Bill McKibben - America's Environmental Leadership Long Since Outsourced

[hatrack]

"California unveiled the design on its state quarter last week: a picture of John Muir, an image of Half Dome. It's an apt representation of American environmentalism at the moment – rich in history, but not worth much at present.

Modern environmentalism can fairly be described as an American invention. It got its rhetoric from John Muir, its fighting savvy from David Brower, its sense of the world from Rachel Carson, and its institutional framework from the Congress of the Nixon years, which bowed before the loud will of the American people in the years after Earth Day I. The rest of the industrialized world followed, its NGOs patterned on the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, its laws modeled on ours. We paved the road; we drove innovation.


So it is odd for American environmentalists to look up now and realize that we no longer play a leading role of any kind. If you spend much time at international conferences, you see that we are no more the center of gravity, the fount of new ideas. Long before President Bush ditched the Kyoto treaty, we were drifting toward the back of the pack.


Name the field. Technology? In 1980, the U.S. was far and away the world's biggest player in the nascent wind market. If you wanted to meet with a windmill guru, you booked a flight to California. Then the Reagan administration gutted subsidies for renewables. While the Danes and the Germans and the Spaniards have advanced the technology, we've only recently begun to revive our interest. If you want to meet a wind guru now, you fly to Copenhagen. What about cars? The Japanese managed to put hybrid engines on the market half a decade before Detroit; now Toyota is licensing the technology to American automakers. The president promises hydrogen cars by 2020 – but the biggest player in the field is Canadian. Or consider design. Green building is still an uphill struggle here – the odd showpiece stuck among sprawling tract mansions. But go to Western Europe and you feel the difference immediately – green architecture embedded in increasingly green cities, where planners have created livable downtowns and built effective mass transit."

EDIT

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18341