Misguided Environmentalism

Last summer I worked for five weeks as a member of an Appalachian Trail crew, living in tents in Northern Maine while performing maintenance on the trail. Apparently I gave them my mailing address, because yesterday I received “The MAINEtainer,” an eight-page newspaper from the Maine Appalachian Trail Club (MATC). One headline stood out: “MATC opposes Highland Plantation wind energy plan.” The article included a map of the area around the proposed Highland Plantation, and I recognized it as Flagstaff Lake, where I spent a week cutting new trail out of the side of a hill with a mattock. The area is part of the ‘Hundred-Mile Wilderness,’ the longest stretch of the entire Appalachian Trail without a town or store.
MATC opens by summarizing their opposition to the installation of wind turbines two miles from the trail: “The MATC recognizes the need to develop wind power as a renewable energy source.  However, this need must be balanced against the recreational, scenic, natural, and cultural resources of the Appalachian Trail in Maine.”
For decades, environmentalists have taken the wrong approach in their advocacy, and MATC’s opposition to the Highland Plantation project is a prime example. Like Thoreau, who wrote, “All good things are wild and free,” they assume and promote an emotional reverence for nature. The assumption misses the point: the true reason to protect the environment is not for the environment’s sake but for our own. Rather than emphasizing this hard fact, environmental groups have relied on a sentimental argument for the intrinsic value of untamed nature, producing cultural antipathy and misguided environmentalism.
Arguing for a deep reverence for nature immediately evokes the 1960s counterculture, an association which mires the environmental debate deep in the baggage of America’s forty-year-old culture war.Consider any of various news stories detailing the latest extreme tactics of anti-whaling activists.  The general public cares little one way or another about whales, but most have a sense of whether or not their political group supports saving whales.  So all the vitriol of a culturally divided nation springs up before anyone can ask why we should care about whales in the first place.  Some people just like whales and think they’re worth saving; others do not.
The World Wildlife Fund is not a radical nut chained to a harpoon cannon, but its arguments for the natural world are not much more complex than the hippie yell, “Save the whales!”  Their standard advertising campaign is essentially a guilt trip featuring pictures of the fuzziest endangered species they can find.  Their species adoption program allows you to donate in the name of a certain animal like the panda, Amur leopard, polar bear, or tiger.  Never mind that your money goes into a general fund; you can feel good knowing that you have helped save the meerkats.  The entire campaign depends on the assumption that there is inherent moral value in these species.  Save the meerkats because they are cute.  Save the leopards because they look noble in the setting sun.
Similarly, the argument for reducing carbon emissions is often simplistic.  Carbon dioxide produced by industry is disrupting the natural balance, so reduce carbon dioxide.  MATC seems to think that we should preserve the Hundred-Mile Wilderness simply because it is wild and beautiful, without unsightly wind turbines.  Environmentalism of this sort depends on a hippie ethos of secular reverence for nature in its purest form.
Little wonder, then, that vocal skepticism of climate change appears to be growing.  Actual science is irrelevant to the issue, because the argument for environmentalism has been cast by environmentalists themselves as a cultural crusade promoting reverence for nature, and cultural crusaders must expect to find stiff resistance.
The crusader’s approach is a terrible mistake, not just because it motivates opposition along cultural lines, but because it is the wrong way to understand our relationship with the environment.  Thoreau-style environmentalists would claim that our capitalist economy spoils the environment, but the very word ‘spoil’ implies, incorrectly, that there exists an absolute, external definition of what a pristine environment looks like.  Rather, economy and environment are inextricably linked in a circular relationship, each shaping the other.  Just as Native Americans used to burn their forest’s undergrowth to produce a healthy deer population and make it easier to hunt those deer, we must devise a sustainable model for the ongoing interaction between our globalized economy and the natural world on which it depends.
In short, we need to manage our environment for our own long-term benefit, not for the whale’s benefit.  Our long-term interests should include a healthy whale population, but we must remember it is for our own good, not theirs.  Recent emphasis on efficiency and sustainability is the right direction to take, but these movements have not yet managed to shed their association with the ever-more-stale teachings of the counterculture.  It is our job, as a fresh generation, to forcibly recast environmentalism in practical terms.
Yes, Flagstaff Lake has a prehistoric beauty about it, but its wildness is a pretty fiction, not an intrinsic good.  The lake was created by a hydroelectric dam in 1950, deliberately submerging the town of Flagstaff in the process.  Rather than clinging to a cultural reverence for a false wilderness, we should plan for the future and install wind turbines in Northern Maine.  Then, perhaps, with the counterculture behind us, we can move past the culture wars and create a working model for an environmentally sustainable economy.