Green rage: radical environmentalism and the unmaking of civilization by Christopher Manes

Author:Christopher Manes [Manes, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Environmentalist, conservationist & Green organizations, Environmental Science, General, Social Science / General, Environmental Studies, Citizen participation, Environmental policy, Environmental protection, Green movement, Radicalism, Nature/Ecology, Human ecology, Écologisme, Environnement, Radicalisme, Écologie humaine, Soziale Bewegung, Umweltschutz, Ökologische Bewegung, Environmental policy Citizen participation
Publisher: Boston : Little, Brown
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE CRITICS

Nothing is natural.

— Allan Savory

THE CRITICS of Deep Ecology and radical environmentalism have been anything but restrained. They have accused radical ecologists of being fascists and Marxists, terrorists and mystics, people with axes to grind and hucksters in pursuit of wine, women, and song, destroyers of local economies, purveyors of distrust, obscurantists, atheists, misogynists and misanthropes. To paraphrase Edward Abbey, if any insult has been left out of the list, apologies are in order.

It is probably best to distinguish between critics who are avowedly pro-environmental and those who see any kind of environmentalism, radical or not, as an impediment to free markets, scientific progress, and other resplendent values behind the plundering and domination of nature.

“This juggernaut,” economist Julian Simon writes of the environmental movement, “fueled by false information and special interest values, must be stopped before the world is led too far along the road to disaster.” 1 Although the world seems to have already gone a long way toward disaster without any help from environmentalists, this logic typifies one strain of criticism of radical ecology. Its premise is that there is no environmental crisis and that warnings to the contrary are therefore being used as a pretext for carrying out a hidden agenda of apparently sinister special interests — the “dark side of environmentalism,” as William Pendley, director of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, ominously puts it. 2

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