The Triumph and Tragedy of Environmentalism

For what are, at least now, obvious reasons these ideas rankled. A commission was set up in 1983 by the United Nations, the World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by former Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland and often called the Brundtland Commission, to address this problem and try to find a way to reconcile preserving the environment with addressing the plight of poor people in developing countries.

In 1987, the commission produced its report, titled “Our Common Future,” often known as the Brundtland Report. Its signature achievement was to create and codify the concept of sustainable development – a doctrine that if it were followed, would allow peoples in poor countries to begin to thrive, while at the same time protecting the environment.

The doctrine and the concept were contained in this famous definition of sustainable development: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The two parts of sustainable development

Ritchie notes that there are two parts to “sustainable development.” First is “development that meets the needs of the present” – in other words short-term needs of the present generation of the population. The second is “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” – in other words, without depleting the environmental resources that will be needed by future generations.

Contrary to what many environmentalists believe, Ritchie says that humankind has never lived sustainably. A common belief among environmentalists is that ancient or indigenous peoples did or do live sustainably because their simple mode of living is frugal in the use of resources. But Ritchie points out that in their case, the first half of the definition of sustainability is not satisfied: “A world in which half of all children die is not meeting ‘the needs of the present generations’ and is therefore not a sustainable one.” She says that the realization that this first sustainability criterion has never been met until recently came to her when she watched a five-minute video by Hans Rosling, which shows that most of the world was poor and sick and lived short lives until the last 50 years. But only very recently has the first sustainability criterion been met.

What of the second sustainability criterion? Are we compromising the ability of future generations, say by poisoning the environment, to meet their own needs?

That is the belief among a very large segment of the population, especially the young. But her answer is a firm “no.” “We have the opportunity,” she says, “to be the first generation that leaves the environment in a better state than we found it. The first generation in human history to achieve sustainability.”

Improvements in sustainability everywhere

The bulk of Ritchie’s book is devoted to showing that this is true. In a succession of chapters, she tackles each environmental problem that is believed to be dire: air pollution; climate change; deforestation; food sufficiency; biodiversity loss; ocean plastics; overfishing. In each case, she shows, using hard data, that the problem is far less dire than commonly believed, and in most cases already being solved or readily solvable. In the hardest case, climate change, we can solve it – more on that in a moment.

In the process, she debunks widely held but absurd beliefs about what is bad for the environment. For example, because a plastic straw was believed to have been found in the nostril of a sea turtle, it became a sine qua non of environmentalism to ban the use of plastic in favor of paper straws or even metal ones. But Ritchie says, “Paper and water don’t go together. Paper is made of a compound called cellulose, which dissolves in water. Why anyone would think it’s a good idea to make drinking straws out of paper is beyond me… Yet ‘paper straws’ have become the sustainability badge for restaurants and bars across the world.”

In the chapter on plastic waste, she makes clear what should be obvious – the problem is not the use of plastics in the first place but their manner of disposal. Plastic bags are no environmental problem if they are disposed of in a well-designed and well-maintained landfill.

The case of overfishing is an interesting one. Overfishing of some species has taken place in the past. It caused a serious decline in fish stocks on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. But since 1990, Ritchie says, “global seafood production has more than doubled. How did this happen? Rather than catching more fish, we started to grow them. This is called ‘fish farming’, or ‘aquaculture’” Also contributing to the new adequacy of fish stocks is simply keeping a good count of the fish and holding the stock at the “maximum sustainable yield” – which could be half their abundance historically, but sustainable.

Climate change

Climate change is the toughest challenge, but Ritchie says we can do it if we apply ourselves. I’ve been somewhat skeptical of this, though not of the likelihood we can do it eventually. but I was skeptical of the time frame that people claim we can do it in. “Net zero by 2050,” for example, I believe is a pipe dream – I’m not sure Ritchie disagrees. But that we can achieve close to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within some time frame, short enough to avert the catastrophe that so many doomsayers proclaim will occur – a matter of decades perhaps – is possible. Aiding in this pursuit is the fact that the cost of wind power and solar power has declined so precipitously, and the cost of batteries too, though not long-term storage batteries that we are likely to need.

We will need some nuclear power as well, and Ritchie, to her credit, pushes back against the anti-nuclear undercurrent that runs through several of the most prominent environmental organizations. And to back up and even out the fluctuations in electricity output that are characteristic of wind power and solar power there is also the possibility of an emerging, though still nascent technology: enhanced geothermal.

We know there will be some climate change, some warming, some ocean rises, and other effects of climate change. We will have to adapt to them. But Ritchie believes that we have the capability to avert the worst and most catastrophic scenarios over time. She has convinced me that this is indeed possible, even if less than certain.

What is the tragedy?

The title of this article is “The Triumph and Tragedy of Environmentalism.” What is the tragedy? Let me explain.

I have always been an environmentalist. As a child I loved visits to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and staying in a simple cabin in a secluded wood alongside a rippling stream. I visited Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods by Walden Pond more than once. In summer camp at age 12, I hiked with a counselor and other campers in those White Mountains, and at age 14 I resolved to find a way to explore them further by hiking with the Appalachian Mountain Club.

My first overnight with the club was a Memorial Day weekend camping trip in the wilderness of Baxter State Park in Maine. The morning after my first night, I awoke in my sleeping bag early to a veritable symphony of birdsong. I was thrilled, jubilant. I listened for long minutes until it was finally time to get up and do the day’s hike, a climb of Doubletop Mountain on which to my chagrin I was only barely able to keep up with the 61-year-old woman ahead of me. (I spent the next few years toughening up successfully.)

In 1962 Rachel Carson kicked off the modern environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. The book’s first chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” begins this way:

THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

It continues in that manner, but then it says:

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change…

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone?...

Reading this in its entirety is enough to literally make you cry.

Silent Spring was perhaps the biggest motive force powering the new environmental movement. It was a movement to protect nature for itself, because it was something to be loved and protected, like your pet dog. Secondarily, but very secondarily, it was a movement to protect nature not only because we loved it but because we used it and needed it.

One of the first pieces of environmental legislation that this movement was able to pass was the Wilderness Act of 1964. It was an act to designate and protect wilderness areas in the United States. It defined wilderness in this way:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.ⁱ

So, one of the very first pieces of legislation pushed successfully by the modern environmental movement was one to protect features of nature that have no direct use for human beings at all.

The environmental movement transforms itself

As time went on, the urge to protect nature for itself floundered. There had arisen the mandate to quantify everything and to demonstrate through cost-benefit analysis why doing one thing, such as protecting a natural environment from development, had a greater value in dollars than developing it. Environmentalists’ proclamations that certain natural features were “priceless” didn’t cut it anymore.

Finally, environmentalists caught on and started devising ways to assign “economic” values to things they were trying to protect. I did it myself, though I frankly felt I was doing it cynically. For example, I participated in the battle to save the idyllic Cheesman Canyon from being flooded by the proposed Two Forks Dam in Colorado. Environmentalists argued that the pristine canyon held great value as an environmental site as well as for fishing and hunting. But I resorted to an economic argument – which was in fact true and was later confirmed – namely that to pay for the dam, its proponents would have to raise water rates, which would engender enough water conservation to eliminate the need for the dam.ⁱⁱ

The idea that we were saving the environment for our use was not one that I welcomed or agreed with, but it took over the movement almost entirely. Even “existence value” – the value that humans place on the mere existence of polar bears, or giant pandas, even if they would never encounter one – was quantified, if not very well or precisely.

And so, this triumph of environmentalism that Ritchie identifies – that we have come to manage the environment so well that it will meet all our needs, now and in the future – is not one without a tinge of tragedy. It is as if I had found a way to manage my pet dogs so that, like the people in Peru who keep a roomful of guinea pigs, I could sustainably eat them.

Does this explain the insistent catastrophism?

In an essay by the environmental writer Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and other books, back in the days when environmentalism was more about nature than about providing resources for humans, he observed that no matter what insults we impose on nature, nature will survive but we won’t.

This thought may be inherent in the love for nature. Nature is eternal. We are evanescent. Perhaps this tacit underlying belief fuels a wish, a kind of eschatology, for humans to suffer a catastrophe, even if it is voiced disingenuously as being a catastrophe to nature as well.

Anti-environmentalists, or rather those who are annoyed with environmentalists and distrust their motives, often call environmentalism a religion. And it does indeed have characteristics of a religion. But is that necessarily bad? What might be bad is trying to disguise it as something it is not.

But there is a resolution

I realized some 25 years or so ago when I participated in a multi-day workshop on protecting the world’s forest with several other people including Jim Bowyer, a Michigan State University professor and forest policy expert, that there was a way to fully reconcile utilizing nature’s resources in the most efficient manner with protecting wilderness.

Although “monocultures” such as palm tree plantations were anathema to environmentalists, Bowyer said they were the best way to protect virgin forests, because monocultural plantations could be concentrated on much smaller areas of land and harvested efficiently, leaving more room for the natural forest.

Even just finding a way we can consciously protect nature by managing it intelligently using technology still slightly offends my wish for “untrammeled nature.” And yet, I can become reconciled to that. There might, indeed, be an environmental tragedy here, but while we have lost something we have gained much.

Hannah Ritchie has convinced me of that.

Economist and mathematician Michael Edesess is adjunct professor and visiting faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2007, he authored a book about the investment services industry titled The Big Investment Lie, published by Berrett-Koehler. His new book, The Three Simple Rules of Investing, co-authored with Kwok L. Tsui, Carol Fabbri and George Peacock, was published by Berrett-Koehler in June 2014.

ⁱ “Man,” if it needs to be said, was understood at the time to mean “man and woman,” “mankind,” “humankind.”

ⁱⁱ Two Forks Dam was vetoed shortly after that by William K. Reilly, President George H. W. Bush’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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