The Human Outbreak And The Alleged Death of Environmentalism By Howie Wolke

In a recent speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, boy wonder Werbach says, “If you’re a conservative…….but you still love nature, we wish you well, but we need you to leave this movement”. Ugh! Way to go, Adam. That’s reaching out to America.

None of this is to say that American environmentalism is healthy and particularly effective. We can do much better. For one thing, our movement espouses no unified clear and exciting vision of what America and the world could be like with sane environmental and energy policies.

In addition, too much of wildland conservation has become a lethargic nine to five world of well paid professionals with great 401-k’s, mind-boggling legal and computer skills (any computer skill boggles my mind), and an appalling lack of passion.  The result of this technocracy is the failure to excite and enlist volunteer citizen activists. Yes, there are plenty of grassroots groups and activists out there (and they’re not dead), but there should be more, and they shouldn’t have to spend so much time fighting their own movement’s centralized establishment. In fact, much of wildland conservation’s agenda is increasingly set by a small number of careerists with I.V. tubes flowing green from the Pew Foundation’s so-called “Campaign for the American Wilderness”. Which wouldn’t be so bad was it not for the horrific compromises to the very idea of Wilderness, promoted by those hooked into the Pew I.V. But I digress; that’s a whole nuther story.

Ever since the first anthropoid with opposable thumbs stood up to better view a feline nemesis in a distant African savannah, Homo horribilis has been expanding, modifying, simplifying, polluting and otherwise damaging the natural environment. This was no big deal with a tiny population thinly spread across Africa and Eurasia.

But the deal got bigger with continued growth and expansion. Pleistocene megafauna bit the eternal dust. Agriculture gobbled up billions of acres. The industrial revolution jump started atmospheric carbon increases, and human populations exploded and crowded into nearly all earthly habitats. The oceans became depleted, forests butchered, grasslands grazed to dirt, rivers dammed (only 2% of American rivers remain free-flowing), nukes ignited and we got evermore parking lots, strip malls, box stores and other forms of sprawl. Biodiversity has plummeted as a direct response to human population growth, now passing the six billion figure, with no end in sight. As if to prove that the folly of human expansion knows no bounds, Phoenix and Las Vegas cast their growing glares across the formerly black skies and still water-starved landscape of the American Southwest, exploding as our two fastest growing cities. Is this happening because the environmental movement is “dead”?

Due to human expansionism (and other follies) planet Earth is now in the 6^th great extinction event since the inception of life some 3.5 billion years ago. At 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal background rate for natural extinctions, this is the only extinction event in geologic history caused by a biotic factor. That’d be us. Other extinction events were caused by volcanism, plate tectonics, climatic perturbations and collisions with comets. E.O. Wilson estimates that at least 20% of all remaining species on Earth will be extinct in 30 years. Roughly 100 species are already extinct in the U.S. not counting hundreds or thousands more subspecies and uniquely adapted populations. The primary force behind this mayhem is human overpopulation/expansionism. Over six billion humans now convert about 50% of all the Earth’s terrestrial net primary production (photosynthetic matter) into human biomass and support structures. I could go on, but you get the picture. The mess we are making is big, with considerable history.

Enter the modern environmental movement. Only in the last 150 years – a mere blink of human time – has any faction of modern Homo sapiens seriously sought to slow environmental destruction. It’s arguable, but my environmental movement begins with John Muir. In the 1960’s, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring elevated environmental awareness in America, but despite the growing movement, destruction continued.

For example, for the first 30 years after passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the U.S. Forest Service alone destroyed about a million acres of de-facto roadless wilderness each year, even while the fledgling National Wilderness Preservation System, thankfully, was growing.  A million acres is an area equal in size to Glacier National Park. This destruction, by the way, drastically slowed under Clinton but is once again grinding into gear with the ongoing Bush-Cheney dissolution of the Roadless Rule. Is our failure to stop all wildland development entirely the fault of modern environmentalism, or might it be part of something bigger, something that’s been going on for many millennia? Yes, we could have and should have and still can do better, but that doesn’t mean we are or ever have been dead.

I believe that this environmentalism is dead crap is a disservice – no, it’s a slap in the face – to all the grass roots groups that work their tails off in the face of the overwhelming forces of human history. Also, if you think you’re dead, then effectively you are. We need more vision, voices, courage, passion and perseverance, yes, but the folks with whom I work are anything but dead. To blame our predicament on the alleged “death of environmentalism” in the face of the spectacular evidence that the basic problem is human biomass and expansionism is ludicrous, not to mention a great comfort to our enemies. In fact, given the history and extent of the human juggernaut, it’s kind of amazing that activists anywhere have managed to save much of anything.

Ironically, those cappuccino cowboys pondering the alleged death of environmentalism from the safety of liberal enclaves like northern California, fail to grasp that saving the planet must span the political spectrum in all societies if we are to have a chance. That means if a republican wants to help save the wilds or to stop pollution, than we’d better welcome her aboard. Unless I’m missing something, seems like about half the country is basically conservative and I’m not willing to write them all off. Particularly since there are plenty who vote for the Donkeys that don’t give a damn about the environment, or at least about saving the wilds. It’s also ironic that Werbach’s leftist fantasy aligns him on the population issue with right wing religious fundamentalists of all ilk. Werbach wants environmentalists to ignore overpopulation. “End the environmental movement’s population program”, says he. As if there was much of one at all.

Until our movement and the general population of this planet grasps and acts upon the enormity of the human outbreak as the basis for most of the planet’s ills, environmentalism will continue to occasionally protect key ecosystems and resources (a valuable service) while the planet that we know and love continues to whirl down the drain. It does so not because environmentalists have failed to join hands and sing Kum-baya with fellow progressives, but above all else because there are, quite obviously, way too many bleating fleeting two-legged industrial apes on this very fragile, very finite, very wondrous blue-green planet.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Howie Wolke lives and works in a Red State and has been part of the environmental movement in the rural west for 30 years.