Environmentalism: Movement or Religion?
Spending their way into the "hearts and minds" of the public..."Can enviro-optimists save the movement from itself?"
...The McKibbenists face defeat at every turn. The Democrats are deeply split on Keystone, as they are on the desirability of hydrofracking. The Environmental Protection Agency has postponed new laws on carbon dioxide emissions. Worst of all is the growing number of people in the environmental movement itself who flatly disagree on tactics, strategy and goals.
Call them the pragmatists – the greens willing to settle for progress, not utopia. In January, the scientific journal Nature endorsed the Keystone pipeline on the grounds that there were bigger environmental fish to fry. Some environmentalists have even come out in favour of fracking, on the grounds that clean natural gas is better than dirty oil. Some are pro-nuclear. Environmentalists are even divided on renewables: Some are fans of wind power, while others think it's an expensive folly that devastates rural environments and transfers taxpayer money to international corporations.
As Jason Mark writes in his article It's Not Easy Being Green in the Washington-based magazine The American Prospect, "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."
Please read more by: Margaret Wente and Peter Kareiva, the senior scientist for the Nature Conservancy, who is one of the keys to saving environmentalism from terminal irrelevance
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/can-enviro-optimists-save-the-movement-from-itself/article11418189/