Will the Real Environmentalists Please Stand Up?

More rhetorical gunfire was exchanged recently in the battle over who can legitimately claim to be an environmentalist. The subject of the skirmish, the credentials of the combatants, and the tone of each side’s volleys all suggest the tide is turning. And yes, you guessed right: we are winning.

Who’s on First?

On one side is the Old School, activists who still rely on scare tactics and the crypto-Marxist rhetoric popular when the environmental movement was born in the 1960s and 1970s. Their motto seems to be “if it worked for Rachel Carson, it will work for us!”

Old-school environmentalists seldom want to debate science or economics; such things are unimportant to what is essentially an ideological (some would say religious) conviction.

On the other side is the New School, a motley assortment of free-market environmentalists, wise use advocates, scientists, and conservationists. Members of the New School tend to be believe that the tools and knowledge of their professions–economics, physical and health sciences, forestry, and ranching–can improve efforts to protect human health and the environment. The science and economics of environment issues, far from being unimportant, form the principal motivation of these activists.

The Heartland Institute’s Role

For the past five years, The Heartland Institute has been working with other members of the New School to reform the national environmental movement. Our 1994 book, Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism, our policy studies, and our monthly newspaper, Environment News, work to coax, persuade, and shame Old-school environmentalists into abandoning their wicked ways.

As part of that effort, on December 21, Heartland released a 47-page Policy Study suggesting that enough land in the United States has been set aside by public and private landowners for wilderness preservation. The authors–a retired U.S. Forest Service researcher and a private lumber importer–are thoughtful, well-read, and considerate of alternative views.

“Wilderness,” they write, quoting Roderick Nash, is not a scientific concept but rather “a state of mind evoked by a state of nature, a quality associated by some people with some places. A more rigorous definition probably is not possible.”

Approximately one-third of the land in the U.S. (excluding Alaska), they say, is “suitable for experiencing somebody’s conception of wilderness.” They chide radical environmentalists for pretending that only lands designated as wilderness preserves by the federal government qualify, either aesthetically or ecologically, as wilderness. In fact, hundreds of millions of acres of wildlands exist in the form of national, state, and local parks, private nature preserves, land set aside by various government agencies, and private land accessible to the public.

The wilderness protection issue is important for several reasons. It is the foundation of environmentalism’s romantic appeal to the general public. It is a clear case where Old-School ideology conflicts with current scientific thinking. And it is a case study of the trade-offs that invariably must be made between competing goals . . . trade-offs that Old-school environmentalists invariably refuse to recognize.

The Old School Attacks

Seven days after the new Heartland study’s release, the National Environmental Trust issued a news release trashing the study, its authors, and The Heartland Institute.

The NET news release is anything but thoughtful or considerate. NET accuses the authors of being “industry-paid ‘experts’” and “blatantly misstating the facts.” It refers to Heartland as “a so-called institute” and an “industry front group,” and even presents Heartland’s name in quotation marks, as if it were fictitious.

The news release leads off with a selective list of some of Heartland’s corporate donors. (A complete list is available on our Web site. No similar list appears on NET’s Web site.) Lest the reader not get the point, the release is titled “Industry Mounts New Attack on Wilderness.”

We quickly responded with our own news release commenting on the tone of the NET release (“either the NET is run by 16-year-olds, or somebody forgot to run a press release by the nearest adult”), defending the authors and their thesis, and presenting our credentials as an independent voice of reason.*

Who Is NET?

Whereas Heartland has a diverse funding base and 15-year history, NET is barely three years old and gets almost all of its funding from a few far-left foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the W. Alton Jones Foundation. While purporting to be “dedicated to educating the American public on contemporary environmental issues,” in fact it devotes its resources to street theater, lobbying, and manipulating press coverage of environment issues.

The irrelevance of science and economics to its mission, and accordingly its refusal to debate such matters, is unintentionally on display in NET’s mission statement on global warming: “To demonstrate to the public, press, and policy makers that climate change poses a serious threat to our environment, economic development, and quality of life, and that policies to mitigate climate change will improve economic competitiveness and the standard of living in the United States.”

Those are plainly debatable propositions, yet NET asserts them as undebatable truths. NET’s mission, then, reduces to unvarnished advocacy of partial truths, or propaganda.

While NET calls itself nonpartisan, its executive director was a top aide to former Senator and Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth and campaigned actively for Clinton-Gore. One published profile of NET says “many environmentalists think NET is a front organization preparing for the Gore for President campaign in 2000.”

Where the Battle Stands

Heartland’s exchange of news releases with NET reveals an Old-school environmental movement that is on the defensive and lacks either science or logic to defend its positions. Its tactics are limited to little more than name-calling, avoiding real debate, and lying.

NET’s organization, too, epitomizes the state of the Old School at the end of the 1990s. It is based in Washington D.C., staffed by political hacks, and funded by a few elite foundations better known for their hostility toward free enterprise than their concern for the environment.

The allegation that NET is a front group for a Gore campaign for President in 2000 is a specific count in an indictment that could be made against the entire Old-school movement. Lured to Washington by promises of money and political power, the Old School has been thoroughly co-opted by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Winning Battles, Losing the War?

The progress being made by New School environmentalists may be less apparent than the collapse and retreat of the Old School. This is due to media disinterest in the scientific and economic arguments preferred by New School environmentalists, and to the failure of prominent Republicans or moderate Democrats to embrace the pro-science, pro-market message.

Winning intellectual battles does not necessarily mean we will win the public policy war. Changes in public opinion and public policy will lag behind the intellectual victories being recorded by the New School. Still, policies based on lies and deception must eventually collapse, creating opportunities for new policies to be adopted. The collapse can occur suddenly and with little warning: witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union.

Despite unfavorable opinion polls and policy set-backs, or maybe because of them, we will keep publishing the best available research on the science and economics of environment issues. And we’ll mark our progress by the amount of sputtering and hyperventilating we cause among Old-school environmentalists, such as NET, who can’t, or won’t, tolerate the truth.

* The NET news release and our response can be viewed on Heartland’s Web site (www.heartland.org/studies/NETexchange.htm).