Major split(s) in the environmental "movement"?

[Ted King]

http://prospect.org/article/its-not-easy-being-green-0

Few heeded the warnings in time to halt the first effects of large-scale global pollution and resource depletion, and now the consequences of ignoring the warnings have come to pass. Many global fisheries are on the brink of collapse; nearly half of the planet’s land is dedicated to feeding a global population that will soon reach nine billion; freshwater scarcities in some regions are becoming acute; and, most frighteningly, we appear intent on wrecking the global atmosphere, the ecosystem on which all other ecosystems depend.

Environmentalists have found themselves being taken seriously, and it has proved to be something of a curse. As they are asked to come up with solutions for the cascading eco crises, internal divisions are becoming more obvious. The biggest divide may be between those who would do anything to cut carbon emissions and slow climate change—going so far as to support natural gas and nuclear fuel, or even supporting geo-engineering and other controversial ideas—and conservationists who don’t want to trade one earth-damaging practice for another.

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

I'm sure environmental groups have had all kinds of disagreements for quite a long time. Is this a significant new development - representing more of a major divide than in the past? Any ideas as to how this will play itself out?

Or is this almost exclusively a creation of the imagination of the writer of the article?

[mattkime]

liberals have always been poor at falling in line.

[Acer]

Those camps have always existed. There has always been a tension between those who want to preserve (i.e., not use at all) versus conserve (i.e., use but carefully.) or eliminate (close the factory) versus accommodate (install scrubbers). The camps crop up for every contentious environmental issue. They crop up at every conference, public meeting and staff meeting in the environmental field, for that matter.

I don't see why climate change is any different. Except it's such a huge issue that must be addressed on the global level. The stakes are higher and the camp voices louder.

[Ca Bob]

Conservation was once a strong element in conservatism, and certainly in the Republican Party. It's not a matter of liberal vs conservative, except that a lot of liberals or "progressives" find common cause with environmentalism at a certain level. Unfortunately, that level can often be a kind of reflex anti-corporate and anti-business consciousness that automatically blames BP and Monsanto for all the ills of this earth. The idea that nuclear power is bad for the environment is silly, but it goes along with fright about immediate damage to us humans, so it has a lot of supporters. Large environmental organizations get a lot of members and money from that group of people, so they don't dare take a rational, scientific point of view. Instead, they recite the mantra "solar, geothermal, biodiesel" without taking the time to calculate how much, how soon, or how expensive.

I've been following the Solar I project since it first got started, and I used to point out that it took a lot of land, truck trips, overhead wiring, and the assorted damage to the desert in order to generate a few hundred thousand watts. (For those who have not followed this approach, it involved building hundreds of large mirrors on swivels, and pointing them at the top of a tower which could store the heat, and out of that process, generate some electricity.) It's not impossibly stupid, but there may be other, less damaging approaches, particularly the use of solar electric panels, which have come way down in price and can be distributed a lot more easily.

There has been a bit of progress in terms of internationally regulating the oceanic fisheries, but I don't know whether it will be enough in the long run. It seems to have done well in terms of the whales, but that is completely different from the cod and tuna fisheries.

I think the real tragedy has been the failure -- resistance, actually -- to warnings about human population growth, warnings that became widely publicized in the late 1960s, and have been dangerously prophetic. Paul Erlich (The Population Bomb) misunderstood some economic issues, and famously lost a bet with a famous conservative economist over long term trends in prices of metals and so forth, but the overall damage to the surface of the earth continues. If we had half the population, we wouldn't be looking at the same level of global warming, just to take one obvious example. But somehow the population problem is never brought up nowadays. One culprit in this failure is those same environmental organizations, which hide from the topic for fear of attracting even more anger than they already do.

[Black]

Ted King wrote:
Or is this almost exclusively a creation of the imagination of the writer of the article?

Mostly this^

[the_poochies]

I'm the president of a small watershed group and we really don't deal with climate change or fracking, but I understand where these tensions lay. We have refused to take a side on fracking (although the closest Marcellus Shale is about 100 miles west of us) because it detracts us from our mission of conserving our urban watershed.

I am generally wary of humans trying to engineer themselves out of the environmental messes they created because the efforts are expensive and often ineffective. Just look how the National Flood Insurance Program subsidized people who chose to live in a flood zone. It would have been cheaper to use tax money to buy out those homes and let Mother Nature take her course, but then again, all of the politically-connected would have lost their beautiful oceanfront vistas.