Ben Casnocha: The Blog: The Politics of Fear and Environmentalism

A blogger, Ben Casnocha, made an interesting comment on a piece I wrote identifying environmentalism as a politics of fear. The most important point of his post is the following:

"Look, I believe in most environmental issues, and think we need to deal with global warming in a proactive manner, but enough with the shrieking and doomsday overreach. Three billion people live on less than two dollars a day; 790 million people are chronically undernourished; 1.1 billion people lack daily access to clean water; etc etc. I don't know about you, but poverty strikes me as a much more pressing moral issue than global warming."

I think this is a fair point, but I would push it a bit further. There is something undeniable strange and disturbing about the way so many liberal elites, from Gore, through Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker and Andrew Revking at the New York Times, on down, will immediately get on their high horse about global warming and environmental problems, yet can only shake their head in dismay at the far more devastating and immediate human consequences of global inequality. Of course, a common argument is that they're not mutually exclusive concerns, one can 'care about both,' or, more perversely, as a comment on Casnocha's blog claims, concern for the environment 'is' concern for the poor, because climate change will make the poor poorer ("If Africa and south Asia get drier, it follows that those places will get poorer and more people will suffer famine or starve").

I've already developed some arguments as to why the latter is not true. But it's also just not true that one can 'care about both.' This is not what happens. As I mentioned in the post about Katrina, environmental concerns consistently displace concerns about equality. There is a degree of passivity and hopelessness about the possibility of changing society that goes hand in hand with environmental activism. That is one of the reasons, I think, for why some people think that climate change means the poor will get poorer. If you really think society is static, then it is true that changes in nature will harm that society. If you really think Africa and South Asia can't develop better irrigation technologies and dams (or think they shouldn't), then it's true they will remain dependent upon rainfall patterns, and the alteration of those patterns will screw them. But if they were more developed, and if their uneven development has to do with things like the (alterable) structure of global markets, concentration of wealth in certain nations, and international and national regulations, then it just isn't true that changes in rainfall patterns would be that devastating at all. There would be no reason to think they would get poorer. Rather, they would get richer, and have more technology at their disposal to improve their fate.

But the truth is, this is not how environmentalism tends to think. Poverty is mainly a function of nature, not social organization, on the environmental view. And for the most part, it has managed to trade off pessimism about the possibilities for social change (despite its best efforts to present itself as utopian.) It is with unerring consistency that environmentalism has proven, despite its protestations otherwise, that one can't be concerned with the environment and poverty at the same time. They really speak to distinct moral concerns and attitudes towards politics.