This annual report is an overview of what has happened in the environmental world over the past year, from the Pacific Research Institute.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction.
2006 INDEX OF LEADING ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS:
The Nature and Sources of Ecological Progress in the U.S. and the World. ELEVENTH EDITION
INTRODUCTION; THE YEAR THE MUSIC STOPPED?
The year 2005 offered a full plate of environmental episodes that riveted the nation’s attention, including sky-high energy prices, expanded talk of permanent oil shortages, Hurricane Katrina, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal, where the U.S. came in for the usual pasting from the “international community.” Yet a funny thing happened along the way.
The modern environmental movement died.
Perhaps this is an overstatement. No movement that commands hundreds of millions of dollars in financial resources and millions of dues-paying members can be said to be fully deceased. The end of the year saw environmentalists celebrating a large political victory in Washington, D.C., where efforts to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas production were stymied again—though it should be noted that this was purely a defensive win for the greens, relying on a Senate filibuster against majority support for opening ANWR. In the long run that is likely to be a losing hand.
Although the continued success in blocking the opening of ANWR shows the latent potency of environmentalism as a political force in Washington, at the same time the environmental movement increasingly resembles the hapless incipient corpse in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who protests, “I’m not dead yet!” Leaders of the environmental movement have been convulsed for much of the last year in an intramural debate over “The Death of Environmentalism,” the provocative memorandum from two young insurgents in the movement who argue that environmentalism has failed in its larger aims and should now integrate itself within a broader spectrum of “progressive” causes. “The Death of Environmentalism” received an extraordinary amount of media attention, including front-page news stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and extensive features in publications as diverse as The Economist and The Wilson Quarterly. The authors, Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, are coming out with a book on the subject soon.
Should the environmental movement follow their advice to turn further to the left, we will undoubtedly come to speak of environmentalism’s suicide rather than its death from natural causes. To be sure, much of what ails the environmental movement comes from its self-inflicted wounds, but it is still surprising to find environmentalism in its current funk amidst a presidency whose soggy approval ratings are seldom worse than on environmental issues, and at a time when corporate America seems to be embracing green values on a large scale (such as GE’s “Ecomagination” campaign). Yet one of the remarkable things about 2005 was that environmentalists received proportionally almost as much bad press as President George W. Bush.
