Apocalyptic Environmentalism: It Works

One of my biggest pet peeves is the cliched assumption that apocalyptic environmentalism turns people off from doing anything about the environment rather than convincing people to fix the problem. This is something that skeptics of environmentalism have pushed for years and it’s become almost conventional wisdom, so much so that it has frequently popped up in comments here. The problem with this formulation is that it’s obviously false. First, any examination of the history of the environmental movements has shown time and time again that this language works very well and has convinced people to do all sorts of things, including shutting down the timber industry in the Northwest in the 1980s to protect ancient forests and spotted owl, a story I know very well. Moreover, it has just worked this week with Obama responding to protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline by killing it.

For those of you with access to university libraries, I want to point you to Robin Globus Veldman’s article in the Spring 2012 issue of Ethics & the Environment titled “Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End Facilitates Moral Reasoning among Environmental Activists.” Here is the abstract:

Often assumed to induce fatalism, empirical evidence shows that environmental apocalypticism is frequently associated with activism. I suggest this is the case because the notion of imminent catastrophe reveals a moral to the environmental story, and in so doing furnishes a point of view from which people can determine what constitutes environmentally ethical behavior. Insofar as it guides behavior, this apocalyptic moral reasoning can be usefully understood as a folk version of consequentialism. Further research on how people put environmental ethics into practice would complement the significant advances environmental ethicists have made in the areas of normative and meta-ethics over the past several decades.

She then goes on to detail how the apocalyptic narrative creates a moral world for activists and how this has been so effective in the last-century. Now, it’s possible that apocalyptic environmentalism actually does turn people off. But this needs to be shown with empirical studies, not as either an attack from people who don’t like environmentalism to begin with or as a conventional wisdom cliche. The evidence, as I and other scholars read it, strongly suggest that this sort of language actually works very well. It won’t get everyone involved in the environmental movement. But nothing will do that. Rather, it’s a more effective tool than perhaps anything else in creating strong commitment among a group of people who will then act to make change.