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Code Blue for Conservation
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER AND TED NORDHAUS SAY environmentalism’s heart has stopped. But making the movement more “progressive” may finish off the patient. Are there better prescriptions?
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus haven’t quite reached the status of American Idol stars. But if you Google their names together, you’ll get more than 6,200 Web pages. Ever since last October, when they had the nerve to deliver their famous “The Death of Environmentalism” manifesto at a meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, they’ve stirred an uproar in conservation circles. Admirers praise Shellenberger and Nordhaus for prodding environmental groups to do some much-needed soul-searching, while critics of the essay could hardly be more upset if they saw Dick Cheney crashing an Earth Day rally. The debate will rumble on next year when “The Death of Environmentalism” will be turned into a book by Houghton Mifflin, which—as Shellenberger’s bio presumptuously notes—was the publisher of Walden and Silent Spring.
The provocative young duo may not be Thoreau and Carson, but they have enough green credentials to be taken seriously. Shellenberger, 34, is executive director of the Breakthrough Institute in El Cerrito, California. Nordhaus, 39, is a founder of the American Environics opinion and market research firm in Oakland (to conserve space, let’s call them S&N). Although both cut their teeth working on campaigns for conservation groups, they are now disillusioned.
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Conservation magazine is published by the Society for Conservation Biology
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