Editors note: Over the next 5 days, It’sGettingHotInHere.org will be serializing the introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalist to the Politics of Possibility, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s latest book.
The book has stirred up a bit of controversy for its strong – yet often well-founded – criticisms of mainstream environmentalism and liberal politics. It’s also generated quite a bit of misinterpretations about the author’s positions, often by people who haven’t yet read the book.
So over the next few days, read the introduction and check out for yourself what all the fuss is about. What do you think? Is it time for a new “post-environmentalism” and a “politics of possibility?” If you’re intrigued, pick up a copy of the book and read on…
Here are the other sections of the introduction: Part 1 [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
But first, a short message from the book’s co-author and co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, Michael Shellenberger:
“Ted and I wrote Break Through with the student movement in mind, and after we attended Powershift we knew we were right to do so.
We are giving ItsGettingHotInHere.org the introduction to Break Through in the hopes that some of you will be inspired to read the whole book. If you want to read the book with a group of friends on campus, we will be happy to send you 10 or more copies of the book at cost to us — $15 per book.
Since Powershift there has been a huge amount of interest in students who want to attend the Breakthrough Generation founding meeting in the Spring. To find out more about that meeting, and about Breakthrough Summer as well, please contact Teryn Norris at Teryn[at sign]thebreakthrough[dot]org.
Enjoy the introduction…”
“From the Nightmare to the Dream” – Introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Part 1 of 5)
THIS BOOK was born from an essay, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” that we wrote in the fall of 2004. We released the essay in pamphlet form at the annual conference of environmental donors and grantees, hoping to spark a conversation among insiders. What we didn’t expect is that it would be read and debated by such a diverse audience, from college students to corporate executives, everywhere from Italy to Colombia to Japan, or that it would become a projection screen for the hopes and anxieties of the broader progressive community in the United States.
After all was said and done, the passages of our essay that seemed to resonate the most with readers were those that criticized environmentalists for their doomsday discourse. The most quoted lines in the essay were these:
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an “I have a nightmare” speech instead.
We went on to contrast the environmental movement’s complaint-based approach to politics with King’s positive vision—and called on environmentalists to replace their doomsday discourse with an imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented one.
What we didn’t know at the time we wrote those words was that King had given an “I have a nightmare” speech. In fact, he had given it just moments before he gave his “I have a dream” speech.
The setting was the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people had crowded before the Lincoln Memorial, on the Washington Mall, to hear King and other leaders rally the country to support civil rights legislation. Millions of others watched on television, where the speech was carried live by all three networks.
President John F. Kennedy had just returned from Germany; against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, he had called for freedom for those living behind the Iron Curtain. On his return, Kennedy asked King to call off the demonstration. “We want success in Congress,” the president said, “not just a big show at the Capitol.”
Kennedy’s comment tipped King into a dark mood. The worst manifestations of human nature were on display in the South—bigotry, beatings, cowardice, murder—and King was intent on making sure that white America, Kennedy included, faced up to them. And so, a few minutes before he was to speak, King leaned over to the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who had been traveling the country with him, and whispered, “Before I speak I want you to sing ‘I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned.’” When Jackson told her stage manager of King’s request, he replied, “We need a song that’s a little livelier than that!” But Jackson did as King requested. “Dere is trouble all over dis world, children,” she sang. “Dere is trouble all over dis world.”
The operating metaphor in King’s nightmare speech was the debt white America owed African Americans. “We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said, but “instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” The words revealed King’s fears that the march wouldn’t be taken seriously by Congress and the White House. “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” he warned. Those who underestimated the movement’s power, he said, would have a “rude awakening.” It was perhaps the darkest and most discouraged speech King ever gave.
But then something strange and wonderful happened. A voice rang out from the back of the dais. It was Mahalia Jackson. “Tell them about your dream, Martin!” She could feel that King had dwelt too long in the dark valley—he needed to bring the crowd up to the sunlit mountaintop. Having heard him give riffs of the dream speech to earlier audiences, Jackson knew just what King needed to do. “Tell them about the dream!” she cried once more.
King seemed to address his next line—”Let us not wallow in the valley of despair”—as much to himself as to the crowd. He then pattered—”I say to you today my friend”—and paused, triggering soft applause from the tired audience and buying himself the time he needed to reorganize this thoughts.
King then seemed to find the words Mahalia Jackson had tossed him, and he began the new speech. “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” From there King led the hot crowd in a rapid climb out of the valley.
[W]hen we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
With the words “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” racial integration suddenly felt inevitable.
Even the nervous Kennedy, who was watching the speech live on television down the street, was impressed. “He’s damn good,” he told his aides. When Kennedy greeted King at the White House later that same day, the president smiled and said, “I have a dream.”
Three months later Kennedy was dead, but his successor, Lyndon Johnson, surprised nearly everyone and became an aggressive pursuer of King’s dream. Over the next two years, Congress passed, and President Johnson signed, the sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. And while those laws might have been enacted no matter what speech King had given, it is unlikely that history would have unfolded as peacefully or as quickly as it did had it not been for King’s dramatic and mysterious leap from the nightmare to the dream.
1.
One unfortunate consequence of having quoted Dr. King in our essay was that we ended up tapping into that apparently inexhaustible reservoir of nostalgia for the 1960s. The truth is that King’s dramatic leap from the nightmare to the dream can be a parable for the future only if we first understand how much the world has changed since 1963.
Schools today are still segregated, but for reasons vastly more complex than Jim Crow. Americans of all colors are living roughly a decade longer, thanks in part to advances in medicine. Our homes and cars are larger, and more of us own them. We take such luxuries as air conditioning, cell phones, and inexpensive air travel for granted. And our air and water are far cleaner. Our unprecedented wealth and freedom have profoundly changed what we care about, aspire to, and believe in, so it’s no wonder that the old political and moral fault lines no longer apply.
Civil rights, the environment, feminism, labor—what were once cutting-edge movements are now established special interests. This is due in no small part to their success. Rights-based liberalism ended school segregation, dramatically reduced employment discrimination, and gave women the right to abortions. And environmental laws cleaned up our air and water and protected wilderness lands.
But the old politics has taken us as far as it can. The world has changed in profound ways, but liberal interest groups have not. In defining themselves and their interests so narrowly, it is the issues groups and their political allies—not bogeymen like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Heritage Foundation—who have created the widespread impression that liberalism is little more than an aggregation of the aggrieved. Environmentalists define their interest as limiting human intrusions upon nature. Health care reformers define theirs around insuring the uninsured. Civil rights groups define their mandate around ending racial prejudice and disparities. And reproductive rights and women’s groups define theirs around access to contraception and abortion.
This literalism in setting policy contains its own contradiction: in reducing their own manifold interests to single essential causes and complaints, liberal issue groups have inhibited their ability to create the kinds of broad coalitions they need to achieve their goals. And in consistently defining the interests of others—whether they are corporate executives, labor unions, or Brazilian peasants—as outside the categories of the environment and nature, environmental and conservation leaders have failed to create a politics capable of dealing with ecological crises.
That’s the end of Part 1.
Here are the other sections of the introduction: Part 1 [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
i’m intrigued and can’t wait to read the rest of this section