Last week I received the following letter from the Bard Center for the Environment.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The election last week was very grim for the climate, and the future. Perhaps the Tea Party will over-reach, with effects lasting only a few years, but regardless, these are the critical years. Last Tuesday, the window for bold near-term climate action slammed firmly shut. The story almost came true, the grassroots climate movement almost drove national legislation. But now that way forward has hit a brick wall. It will be at least four years before the House swings back to a majority for clean energy.

Here is how the strategy unfolds:

1. For the next 6-10 years, the Clean Air Act, RGGI, and California’s laws can be used to hold US emissions steady, and maybe even cut them 5%-15%. This means fight like hell to keep the policies strong. In 2012, the Presidency, not Congress, will be the key, in determining the speed at which the EPA moves forwards.

[The EPA regulates carbon as a pollutant. RGGI’s are Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives. California has set ambition targets for carbon reduction.]

2. In the meantime, rebuild a grassroots political movement demanding clean energy. Support all efforts at the state and local level, and work all levers to drive investment into clean energy.

3. By 2016 or 18, or even 20, rebuild super-majority congressional support for clean energy, and pass comprehensive carbon legislation. The timing will depend on the degree to which climate disasters unfold.

So we stabilize as low as we can, and then leave it to our kids and theirs to then drive levels back to 450, and within a couple of centuries, back to 350. Hope and pray that all our combined work catalyzes some cheap clean technology, that solves the problem in ways we can’t imagine, and sooner than we ever thought possible. And hope and pray also that we don’t cross tipping points along the way, triggering runway warming in the process.

That’s where we are: looking at another decade of work, just, really to get started. Truly depressing. But it is, as they say, what it is. Now we need to search and find the courage within ourselves to carry on.

Still so many beautiful parts of the earth, so much of creation to fight for….

Thanks for the work you are doing.

Eban Goodstein
Director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Bard has made climate action the signature focus of its environmental policy program. And Goodstein’s despair over recent events is obvious. He is hardly alone. Two of the more important and credible climate blogs — Climate Progress and RealClimate — share this outlook. Both of these blogs are also severely critical of the Obama administration for failing to provide the leadership required on either the domestic or international fronts to achieve sustainable climate goals.

I’m reminded of peace activism during the 1980s. It was a time when global nuclear war was increasingly likely. Had it occurred, it would have been a policy failure equal to that of our collective inaction on climate change. Those of you not attuned to this time probably do not appreciate just how close we came to a hot war, and how the prospect of it helped shape the environmental movement of the time. This apocalyptic threat loomed over other environmental debates. It is not that people stopped working to address pollution, population, endangered species, habitat protection, and the like. Nor did it prevent the emergence of discourses like earth ethics, biodiversity, environmental justice, and sustainable development. But it was the larger context, the discourse that, for a time, structured how other environmental issues were discussed.

To be sure, this was not the first time the global environment was in the spotlight. Wildlife protection and resource conservation were major issues before World War II. One outcome of this concern was the founding of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN) in 1948, a synthetic organizations of states and civil society loosely affiliated with the United Nations. The IUPN is now the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Its name change that bespeaks the organizations philosophical and political orientations. This was not so much a shift from preservationist to conservationist sensibilities in the sense of American environmental history, but an ongoing struggle between anthropocentrism and geocentrism in the discourse of sustainability.

This is a story for another time. Back to the peace movement.

Peace activists worked hard, and got lucky. Both the capitalist and communist blocs were sorely strained by the weight of military spending. The Soviets more so than we at the time, although the cost of empire has certainly caught up with us twenty odd years later. Both blocs were placing first strike nuclear weapons in Europe, thus undermining the deterrents to nuclear war. Yet President Reagan and Premier Gorbachev were forced by relentless public opposition at home and abroad to step back from cold war brinksmanship. To be fair, a generous spirit from both men helped foster a rapprochement. Meanwhile, the green movement in the Soviet bloc created the social network used to organize the mass protests that eventually brought down the Soviet Union. Despite the rhetoric of cold war triumphalism in the West, nonviolent direct action played a large role in collapsing the Communist bloc from within.

The 1990s brought hope for a peace dividend (reduced military spending) and a ‘new world order’ of international cooperation. Sadly, both the Clinton and Bush administrations squandered this opportunity.

Clinton and company left the former Soviet bloc to the depredations of neoliberal economic theory, huge market failures, entrenched criminal gangs, widespread political corruption, and the kleptocracy that has arisen in this wake. Along the way, the US, NATO and the EU underfunded weapons security programs in the post-Soviet states. The result was a range of biological, chemical and nuclear materials (and scientists that made them) slipped out of sight, and now present a grave security threat the world over.

Bush’s free market fundamentalism and international unilateralism, alongside his post-911 military adventurism, whittled away at the credibility and participation of the United States in global accords (e.g. the stalled strategic arms reductions talks; the provocative placement of missile defence in central Europe). This made a mockery of our commitment to non-proliferation, and provided further justification for nuclear weapons by states like India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Israel, and South Africa. To its credit, the Obama administration is trying to undo some of this damage, and ‘reset’ relations with Russia and a suspicious post-American world.

There are parallels here between the environmental and peace movements. Over the last decade, no other environmental issue has been so emphasized as climate change. Globally there has been an enormous amount of successful advocacy, education, and policy initiatives around the subject. Both the peace and environmental movements provide an alternative narrative to understand the meaning and risks of their time. Nuclear annihilation versus detente and anti-imperialism was the narrative shift offered by the peace movement. Catastrophic climate change versus sustainability and green energy is the shift advocated by the environmental movement. After all, one cannot have animal welfare, biodiversity, environmental justice, or sustainable development on a planet whose climate is so altered that previous patterns of natural and cultural diversity are unviable.

Indeed, I suspect it is the increasing dominance of the climate change narrative that has shifted environmental discourse generally towards the language of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability is a big tent that allows climate change to be integrated as first amongst equals in environmental debates. To be sure, this is a source of friction for some environmentalists whose priorities begin elsewhere, object to the relative marginalization of their concerns, and worry that over-focusing on one dimension of sustainability will undermine others. The environmental justice movement comes to mind, especially in light of the well understood relationship between peace, justice and appropriate development. The concern for biodiversity is another, given the role ecological services play in making the earth habitable for people and other living things.

Regrettably, the US has been unable to grasp the nettle of climate action. Although not alone in its recalcitrance (Australia comes to mind), we failed to support the Kyoto Protocol, privileged corporate special interests in climate talks, delayed substantive technology transfers and transition funding to the global south, and ducked greening our own domestic infrastructure and energy policies. Under the Obama administration, there are some bright spots — the EPA can now regulate carbon as a pollutant, mileage standards for cars have been raised (after decades of delay), a green energy future is at least talked about, and the Bush administration is no longer in a position to censor scientists or doctor scientific research. But this has been too little, too late. This is especially so for emerging economies who, from an environmental perspective, are insisting on repeating the mistake of using the atmospheric commons to externalize the costs of their own industrialization.

So two decades on, both the environmental and peace movements are, if not back to square one, facing daunting challenges in creating a world that is more democratic, peaceful, socially just, and ecological whole.

Where do we go from here? I do not know. A set of questions, however, has been weighing on my mind.

What did the 2010 midterm elections mean? Were they an anti-environmental rejection of climate action by the public, a wave in a bad economy whose beneficiaries also happen to be global warming skeptics, or evidence of a fundamental ideological divide on environmental issues?

How should the environmental movement(s) respond? Do we wait for our children and their children to grapple with this issue? Should we being doing more to build solidarity with other movements, such as those for animals, peace and justice, and hope the synergy alters the political landscape? Should we be redoubling efforts to sign up big corporate and individual donors in a political environment where American elections are routinely bought?

How should environmental studies programs respond? Do we teach ‘just the facts’, or do we become more actively involved in public outreach and policy making? The debate over facts and values in the academy is as alive today as it was when Weber reflected on science and citizenship a century ago. We often assume the facts will lead citizens to make the right choices. Yet as important as facts are, environmental policy is as much a matter of values. So do we shift the conversation and curriculum about global warming so that it invokes a greater engagement with value-laden questions of ethics and worldviews?

How can educators at all levels best communicate the full depth of our situation without killing the hope, optimism and political engagement so necessary to solving this problem? How do we attune students to what the UN Convention on Biodiversity terms our ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, so that we can acknowledge different individual and collective opportunities to foster just development, the protection of biodiversity, and reversing climate change?

Finally, how do we hold all contributors to global warming to moral account? How do we demand that the main contributors in the past (the global north), the present (the world’s major economies) and the future (the global south) for the harm that has been done (or may be done) to the planet and its people, animals and nature?

My head hurts. I need to sleep on this.

Cheers, Bill

Image: Polar Bear on Ice Floe.