Precis on "The Idols of Environmentalism"

In The Idols of Environmentalism, Curtis White launches a sweeping critique of contemporary environmental activism. White targets all contemporary environmental activists, whether it is “the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon,” presenting their efforts not only as ineffective interventions into halting environmental destruction, but also as capitulations to it.

For White, the problem with environmentalists’ approach to environmental destruction lies in the very paradigm that it operates: targeting an illusory enemy, the “Monsanto’s and Weyerhauser’s,” and confronting them with the very language and logic that legitimizes their destructive practices. Instead, White argues that environmental activism needs to recognize and confront the “deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human” character of the market system that permeates the “very fabric of our daily life,” and inhabits “nearly every working American, environmentalists included.” White attempts to explain the real predicament and position of environmentalists in his thesis:

THE LESSONS OF OUR IDOLS come to this: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is in fact internal to you, when its life is your life. And even if it were external to you, you cannot defeat an enemy by thinking in the terms it chooses, and by doing only those things that not only don’t harm it but with which it is perfectly comfortable.

For White, halting environmental destruction requires not only the fall of the “idols of environmentalism,” but also the transcendence of the system that has come to define “our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order.”

White examines the popular and mainstream icons of the environmental movement, Kyoto and Gore, to demonstrate their problematic approach to environmental destruction. Kyoto, of which environmentalists “speak longingly—“Oh, if only we would join it!” is portrayed as “little more than a complex scheme to create a giant international market in pollution,” one that protects “economic growth and development” rather than nature. Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, while it “may have distressing things to say about global warming,” is little more than “an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our utterly corrupted democracy.” Although White effectively depicts the limitations of such efforts, he inaccurately distills the environmental movement into an image of parading Gore and Kyoto supporters.

In doing so, White creates an image of a ‘monolithic’ environmental movement characterized by those “that ‘give back’ to nature through the bequests, the annuities, the Working Assets credit cards and long distance telephone schemes, and the socially responsible mutual funds advertised in Sierra and proliferating across the environmental movement.” White’s characterization of environmentalists ignores the sects of the environmental movement that offer and practice meaningful challenges to the market system, of which White, himself fails to provide or even recognize their existence. White’s caricature of a uniform and static environmental movement imparts a feeling of fatalism that seems to be “thinking in cartoons,” the same critique he launches against current environmentalists.

White deepens his argument by challenging the very language and logic utilized by his ‘monolithic’ environmental movement to confront environmental destruction. Throughout the piece, White parenthesizes and contextualizes commonly used terms like “economic growth and development,” “harvests,” “liquidity,” “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” in order to expose the ways in which these terms serve to embed and proliferate the practices and mindsets that protect the market economy, not nature. For White, because these terms find meaning in a scientific and rational context and, by extension, serve to support the logic of the market, it is necessary to “rediscover a common language of Care.” White deploys his idea of such a language by quoting such transcendental and religious figures as St. Thomas Aquinas, Goethe, Kant and the Buddhist scholar David Loy. Although White’s support of this type of logic and language may offer a more effective means of communicating the intrinsic value of nature, it fails to recognize that it was the same logic used to uphold such socially and environmentally destructive practices like the Crusades and slavery. White also reinforces his inaccurate depiction of the environmental movement by failing to recognize, and legitimize, the groups that have deployed such language, like the eco-feminists and the deep ecologists.

White’s creation of a ‘monolithic’ environmental movement, subsequent rejection of all non-mainstream environmental efforts, and his failure to outline or highlight alternatives amount to a fatalist’s approach to environmental destruction. For White, the impending environmental apocalypse and the comprehensive transcendence he believes is necessary to escape such a fate seems to unilaterally raze the agency of the entire environmental movement. As a result, White’s argument leaves his audience with two distinct and competing visions for the future of the environmental movement and the world. The first is a call for environmentalists to sincerely and comprehensively re-examine their efforts and actions in order to transcend the pitfalls in which White exposes in the article. The second is one that believes that the environmental apocalypse, resulting in the dissolution of both the market system and the environmental movement, is necessary because it would force the transcendence he believes is required for salvation; without which there is “no hope for discovering the real problems and the best and truest response to them.”