodation" instead of "prevention" as a response to atmospheric greenhouse gas overload is futile -- not because it is not environmental, but because it won't work. We simply won't build a sea wall around Florida, much less around the Gangetic Delta in Bangla Desh -- and a sea wall won't stop a hurricane, or save coral reefs.

There is a deep values conflict between the modern hard right on the one hand, and traditional conservatives and environmentalism on the other. It has to do with the conflict between prudence/prevention vs. risk/retaliation. Environmentalists have been pretty consistent in taking the side of traditionalism -- prudence, the precautionary principle, prevention -- against the hard libertarian right. We need to do this more explicitly around global warming.

But again, environmental discourse gives us tools we can use effectively to move the public conversation on global warming -- even though they are not the tools of interest-group lobbying.

Following this one line of possible alternative reasoning, how do we frame global warming as pollution? More particularly, how do we frame burning fossil fuel as pollution, because that is how the ordinary person will encounter this issue? Here's where it's not enough to think of global warming as a policy, or even a political problem. It's a conceptual problem. And it's a conceptual problem that environmentalism dealt with before, when it encountered the early view that "the smell of pollution is the smell of money."

As long as we view developing oil, coal and gas as development, as a form of economic advancement, it will be very hard, simultaneously, to say that we should charge people lots of money for doing so -- it feels like a punishment for success.

That's yet another reason why conventional interest group advocacy won't work on this issue -- it's more than the new power of the right. Neither moderate Republicans nor Democrats have been able to shake themselves loose of the regional power of the carbon lobby. No one, environmentalists or some broader group that S&N might imagine, will be able to solve the problem of global warming by persuading members of the House and Senate that there are good alternatives, and that if we do the right things we can get rid of oil and coal and still have a good economy with lots and lots of stuff to consume. That case has been made aptly and effectively, in DC (and elsewhere).

What the environmental community must grapple with is, "How do you deal with the reality that not everyone in Washington thinks a world without oil and coal is a good thing?" America's leaders think that, overall, producing fossil fuels is a form of progress. And they have ample incentives to keep on thinking that way. That's why, in my view there is no elite solution. You can't bring the world's leaders together to solve this problem. The world's leaders are the problem.

We need to start talking about our current pattern of consuming ever more carbon as a public health problem not an economic solution. A hundred years ago open sewers were common. Today, if we were to see an overflowing open sewer, and someone said make it twice as wide to handle all the new sewage, we would not think that was a good thing (and a mayor who proposed that would be in trouble).

We won't make progress as long as we conceptualize fossil fuel consumption as a good thing (along the recent lines laid out by the World Bank) instead of presenting fossil fuel consumption as our century's open sewer. But once we start thinking about fossil fuel consumption in this way, we need to recognize that the political problem gets bigger before it get smaller. We have to deal with the reality that there are win-win solutions for the economy as a whole, but not for Exxon -- (or the Saudis.) We should acknowledge that it's not a win-win for Exxon. (There can be win-wins for General Motors.) The conversation we are having should be about an entirely different energy future, one which will mean a dramatic reconfiguration of the world's wealth. Now how will we get that done?

Fully exploiting the potential of the pollution frame is, again, only one potential course for reframing the issue of global warming.

Another is to take advantage of place-based environmentalism. One of the major global warming issues is that there are a huge number of coal fired power plants being proposed in the US -- about 112 gigawatts. If approved and built, these will have operating lifetimes in excess of 60 years. Their carbon dioxide emissions alone will drastically impair the US's ability to cut its emissions. They will also preempt the market for wind and solar. So if they are built, we are cooked.

But they must be built somewhere. Wherever they are built there are place based advocacy tools to resist, which have been used quite successfully, say, in Colorado, as part of an integrated campaign to encourage wind and solar. So here is another example of reshaping an existing advocacy approach from the traditions of the environmental movement to make effective forward progress on global warming.

Again, I would say we did something much like that in the late 60's or 70's with pollution, in the 80's with nuclear power, and have been having surprising success doing it in the last decade with genetically modified foods.

Global warming is a more abstract, distant problem; the economic transformation required is bigger; it needs deeper, more robust, more sustained collaborations; it needs to be harnessed to a broader vision of a new economic order. There is more than enough hard work to go around. We ought not to get distracted by conversations about "the death of environmentalism"; we should avoid allowing ourselves to be divided by glib generalizations about generational divides; we should above all be creative, not destructive.


Confusion With the Apollo Alliance

Because I am one of the co-chairs of the Apollo Alliance, and because S&N referred so heavily to the Alliance, I went to the trouble of checking with the other leaders of Apollo to see what their involvement in this piece had been. Their response makes it very clear that Shellenberger and Nordhaus were speaking only for themselves, and that the Apollo Alliance as a whole had not even seen this document before it was distributed:

Another unfortunate aspect of the paper was that it left the impression that the Apollo Alliance sanctioned the substance, criticism or tone of the analysis. In fact, Alliance partners such as my fellow Alliance co-chair Leo Gerard (Steelworkers), as well as key partners Robert Borosage (Institute of America's Future), Dan Carol (CTSG), Joel Rogers (Center on Wisconsin Strategy), as well as Alliance Executive Director Bracken Hendricks did not see a copy of the paper until it was released for EGA, nor were they aware of its existence before its release.

Of particular concern to Alliance partners is the suggestion in the paper, real or implied, that the Apollo Alliance's model green jobs investment plan released last year, was, in any way, a complete "solution" to the climate change challenge we face. The Apollo vision is animated by the strength of environmental values and the vitality of a popular movement that is one of the great hopes for re-tooling the nation's policies to create clean energy jobs, a sustainable economy, and a safer world.

Most disturbingly, to me and the Apollo team, was that the paper was not in the spirit of our project, which has been seeking for the last two years to evangelize and create innovative new alliances and partnerships for tomorrow -- not practice the "push-off" politics of the past.

These at-times painstaking efforts have sought to balance the passions of many, many stakeholders; and so it was disappointing to me and the Apollo team to see the passions of a few, however well meant, to raise their voices over others. It is not how we operate, and it's surely not how we will succeed together.

Sincerely,

Carl Pope
Executive Director
Sierra Club

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has joined forces with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service to find constructive uses for an aggressive tree species plaguing the southwestern United States. The goal of the joint effort is to control the spread of saltcedar, a tree that displaces native plants and devastates wildlife habitat and ecosystems on more than a million acres of rangeland.

BLM Director Kathleen Clarke met today with researchers at the Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) in Madison, Wisconsin, and toured the facility where scientists are testing saltcedar and other trees from BLM land to make a wood-plastic composite. The Director witnessed a demonstration that turned saltcedar and juniper removed from BLM land during restoration projects into boards that hold promise as house siding. “This project shows how the Federal government can turn problems into opportunities,” said Clarke. “Turning this unwanted species into building material simultaneously slows the spread of this tree on BLM land and creates a market for it,” she added.

Also known as tamarisk, saltcedars deplete surface water and groundwater and are believed to increase the salinity of soil, making the area inhospitable for native plants. Thought to have been introduced into this country from the Middle East in the 1800s, saltcedar spreads rapidly and supplants native species. A single saltcedar tree, for example, can consume up to 300 gallons of water per day and produce up to 500,000 seeds per year. These seeds establish themselves aggressively along ecologically significant stream corridors, where they crowd out native vegetation, which in turn deprives wildlife of the nutrition provided by indigenous trees.

The high cost of removing saltcedars and the lack of a market for the removed trees has hindered efforts to control the tree’s spread. In recent years, however, FPL researchers have developed techniques for combining wood with plastic to make composite materials that can be used for a variety of purposes, such as outdoor furniture, signage, and decking lumber. While the scientists’ principal purpose was to find uses for the small trees and underbrush that choke Federal forests and rangeland and increases the risk of catastrophic wildfires, researchers also looked at invasive species such as juniper and saltcedar. If markets can be created for these small trees and woody vegetation, the sale of those materials could help subsidize the cost of their removal from the public lands.

As part of the inter-agency project with BLM, FPL researchers such as Drs. Craig Clemons and Nicole Stark are expanding their work with saltcedar. This summer, BLM sent FPL a ton each of juniper and saltcedar. FPL pulverized the wood material and compounded it with polyethylene plastic and formed the wood-plastic composite into pellets. In the study that Director Clarke observed, the pellets are processed through an extruder that produces boards that might be suitable for house siding. Boards made from combinations of saltcedar, juniper, and plastic will then be exposed to the elements to study their long-term durability.

The USDA Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory was established in 1910 with the mission of conserving and extending the country’s wood resources. Today, FPL’s research scientists explore ways to promote healthy forests and clean water, and improve papermaking and recycling processes. Through FPL’s Advanced Housing Research Center, researchers also work to improve homebuilding technologies and materials. Additional information about FPL and its research activities is available at http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us.

The BLM, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, manages more land—261 million surface acres—than any other Federal agency. Most of this public land is located in 12 Western States, including Alaska. The Bureau, with a budget of about $1.9 billion, also administers 700 million acres of sub-surface mineral estate throughout the nation. The BLM’s multiple-use mission is to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. The Bureau accomplishes this by managing such activities as outdoor recreation, livestock grazing, mineral development, and energy production, and by conserving natural, historical, cultural, and other resources on the public lands.

Supermarket retailer Giant Eagle, Inc. today became the nation's first grocer to operate a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified supermarket at one of its locations in Northeastern Ohio. LEED, a national green building rating system administered by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), designates that Giant Eagle has and will continue to meet required standards by incorporating environmentally responsible features and systems into the building.

The 80,000 square foot supermarket, opened this past summer and located in the Brunswick Town Center shopping plaza, is the first supermarket to earn an environmentally-friendly designation. No other supermarket has earned an equivalent award in the world. The LEED designation builds on the company's commitment to responsible resource use, as it was recognized in February as a 2004 ENERGY STAR Retail Partner of the Year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for adopting smart and efficient energy practices.

"Becoming the first LEED-certified supermarket underscores the importance of being an environmentally responsible member of the communities we serve," said Giant Eagle Vice President of Marketing Kevin Srigley. "It is a continuation of our pledge to understand the environmental issues that we all face and to adopt appropriate practices to meet those challenges. Our conservation department continues to pursue alternative sources of energy and conservation initiatives." When building its Brunswick supermarket, Giant Eagle implemented the following environmentally-friendly features:

-- The consumption of 30 percent less energy than comparable supermarkets, with more than 50 percent of the location's electrical energy supplied through wind generation. -- 50 skylights integrated with electrical lighting sensors, which automatically adjust the amount of electric light supplied depending on the light generated by the skylight. -- Air quality sensors to monitor for carbon dioxide and other gases to ensure fresh, clean air throughout the entire store. -- The absence of ozone-depleting refrigerants in the refrigeration and cooling systems. -- Natural filtration of parking lot storm water into the adjacent marshland. -- Water conserving equipment that will save more than 100,000 gallons per year. -- Drought-resistant plants and trees that require no irrigation other than natural rainfall, resulting in a savings of approximately 400,000 gallons of water each year. -- A green housekeeping program that uses environmentally responsible cleaning products. -- A white, reflective roof and increased insulation to allow the building to cool and heat easier. -- The Eagle's Nest(R) child learning and activity center, for children ages 3-9, features furniture made of particle board using pressed sunflower seeds. -- Cabinetry made of recycled strawboard. -- Gypsum wallboard made of 100 percent recycled materials. -- Adhesives, sealants, paints, carpeting and wood products that are low in volatile organic compounds. "A great deal of time, talent and resources went into making our Brunswick concept a reality," added Giant Eagle Director of Conservation jim lampl. "We already are implementing many of these features into our new supermarkets for the benefit of our employees and customers."

"Today's historic accomplishment is a vital piece to the overall environmental health of our country," said Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC President, CEO & Founding Chair. "Giant Eagle's determination to become the first LEED- certified supermarket is unmatched and sets an important example for others in the supermarket industry to follow." Guided tours of the LEED features employed at the Brunswick Giant Eagle are available to the public, and teachers interested in educational visits can make arrangements by contacting the store at (330) 225-0616. Reservations are not required for impromptu individual tours, but are needed for large groups. About Giant Eagle Giant Eagle, Inc., ranked 28 on Forbes magazine's largest private corporations list and recipient of Progressive Grocer's 2002 Retailer of the Year Award, is one of the nation's largest food retailers and food distributors with more than $5.2 billion in annual sales. Founded in 1931, Giant Eagle, Inc. has grown to be the number one supermarket retailer in the region with 140 corporate and 81 independently owned and operated stores throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, north central West Virginia and Maryland.

Giant Eagle was named America's Second Harvest 2004 Regional Retailer of the Year for its support of local food banks, and also actively supports numerous community events, the United Way, The Salvation Army, Race For The Cure and other non-profit organizations. The company also has created education initiatives such as Apples For The Students, which has provided millions of dollars in computer equipment, software and other classroom learning tools for local schools and the Be A Smart Shopper school nutrition program. Further information can be found at GiantEagle.com. About USGBC

The U.S. Green Building Council is the nation's leading coalition of corporations, builders, universities, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations working together to promote buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work. Since its founding in 1993, the Council has grown to more than 5,300 member companies and organizations, a 50-person professional staff, a broad portfolio of LEED® products and services, the industry's popular Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, and a network of 67 local chapters, affiliates, and organizing groups.

Source: Giant Eagle, Inc. Wednesday, December 22, 2004

WASHINGTON, DC — The rapid consumption of land in the nation’s fastest-growing large metropolitan areas could threaten the survival of nearly one out of every three imperiled species, according to the first study ever to quantify the impact of sprawling development on wildlife nationally. In at least three dozen rapidly-growing counties found mostly in the South and West, open space on non-federal lands is being lost so quickly that essential wildlife habitat will be mostly gone within the next two decades, unless development patterns are altered.

According to the report Endangered By Sprawl: How Runaway Development Threatens America’s Wildlife, produced by the National Wildlife Federation, Smart Growth America, and NatureServe, the rapid conversion of once-natural areas and farmland into subdivisions, shopping centers, roads and parking lots has become a leading threat to America’s native plants and animals.

“Runaway sprawl will deplete wildlife habitat in many metropolitan areas in the next two decades,” said John Kostyack, National Wildlife Federation Senior Counsel and a co-author of the report. “As Endangered by Sprawl shows, consumption of these critical areas could bring an astonishing number of species up to, or even over, the brink of extinction. If we allow that to happen, both people and wildlife will suffer.”

The report recommends ways to stem the tide of habitat loss by changing local land use patterns and improving state and federal natural resource and transportation policies. “As Congress prepares to debate the future of the Endangered Species Act, this study drives home the critical role that better planning must play in both protecting threatened wildlife and improving our cities and towns,” said Don Chen, Executive Director of Smart Growth America. “To check runaway land consumption, we need to provide incentives for development in existing urban and suburban areas, build new development at higher densities, and set aside natural areas as off limits to new development.”

Endangered by Sprawl integrates widely accepted measures of development density and projections of population growth with a new analysis of the comprehensive data on rare and endangered species that is compiled by the NatureServe network of state natural heritage programs. It shows that imperiled plants and animals are not found only in remote wildernesses; their habitat is often intertwined with where most people live. Although the nation’s 35 fastest-growing large metropolitan areas (those with more than one million people in 2000) comprise just eight percent of the land area of the lower 48 states, they are home to nearly one-third (29 percent) of the imperiled species analyzed—nearly 1,200 species in all. And remarkably, 553 of these species(13 percent) are found only in the fast-growing large metro areas. At current rates of sprawl, by 2025 theserapidly spreading metro areas will convert an area equivalent to the size of West Virginia (about 22,000 squaremiles) from natural habitat to development.

Because each metro area typically comprises several counties, when the results are broken down by county they tell an even more alarming story. Under existing patterns of development, 18 counties are on track to use up all their non-federal farmland and habitat to accommodate projected growth by or before 2025.
Examples include Cobb, Gwinnett, and DeKalb counties in the Atlanta area, Dallas and Tarrant counties in the Dallas area, Harris County in the Houston area, and Broward County in the Miami area. Another 19 counties will consume more than half of their open land in the same timeframe.

Many large counties where the greatest amounts of land are being lost are also home to high numbers of rare animals and plants. The problem is especially acute in California, home to more imperiled species than any other state. Within the 35 fast-growing large metro areas, eight of the top ten counties for imperiled species are in the Golden State. They include San Diego County with 99 species, Los Angeles County with 94 species, and San Bernardino County with 85. Other notable places where rapid growth threatens large numbers of imperiled plants and animals include the Las Vegas area (Clark County, 97 species), Phoenix (Maricopa County, 22 species), and Florida (the Miami, Orlando, and Tampa-St. Petersburg areas). The seeming anomaly in the group is Shelby County, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham that is currently home to 27 imperiled species, and is the fastest-growing county in the state.

“Forests, wetlands, and grasslands in and around cities and suburbs are essential habitat for many imperiled species, as well as the more common birds and wildlife that we know and love,” said Bruce Stein, Vice President for Programs at NatureServe. “We need to value and protect these nearby open spaces for wildlife habitat just as we do far-off national parks and wilderness areas.”

The study also highlights the forward-looking efforts of some localities to identify critical habitats and preserve them even as their regions grow. Drawing on these best practices, the report recommends tools and strategies that local governments can employ to protect open space and biodiversity, including creating and maintaining natural resource and species inventories, establishing regional cooperation, developing green infrastructure protection plans, protecting critical natural habitats, and building reliable local funding sources for habitat protection.

“The bottom line is, we live where the wild things are,” said report co-author Reid Ewing, a Professor at the National Center for Smart Growth and in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland. “We need to do a better job accommodating the natural environment along with the human environment. With proper planning, it doesn’t have to be a question of us versus them or development for people versus habitat for wildlife.”

Read the full report by clicking here, http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/ebsreport/EndangeredBySprawl.pdf

Four North Atlantic right whales have been found dead off the East Coast in the past six weeks — including two just this week — alarming scientists given that the species had been on the brink of extinction.

A dead North Atlantic right whale was spotted off the coast of Georgia on Wednesday, a day after one was found off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. Two were found in December off Virginia and Nantucket.

Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, said biologists hope to perform autopsies on the whales found this week to determine the causes of death.

“What we do know is losing that number of animals in such a short period of time puts us generally on a slippery slope to extinction,” he said.

Two of the four dead whales were pregnant females.

Population has been recovering
There are currently between 325 and 350 of the whales known to scientists. That’s an improvement from 2000, when the population was counted at about 300.

A group that has been monitoring deaths and injuries to right whales said Thursday that it fears the U.S. Navy is responsible for at least some of the incidents, pointing out that one of the pregnant females that died since December was rammed by a Navy ship outside Chesapeake Bay.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said that while the Navy had informed the group that its vessels were exercising greater caution in the migratory corridors of the Atlantic right whale, no one was monitoring the Navy to ensure that takes place.

“The Navy’s belated concessions, while welcome, may be inadequate because so long as the Navy remains the sole arbiter of the adequacy of its actions, we will continue to see more tragic accidents,” Kyla Bennett, PEER's New England director, said in a statement.

Activists: Voluntary steps not enough
Last month, the federal fisheries agency, which oversees right whale recovery, said the Navy had agreed to take certain measures to reduce ship strikes on right whales.

But PEER claimed that the Navy "refuses to even consult" with the agency "on naval operations in the mid-Atlantic that affect right whale survival."

PEER also noted that while the federal government last year said it would consider adopting ship speed limits and traffic changes in certain areas, it "has only urged voluntary cooperation" since then.

“Right whale recovery just suffered a crushing blow, with more than 1 percent of the entire population lost in a matter of weeks,” Bennett said. “If right whale extinction is to be avoided, we can no longer afford to wait for additional calamities before taking effective action.”

Consumers can do more than hope for mild weather this winter as they watch heating oil and natural gas prices hit record highs. They can take actions that will reduce their bills and offset soaring energy prices. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) offers 5 practical steps for consumers to take right now at little or no cost:

1. Change furnace filters. Monthly replacement of furnace filters in forced-air heating systems can save as much as 5% on heating bills.

2.Insulate windows with coverings. Close blinds and drapes at night to keep cold air out and open them in the day to let warm sun in. Cover windows with insulating shades or plastic sheeting to cut down heat transfer from inside to outside.

3.Install a programmable thermostat to set different temperatures during the night and day. Program it to warm up the house in the morning, keep it cooler during the day while residents are away, and warm it up again in the evening until bedtime. Consumers can save about 2% on heating bills for every degree thermostats are turned down.

4.Seal doors with draft-reducing weatherstripping and door sweeps to cut down on spaces where cold air can enter the house.

5.Lower the water heater's thermostat to the lowest level that meets your hot water needs, typically to 120°F (midway between the "low" and "medium" setting on many units). Each 10-degree reduction will save 3% to 5% on water heating costs.

In addition, consumers with older furnaces should consider replacing them with a top-rated energy-efficient model. "Consumers who replace an older heating system can yield savings of 20% to 30%, particularly if the existing system is more than 20 years old," said Jennifer Thorne Amann, co-author of the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings and an ACEEE Senior Associate. "Take a look at our Web site to find the top-rated systems," she added. The site also contains a wealth of energy- and money-saving tips, including lists of the most energy-efficient appliances.

The Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings, 8th Edition can be viewed at http://www.aceee.org/consumerguide.

A case that could determine whether 600,000 acres in Colorado - and millions more nationwide - are eligible for wilderness protection remained on hold Wednesday, when a federal appeals panel questioned whether it even belonged in the 10th Circuit Court.

The case involves Interior Secretary Gale Norton's 2003 decision to retroactively yank the Bureau of Land Management's authority to recommend areas for congressional wilderness designation.

Jim Angell, a Denver-based attorney for the environmental law group Earthjustice, called that action "a fundamental rewrite of law affecting millions of acres."

Norton's decision was the result of closed-door negotiations that settled a lawsuit between the state of Utah and the federal government.

The agreement removed protections that kept the land off-limits to oil and gas development, as well as logging, mining and some recreational uses.

The federal government contended that the BLM, a federal agency, exceeded its authority when it designated the land as potential wilderness.

On Wednesday, attorneys for the Justice Department and the state of Utah took that approach in their arguments before the 10th Circuit.

"The BLM can protect those resources. They're just not going to call it a wilderness study area," said Utah attorney Connie Brooks, using the term for areas being considered for wilderness protection.

Only Congress can make the actual wilderness designation.

The three judges on the panel sharply questioned attorneys for Earthjustice and the government as to whether the Denver court was the appropriate venue for the case.

That's because there's some confusion about whether a lower court is finished with the case in which Earthjustice and other environmental groups challenged Norton's action.

"We are a court of review," said Judge Mary Beck Briscoe of Kansas, "and I am at a loss to find anything to review." She called the uncertainty about the status of the case "a bit bizarre."

Justice Department attorney Todd Aagaard pushed that same argument in saying the court should reject the appeal. Without a final lower court judgment, he said, the case cannot be "teed up" to the appeals court.

But Angell said that the lower court, in effect, had made a decision even though some issues are still pending. That means, he said, the case can be appealed.

The situation, said Judge Michael Murphy, left the environmental group "between a rock and a hard place."

The court took no action Wednesday.

Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who helped negotiate the 2003 settlement, later was named head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Last month, President Bush named him to replace Tommy Thompson as head of the federal Health and Human Services Department.

INFOBOX

What's at stake

Regional areas affected by withdrawal of potential wilderness designation:

Colorado: 600,000 acres, much of it in Vermillion Basin and Roan Plateau

Utah: 6 million acres, including areas adjacent to Zion and Canyonlands national parks; also the San Rafael Swell, Desolation Canyon and Fisher Towers.

Wyoming: 1.5 million acres, most of it in the Red Desert

---Gwen Florio, Rocky Mountain News

ATLANTA - A federal judge on Thursday ordered the removal of stickers placed in high school biology textbooks that call evolution “a theory, not a fact,” saying they were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

The disclaimers were put in the books by school officials in suburban Cobb County in 2002.

“Adopted by the school board, funded by the money of taxpayers, and inserted by school personnel, the sticker conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others they are political insiders,” U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said in his 44-page ruling.

“This is a great day for Cobb County students,” said attorney Michael Manely, who represented parents who brought the suit. “They’re going to be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma.”

Doug Goodwin, a spokesman for Cobb County schools, said officials did not have an immediate response but were preparing a statement.

Tolerance or religious activism?
Six parents of students and the American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the stickers in court, arguing they violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The case was heard in federal court last November, where the school system defended the warning stickers as a show of tolerance, not religious activism as some parents claimed.

“The Cobb County school board is doing more than accommodating religion,” Manely had argued during the trial. “They are promoting religious dogma to all students.”

Lawyers for Cobb County disagreed, saying the school board had made a good-faith effort to address questions that inevitably arise during the teaching of evolution.

“Science and religion are related and they’re not mutually exclusive,” school district attorney Linwood Gunn said. “This sticker was an effort to get past that conflict and to teach good science.”

2,000 complaints from parents
The schools placed the stickers after more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.

The stickers read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

The case is one of several battles waged in recent years in the Bible Belt over what role evolution should play in science books. Last year, Georgia’s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time.” That plan was soon dropped amid protests by teachers.

AUBURN, New York --- In a city where a huge flock of crows has been pestering people for years, officials are fighting back with a hazing program aimed at disrupting the birds' sleep with noise and light and driving them into the countryside.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state Department of Environmental Conservation started harassing the crows Monday, and will continue through the week using hand-held lasers, pyrotechnics and amplified crow distress calls.

"They are beautiful creatures, and we don't want to hurt them. We just want them out of our downtown," said Mayor Timothy Lattimore. "We wish them well -- just somewhere else."

The invasion began about 15 years ago when more than 50,000 crows started wintering in this small upstate city 20 miles west of Syracuse -- outnumbering the human population of 28,574. Residents complain that the crows are a noisy nuisance and that they soil the city with feces and drive off other songbirds.

Three years ago, a businessman organized an informal crow hunt. Last year, the two-day contest in February attracted 208 hunters -- some from as far away as Kentucky and Arizona -- who killed 1,061 birds.

Crow season runs from September 1 to March 31, but crows can only be hunted Friday through Monday because of a quirk in a 1918 federal law covering migratory birds.

The scientists counted some 63,800 birds before hazing began.