About Post-scarcity notes: As the staff of The Public Interest Network advocate for a cleaner, greener, healthier world, from time to time we’ll share observations on the larger challenge facing our network and our society: How do we shift the dominant paradigm — the very way in which we see and make sense of the world — from disposable to sustainable, from “never enough” to “enough,” from “making a living” to “living.” The views expressed in this space relate to our work, but do not necessarily represent the position of the network or its organizations.
The Washington Post editorial board writes that the environment is losing, which means, as the board says, we’re all losing.
The editorial cites as evidence the recent elections in the European Union, in which the union’s green parties suffered big losses, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to hit pause on congestion pricing. As the Post notes, environmentalists are meeting resistance not just from Republicans in the U.S. or the extreme right wing in Europe. Mainstream voters are rebelling against higher energy prices at a time of stubbornly high inflation. The Post blames environmentalists, NIMBYs and “others blocking efforts to build the pipelines, power transmission cables and wind projects needed to decarbonize.”
As is often the case with even the most thoughtful figures in the mainstream media, the Post gets it half-right.
Why continue the destruction?
The environment is losing. It has been losing ever since the Industrial Revolution began 300 years ago. (Some would argue that this has been the case since the Agrarian Revolution began 12,000 years ago. Some even point to early humans’ use of fire. You get the idea.) Yet the scale and scope of the damage has become apparent to most only in the past 50 years or so – even as the rationale for further industrialization weakened. One could argue that humanity had to conquer nature in order to overcome scarcity. But once we achieved mass material abundance, with more than enough “stuff” to go around for everybody, why continue the destruction?An honest reckoning with this question is, understandably, yet to happen. It’s human nature to be skeptical of sweeping change. We tend to value what we have rather than risk it for the hope of something better. That’s why we find public support for incremental improvements in environmental protection; but we also find support for the environment constrained by short-term self-interest and a dominant paradigm that assumes a prosperous economy is a prerequisite for a healthy environment – an assumption that is precisely backward.
The Post editorial doesn’t note these challenges. Nor does it comment on the strategic wisdom (or lack thereof) of environmentalists undermining the cause by aligning themselves with a broader progressive agenda that tends to reinforce short-term, self-interested thinking by focusing on who’s getting what from whom.
This dynamic impacts everything we work on. Investments in clean energy? Popular until gas prices go up. Setting aside places for nature? A great idea unless we can build more housing in those same places. Clean air? Love it, as long as we don’t block any manufacturing or make new cars more expensive.
No way out but through
Some policymakers, allies and funders, confronted with this paradox, turn to “messaging” to solve the problem, with the theory that if we tell people our green agenda lowers costs, they’ll buy it. That isn’t working. Others try to place green causes in service of economic growth (for example, limiting EV tax credits to those made in the U.S. or with certain labor standards; we’ve noted the issues with that approach). You can try to overcome the opposition with field power, but since most people care more about costs than the environment, it’s a fool’s errand.
So where does that leave us? No way out but through. The environment will keep losing until the old paradigm is dead and buried, replaced by a new paradigm that rejects the absurdity of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
