The Death of Environmentalism

[PDF] If environmentalists hope to become more than a special interest we must start framing our proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics. Doing so is crucial if we are to build the political momentum – a sustaining movement – to pass and implement the legislation that will achieve action on global warming and other issues.
“Most foundations accept these categorical assumptions just as our grantees do,” said Peter Teague, the Environment Director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “We separate out the category of ‘the environment.’ We assign narrowly focused issue experts to make grants. We set them up to compete rather than cooperate. And we evaluate our progress according to our ability to promote technical policy fixes. The bottom line is that if we want different results we have to think and organize ourselves in a dramatically different way.”