This piece is adapted from a speech given before the Alliance for Global Sustainability last month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. The full speech — “Reflections on Sustainability and Universities and Whether Environmentalism Has Died” — can be found here.
Are the reapers quitting too soon?
The environmental community is in turmoil over “The Death of Environmentalism,” the challenging essay released by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus last fall. Their thesis is that the environmental community has “strikingly little to show” for its efforts over the last 15 years and that environmental leaders are not articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis facing us.
Remarkably, the two charge that environmentalism is “just another special interest.”
Former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach has contributed his own indictment of environmentalism, calling for the end of a separate environmental movement and the creation of a new progressive movement uniting all of those who can agree on a broad set of p... Read more
