OPINION/COMMENTARY

Environmentalism's Nervous Breakdown

"The Death of Environmentalism" is an Internet essay published last October that is making huge waves in the rather confined world of non-profit environmental organizations. The 35-page manifesto has spawned at least a dozen responding websites (see here for example). Authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two relatively young environmental consultants, charge, "Today environmentalist is just another special interest." That line has become a favorite in the press. It might lead you to think that environmentalists were questioning their own motivations or re-examining their tendencies toward exaggeration--as satirized in Michael Crichton's State of Fear. You would be wrong. Instead, "The Death of Environmentalism" is strangely reminiscent of those 1960s manifestos in which "red diaper babies" accused their parents of having "sold out" because they abandoned the revolutionary fervor of the 1930s and settled down to have jobs and families....

===