It’s Getting Hot In Here

Editor’s note: This is part 2 (of 5) of the serialized introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalist to the Politics of Possibility, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s latest book.

Here are the other sections of the Introduction: [Part 1] Part 2 [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

“From the Nightmare to the Dream” – Introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Part 2 of 5)

2.

In 1943, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a seminal paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” In it he introduced the theory that humans have a “hierarchy of needs,” a deceptively simple concept that many of us can still remember seeing as a multicolor pyramid in our high school social studies classes. At the bottom of the pyramid there were the basic material needs: food, shelter, and security. Above those were esteem, belonging, and status needs, and above them were “being” needs, such as purpose, self-creation, and fulfillment. Maslow argued that once we have met the lower material needs, new and higher needs emerge that demand our attention. Sociologists today describe these higher needs as “postmaterial,” since they emerge only after our basic material needs have been met.

Environmentalism and other progressive social movements of the 1960s were born of the prosperity of the postwar era and the widespread emergence of higher-order postmaterialist needs. As Americans became increasingly wealthy, secure, and optimistic, they started to care more about problems such as air and water pollution and the protection of the wilderness and open space. This powerful correlation between increasing affluence and the emergence of quality-of-life and fulfillment values has been documented in developed and undeveloped countries around the world.

Of course, these universal human needs express themselves as strikingly different social values, and we must thus understand both. By values we mean, very broadly, those fundamental concerns and beliefs that comprise our worldviews and the different ways of making sense of ourselves. An individual’s core values are formed early in life and evolve slowly over time as we go through major life events. Throughout this book we will refer to the social values research that we and others have conducted. Nothing is more central to this book than our contention that for any politics to succeed, it must swim with, not against, the currents of changing social values.

Environmentalists have long misunderstood, downplayed, or ignored the conditions for their own existence. They have tended to view economic growth as the cause but not the solution to ecological crisis. Environmentalists like to emphasize the ways in which the economy depends on ecology, but they often miss the ways in which thinking ecologically depends on prospering economically. Given that prosperity is the basis for ecological concern, our political goal must be to create a kind of prosperity that moves everyone up Maslow’s pyramid as quickly as possible while also achieving our ecological goals.

3.

In the end, it is the global ecological crises themselves that have triggered the death of environmentalism. For us to make sense of them, the category of “the environment”—along with the ancient story of humankind’s fall from nature—is no longer useful. The challenge of climate change is so massive, so global, and so complex that it can be overcome only if we look beyond the issue categories of the past and embrace a grand new vision for the future.

Through their stories, institutions, and policies, environmentalists constantly reinforce the sense that nature is something separate from, and victimized by, humans. This paradigm defines ecological problems as the inevitable consequence of humans violating nature. Think of the verbs associated with environmentalism and conservation: “stop,” “restrict,” “reverse,” “prevent,” “regulate,” and “constrain.” All of them direct our thinking to stopping the bad, not creating the good. When environmentalists do speak in positive tones, it is usually about things like clean air and water, or “preserving nature”—all concepts that define human activity as an intrusion on, or a contaminant of, a separate and once pure nature.

Environmental leaders continue to insist that global warming is essentially a very big pollution problem. But while the coal smoke of Manchester in nineteenth-century England and smog in Los Angeles in the 1970s can reasonably be understood as pollution, the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is invisible and has no offensive odor. Moreover, the quantitative accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has created something qualitatively different from pollution: changing temperatures worldwide and melting ice caps, which may lead to a collapse of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, water shortages, new disease epidemics, and resource wars.

To describe these challenges as problems of pollution is to stretch the meaning of the word beyond recognition. Global warming is as different from smog in Los Angeles as nuclear war is from gang violence. The ecological crises we face are more global, complex, and tied to the basic functioning of the economy than were the problems environmentalism was created to address forty years ago. Global warming threatens human civilization so fundamentally that it cannot be understood as a straightforward pollution problem, but instead as an existential one. Its impacts will be so enormous that it is better understood as a problem of evolution, not pollution.

Our planet, and we along with it, will evolve in rapid and dramatic ways over the next century. The challenge for humankind now is not whether we can stop global warming, which is already well under way, but whether we can minimize it, prepare for it, and improve human and nonhuman life while we’re at it. Before answering the question What is to be done?, we must first ask, What kind of beings are we? and What can we become?

That’s the end of Part 2. 

Here are the other sections of the Introduction: [Part 1] Part 2 [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]