The idea of “helping China to prosper… in a way that also creates a clean energy revolution” is fine, but it must be noted that people have been saying such things for years. Google “Technology Transfer” and “climate”. People have also been (accurately or not) framing this as a social justice issue with environmental benefits, and some have avoiding “framing” it at all.

Ever heard of the “alliance for sustainable jobs and the environment”? It was founded more than 10 years ago. And, despite your continued, baseless statements to the contrary, many EJ activists work on BOTH heath care and pollution issues, on parks and prisons, and have done the work to frame the connections.

Sure, you are *helping* to make some of these ideas more mainstream (not always in ways I agree with, but that’s another story) but that makes you innovators, not originators of the concepts.

What I’m saying is you overstate your arguments in a way that is very insulting and doesn’t give credit to others. If environmentalism is/was dead, you were not the first to notice it’s myriad diseases and disabilities. If it is now “reborn”, you were not there at the birthing, it’s been in the works for decades…

The combined effect of your overstatements (especially when you write articles like this one above!!) makes you appear as extremely self-congradulatory, fixated of the “breakthroughs” of your intellect.

It’s obnoxious, and it weakens your arguments.

I think that is a fair response. I just wanted to say that there have been some powerful thinkers who have built a foundation for challenging standard understandings of wilderness and environment. To say that their ideas have become mainstream among many environmentalists is premature and I wish some of their writing was more common and understood.

However, it is pretty prevalent on a lot of campuses and is more readily grasped and understood by my contemporaries. So perhaps I have a view different from many who have been doing this for their whole career.

You’ve misunderstood the argument of Break Through. Our point is not simply that humans are part of nature. It is that if we are to achieve meaningful action on global warming we can no longer limit our politics to those things that are customarily defined as “environmental.”

EJ is case in point. Why, if you claim to care about childhood asthma, would you focus on diesel bus pollution but not on health care? Why would you focus on parks but not schools? Why would you focus on smokestacks but not crime? The answer is because health care and schools and crime are not customarily defined as part of “the environment” where as the air and parks and smokestacks are.

Or take global warming. China this year will emit more greenhouse gases than the U.S. The government has repeatedly said that it won’t slow its economic growth to do something about global warming. The strategy being pursued by environmentalists — both “mainstream” and “grassroots” — is to emphasize to the Chinese people and government the perils of global warming.

Why the insistence on “fighting global warming” rather than helping China to prosper — perhaps in a way that also creates a clean energy revolution? In part because global warming is an “environmental issue” whereas prosperity is either viewed as separate from the environment or, worse, anathema to it. Sure, the Chinese are happy to receive help from western environmentalists to use energy more efficiently. But they implement efficiency measures not because doing so prevents global warming but rather because efficiency reduces energy costs.

I sometimes hear environmental leaders talk about how climate change will hurt the poor but I have yet to hear either a grassroots or national environmental leader acknowledge that the climate is already dangerous for much of the world. The best protection for poor people against extreme weather, droughts, and food shortages is development. If we are so concerned about poor people in places like India and Bangladesh, shouldn’t we be as focused on economic development as emissions reductions?

You are apparently more concerned than I am about whether our arguments are “new.” In the footnotes and acknowledgments we did our best to give credit where credit was due. I would, however, challenge you to back up your claim that the post-environmental politics we argue for in Break Through can be found in “most ANY reader on the topic of environmental ethics, or the politics of nature, written after 1990.” I’ve read a fair number of them and found the vast majority, including those that discuss EJ, to accept the traditional definition of the environment.

Michael

I’m just saying it’s important to recognize our roots, that many environmentalists outside the mainstream have been saying this, and ACTING on this for years…and they deserve recognition for this and reinforcement, something Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not provide or encourage…in fact they do quite the opposite in some of their writings.

Instead, the valuable point to take away is that we find ourselves in a moment where this stance is essential to creating the politics needed to tackle the challenge of climate change. If we think of humans as part of the environment, there is no denying that we essential actors within it. We are the primary shapers of the environment’s future (which of course includes our own). Therefore, our solutions to climate change must put humans at the center and recognize our active role. We are shaping the environment no matter what, and instead of denying that, we must use it as an opportunity to create expansive solutions with human power and ingenuity at their center.

As Teryn says, let’s take this historical belief to the next level and reflect it in our politics and in the way we think about humanity’s role in this challenge.

He wrote “The Trouble with Wilderness” which is the best argument for dropping the definition of “environmental” and “nature” and “wilderness” as things separate from humans….in 1996.

Aldo Leopold wrote about that very issue decades earlier, arguing that since people live off the land they have an ethic to treat it right - just as there are ethics in society towards how you treat people.

Frederick Olmstead, who designed much of the nation’s parks and public landscapes, understood that we ‘created’ nature and wilderness to serve our artistic and aesthetic needs. In the 1800s.

I am sorry if Jack Johnson and Shellenberger & Nordhaus might be more well known than these figures to many today, but while these ideas should be communicated, it has indeed been done before.

The argument that the environment must include people, and moreover that this requires (for both scientific, strategic and moral purposes) a redefinition of environmentalism, has been around from 2-3 decades.

Pick up most ANY reader on the topic of environmental ethics, or the politics of nature, written after 1990.

Anyone who has read much outside of the great, self-annointed, white male leaders of the environmental movement should be aware of this.

Read Vandana Shiva, read from the visionaries of the US environmental justice movement (which Shellenberger attacks in his book in an extremely offensive manner).

I couldn’t decide for a while what I liked less about the “bad boys” of environmentalism: their extreme use of hyperbole for garnering self-attention or their shameless stealing of credit for other people’s ideas (often while slandering them elsewhere!)…but I think this article has resolved it for me.

Although I disagree with many of them, there’s nothing uniquely problematic with their positions…but I seriously dislike the irreverant self-important style that so often ignores or even denigrates the shoulders they stand so clearly (deny they) stand on.

In fact, waste, skyscrapers, and computers are no less “natural” than anything else; they’re simply created by humans and more complex than many other systems. We understand some of our actions have environmental consequences that seem unnatural, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather, we can oppose toxic waste and other pollution because they’re poor choices for our future - for our health, land, water, food, and the earth systems we depend upon. We should oppose them because we know that we can do better.

The vast majority of people are not going to respond to a philosophy that advocates returning to or salvaging a “natural” world. Many more people will respond to a vision of a just and sustainable world in which humans and “natural” systems are intertwined.