The Traditions of Environmentalism

Tom, how would you define effective environmentalism today?

I don’t know how I’d define it. I can take you through the trajectories, the traditions, if you like. You had a tradition that starts in the 19th century which you might think of as the conservation tradition, which remains live. It was really about persevering things for their aesthetic or intrinsic value. That’s organization like the World Wildlife Fund, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and The Nature Conservancy. Organizations like this. Going on now to organizations like Plant Life or Bug Life, all of which have got that central focus on the natural world and preserving it for its intrinsic or aesthetic value. Sierra Club, another one. That tradition goes back to the middle of the 19th century, really. In the 60s, that’s joined by the campaigning organizations, who are Green Peace, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Defense Fund, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) in the United States, Ecologic in Germany. A whole lot of organizations which are really a new tradition, which are dealing with resource and health drivers, pollution and resource issues.

In a sense, triggered off by the population bomb, a whole series of books that came out. Limits to both and so on at the beginning of the end of the 60s, the beginning of the 70s, I suspect Silent Spring was the seminal text. That sets up a second tradition, the campaigning organizations. Again, they’re all still campaigning away and are proliferated enormously. I think we’ve now got an emergent third tradition in a sense. When the campaigning organizations began in the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, there were perhaps in Britain a couple of hundred environmental professionals all told. There are now several hundred thousand. There are I think something like six or seven thousand environmental finance professionals in the city of London alone. What you’ve seen is a third tradition emerge, which is environmental professionals. In a sense, environmentalism, the environmental community, if you like, is made up of those three different traditions.

Which work together in all sorts of different linkages and associations. I think what’s changed this century, really since climate change became such a big issue, especially in the last few years, is that the environment is now seen as much more of a mainstream issue. In a sense, the campaigning organizations haven’t yet really begun to change their game significantly to make up for the fact that they’re now in a sense, people have got the message that the environment is in trouble, what they need now is much more agency. They need organizations that help them much more directly affect the decisions that influence their lives. It’s the coming together of these three traditions that in a sense, characterizes modern environmentalism.

If you were to critique the way the environmental movement has been organized, has exercised agency?

Well, I wouldn’t call it a movement. I very specifically use the word community because that’s inclusive. The word movement tends to be exclusive. It’s very much a characteristic of the campaigning tradition to think of itself as a movement. I think that’s failing to see that it’s become part of a much wider force in the economy and in politics. It’s failing, it’s failing to see a change in its strategic positioning and adapt to that. That’s one piece. I think it’s still more interested in winning arguments than changing outcomes. In a sense, when you were starting, it was enormously important to win an argument, but to some extent, we’ve done that bit, what matters now is getting on with changing real-world outcomes in real specific context. Whether you’re dealing with climate change or biodiversity loss or all of the different forms of pollution, waste, and so on. It needs to become much more outcome focused and that means to some extent, it needs to engage much more systematically with politics because increasingly what’s clear is the big barriers to solving these problems are not technological barriers.

They’re certainly now barriers of ignorance as they were 50 years ago. They’re not economic barriers. Almost everything you want to do to make the environment better actually adds to productivity, it doesn’t reduce productivity. It makes your economy better. The real problems are you change the patterns of winners and losers. You, in effect, set innovators against incumbents. The incumbents resist. We are not good in the environment community with thinking through, how do you re-write social contracts so that you make it easier for the innovators as it were to win solutions. We need to think more politically. I don’t mean more partisan ways, but we need to think through about politics as in a sense of, how do you choose who wins and who loses. We need to think through the politics much more thoroughly than we’ve done in the past. I think that’s our failure.