By Dean James Gustave Speth, from the Spring 2008 issue of Environment: Yale magazine.

Hard to believe, but as early as 1981, in the waning days of the Carter administration, the President’s Council on Environmental Quality issued a report calling for decisive national and international action to address the threat of climate change. (See the accompanying article, published in The New York Times on January 13, 1981.)

I was chair of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality at the time, and this report was our third, and final, major report on the climate-change challenge. For those who cared to look, there was enough information on climate change three decades ago to stir the deepest concerns. We even knew enough to recommend, as the Times story reports, that rising carbon dioxide concentrations be capped at 50 percent above the preindustrial level, a goal that makes environmental sense today. Because the United States and others failed to act on early warnings like ours, the prospects of halting the buildup of greenhouse gases at safe levels are now fast slipping away.

I could claim bragging rights of the I-told-you-so variety, but what a Pyrrhic victory! I raise this issue instead because it is important to understand how a long string of climate warnings and recommendations spanning several decades could have been largely ignored.

A number of factors probably combined to produce this unfortunate result. The climate issue is technically complex and not easy to master. I once heard the head of the Environmental Protection Agency totally confuse the climate issue and the ozone-depletion issue. Climate change has thus far unfolded gradually, and it has yet to produce the kind of crisis that generates action. Its most serious consequences stretch into the distant future, presenting the type of long-term problem with which our political system has great difficulty. And the search for solutions inevitably leads to the energy sector, where our political storehouse is full of worthy but neglected proposals for much-needed change. The combination of energy industry opposition and consumer concern plus higher energy prices has proven fatal.

Journalist Ross Gelbspan and others have pointed to the shortcomings of the media and other instruments of public education, which did not keep the climate issue on the front burner. In the 1970s and early 1980s, environmental issues were fresh; we environmentalists were constantly sought out by reporters. But the novelty faded and so did editors’ interest. The beat did not always get the top reporters. Fortunately, this situation is changing today, at least on the climate issue. Indeed, one can appreciate how influential the media actually are as we see one cover story, TV special and film after another on the climate issue. It is easy to see what has been missing.

In his book Boiling Point, published in 2004, Gelbspan notes two other important and related patterns: One is that the desire of American journalists to seek balance by presenting two sides to even one-sided issues can actually introduce bias. The other pattern Gelbspan sees stems from the acquisition of most news outlets by a small group of conglomerates. With this change, Gelbspan believes that “the direction of the business has been determined by the profit-driven demands of Wall Street.”

More significant than the shortcomings of the media, I believe, has been the rise of the modern right in recent American politics. Today’s environmentalism had roots in the activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. It sought major regulatory intervention in the economy. It sometimes even talked about limits to growth. And just as it was getting started, so were the Olin Foundation and other funders of the New Right, to whom these ideas were anathema. As the environmental organizations were gaining traction, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation and other right-leaning groups were too. Market fundamentalism gained strength in parallel with today’s environmentalism.

Frederick Buell, in his valuable and undernoticed book, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century, has chronicled what happened: “Something happened to strip the environmental cause of what seemed in the 1970s to be its self-evident inevitability. … The most important explanation for these events isn’t hard to find. In reaction to the decade of crisis, a strong and enormously successful anti-
environmental disinformation industry sprang up. It was so successful that it helped midwife a new phase in the history of the U.S. environmental politics, one in which an abundance of environmental concern was nearly blocked by an equal abundance of anti-environmental contestation. … The public drive for environmental change had been ‘neutralized’ by the 1980s, blocked by an increasingly organized and elaborate corporate and conservative opposition.” Our public discussion of the climate issue has certainly been one area of such contestation, amply fueled by oil and other industry support.

Finally, I would argue that the failure to rise to the climate-change challenge is part of a larger failure to treat as priorities a number of major environmental threats and that we are all complicit in that failure. It is worth remembering what it has taken to build the current momentum for climate action: after a quarter-century of neglect, societies now risk ruining the planet. And while the threat of disastrous climate disruption does seem to be motivational at last, many other environmental risks continue to be largely ignored. Our values are too materialistic, too anthropocentric and too contempocentric, with the result that we have hardly begun what Thomas Berry has said must be our Great Work–“moving the human project from its devastating exploitation to a benign presence.”

George Bernard Shaw famously remarked that all progress depends on being unreasonable. It’s time for a large amount of civic unreasonableness. It is time for the environmental community–indeed, all of us–to step back from the day-to-day and develop a deeper critique of what is going on.