The Usefulness of Cranks

Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

After all, we have been here before. The pragmatic, ethical, and aesthetic arguments for conservation are roughly the same as they were in the 1970s--the only difference being that they have acquired even more urgency in the face of depleted oil reserves, fished-out oceans, and "climate change," the current euphemism for global warming. Yet contemporary politicians and pundits treat green concerns as if they were fresh discoveries. Their amnesia is an understandable response to recent history. For the last thirty years--despite the absorption of environmentalist slogans and sentiments into our popular culture, the frequent legal skirmishes on behalf of endangered species, and the spread of serious ecological thought into many academic disciplines--broad environmental concerns all but disappeared from mainstream political debate.

Noble green intentions left little impact on everyday life. Quite the contrary: for most Americans it was as if the 1970s--the decade of the "energy crisis," Small Is Beautiful, and presidential commitments to solar energy--never happened. Who could be bothered with worry about waste amid acres of wired McMansions and herds of lumbering SUVs?

It will take historians many years to sort through the political, economic, and cultural wreckage left by Ronald Reagan and his ideological heirs. But the disappearance of ecological issues from the national agenda was an essential part of the devastation. Environmentalism was one of Reagan’s targets from the beginning. During the campaign, he and his handlers shrewdly exploited Jimmy Carter’s "malaise" speech of July 1979. Carter never used the offending word, though he did refer to an American "crisis of confidence," arising from the discovery that "owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning." Carter’s big mistake was to question this accumulationist ethos in arguing for conservation as a "moral equivalent of war" and committing the government to long-term research into alternative energy sources. It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, one that acknowledged the limits to economic growth and anticipated nearly all the environmental themes that have only recently returned to fashion.

But it was a political disaster for Carter. Polls indicated that popular reaction to the speech was generally favorable, but then the chattering classes weighed in. By 1979 Carter’s media stock had bottomed out. Pundit after pundit took Carter to task for having the temerity to blame the American people for their wasteful ways. Reagan, meanwhile, was prepared to argue that any talk about limits was un-American. This was the country where the sky was the limit. "America is back," he announced after his election. He lost no time in removing the solar panels from the White House roof. Three decades of denial were under way.

The story of Carter’s speech is a cautionary tale for environmentalists. It suggests the ease with which environmentalists could be identified as puritanical moralists, dour pessimists, enemies of fun and the future. Carter’s public persona reinforced this connection--his sober homiletical tone, his sloping shoulders, his overall limpness. Reagan tilted his head with practiced spontaneity, smiled his lemon-twist smile, and dispensed upbeat aphorisms as if they were freshly minted. His shoulders were padded and his posture was perfect. He was superbly suited to exorcise the demons of doubt, even when doubt had a strong foundation in reality.

And Reagan was not the only villain of this tale. The denial of environmental concerns was part of a broad cultural shift that also swept up the postmodern left. During the 1980s and 1990s, leftists were as likely as rightists to scold environmentalists for their allegedly puritanical preoccupation with limits--as Julian Simon did (from the right) in The Ultimate Resource in 1981 and Andrew Ross did (from the left) in Strange Weather in 1991. Ultimately this critique pushed beyond ethics to epistemology. At its most inane, the postmodern project challenged the very notion that something called "nature" existed apart from human constructions of it. By the late 1980s, no self-respecting professor in the humanities would use the word "nature," or even the word "reality," without inverted commas. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson revealed the social origins of this style when he announced that "postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good"--a view that could be held only by an upper-class professional who spent most of his waking hours insulated from the natural world.

The bizarre notion that "nature is gone for good" had unintended political consequences. It neatly complemented the Republican right’s equation of environmentalism with sentimental nostalgia. The postmodern Left and the reactionary Right deployed different idioms in a common celebration of the untrammeled individual. There was no room at this party for environmentalist killjoys.

But now, as we are constantly reminded, the party’s over. The collapse of credit markets has produced a lot of loose talk about a return to fundamental values, to scrimping and saving and living within our means. But how these ideas and emotions will affect environmental policy or everyday practice remains to be seen. Decades of doctrinaire optimism, uniting everyone from Marxian social critics to development economists to free-market fundamentalists, have undermined the notion that there are natural limits to economic growth. Technological innovation, we have constantly been told, has rendered Malthusian scenarios obsolete.

But these assertions are based on flawed assumptions. Whatever its potential, green technology will take years, perhaps decades, to implement. Meanwhile the urgent need to restore high levels of economic growth by any means necessary--including renewed production of greenhouse gases and consumption of fossil fuels--will trump environmental protection. And the preoccupation with short-term priorities may well promote long-term disaster. A consensus of statistical estimates projects that global population could rise as much as 50 percent over the next forty years. This will probably intensify international competition for scarce resources as the world gets hotter. The techno-utopianism of the last thirty years will prove to have been a flash in the pan, and Malthus may yet have the last word: we shall rediscover that there are natural limits to growth after all.