Photo: limonada via Flickr

At first blush, these two jobs don’t seem to have much in common.  Lately, though, I’ve been wondering about the overlap between my identity as an environmentalist and my identity as a wrongologist.  Here’s why: For the past few months, I’ve been conducting a series of Q&As over at Slate — interviews with various interesting, well-known people about their relationship to being wrong.  Not long after the series started, I got an email from a reader: 

You should do an interview about wrong environmental predictions. “Too cheap to meter” — nuclear power — would be a good one.  I’m not volunteering!

I was immediately inclined to agree with my correspondent: I should do a piece about wrong environmental predictions.  But rather than look outward toward all the wrongheaded beliefs we’ve fought against, I thought: Why not look to our own mistakes?  Justly or otherwise, environmentalists are already associated with self-righteousness, and that’s hardly a reputation that I (or Grist) want to fan.  Moreover, and perhaps more to the point, environmentalists are no more immune to error than the species as a whole. 

In fact, given the nature of their work, environmentalists might even be more susceptible to erring than others.  The “environment” in “environmentalism” is that surpassingly messy and mutable information field known as the real world.  The real world is a wonderful place — that’s why we’re all dedicated to protecting it — but it is, to put it mildly, exceptionally complex.  Within it, controlled experiments are nearly impossible, genuine signals compete with generalized noise, false alarms masquerade as true, and the left field (that inconvenient source of surprise, disorientation, and disconfirmation) lurks everywhere.  The work of environmentalists is to make sense of that messy situation, predict its future, and encourage appropriate action in light of those predictions. 

It’s a tough job, and one that is, as I say, dogged by the specter of screwing up.  (To take just one example, consider Paul Ehrlich’s famous losing bet against Julian Simon over resource scarcity.)  And there are other complications, too.  How do we know if our predictions were truly wrong, or if the predictions promoted actions that then averted feared outcomes?  When the stakes are as high as they often are in this domain, is it more important to be careful than to be right — that is, to “err on the side of caution”?  Is it legitimate to say (as many do with respect to the Ehrlich bet, among other environmental issues) that however wrong we seem now, we are simply off on the timing, and will be proved right in the long run?  (And if so, why are we generally unimpressed when others use that “long march of history” excuse?) Do we weaken our cause if we publicly acknowledge our mistakes?  After all, while scientists, including environmental scientists, are often models of epistemological modesty, activists are often models of pragmatism — willing to streamline or simplify the facts (and sometimes even obscure or distort them) in the interest of sending a compelling message.

These are the kinds of questions I’d like to discuss in one of my upcoming Q&As.  So I put it to the astute readers of Grist: What have environmentalists been most wrong about?  How should we deal with our errors?  And whom should I interview about how the environmental movement faces up to its fallibility?  You can share your ideas in the comment section below, or email them to me at kathryn@beingwrongbook.com.

Kathryn Schulz will be in Seattle this week to talk about being wrong and read from her new book.  You can join her on Wednesday, June 30, at 7:00 p.m. at Third Place Books or on Thursday, July 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Elliott Bay Book Company.

The sun sets on our poverty series.

Photo: Clipart.

There’s something a little odd about ending a series on the subject of poverty — as we at Grist are officially doing today — when the issue itself will stubbornly continue to exist.

That might seem, at first, like a laughable sentence. Of course poverty will persist — when hasn’t it? — and of course our series must end. (Not so coverage of the issues, though. Publishing Poverty & the Environment was as much an act of masonry as of journalism, and we hope we have built a strong foundation for ongoing coverage in the future.)

But I’m going to suggest that this shouldn’t be an absurd sentiment — that the goal of our journalism should be to end economic and environmental injustices. As Marcus Keyes said in our article on poultry farming, these are not “just” environmental issues or human-rights issues. They are also moral issues — moral outrages — and to take their existence for granted is to neglect a code of honor that should be common to humanity.

And yet, we as a society have largely stopped believing that we can end vast systemic injustices, such as the cruelly disproportionate environmental burdens borne by the poor. (Or such as homelessness, or AIDS, or any other pervasive social ailment.) That failure of conviction inevitably leads to a failure of action — or, at best, to band-aid solutions and stop-gap substitutes. But these issues do not call for half measures; they call on us to create a vision of how, in five or 15 or 50 years, our problems will be lesser and our society greater.

How does that kind of change happen? It happens both externally and internally — that is, from interacting with others who cause us to experience (in a phrase I love best at its most literal) a change of heart. It happens individually and collectively. It happens slowly — “the arc of history is long,” noted Martin Luther King Jr. — and then, sometimes, abruptly — “but it bends toward justice,” he concluded. In other words, as much as politics is public and pragmatic, it is also personal and alchemical; your turning point will depend equally on turns of fate and your turn of mind.

I’m a writer and editor, and as such my truck is with words, so I am compelled to point out that this relationship to politics is not unlike the one we have to reading. The words that move me might not be the words that move you, but for each of us there will be some phrase or fragment that reaches out across the gap: from external to internal, collective to individual, stuck to struck; from our own familiar issues to the needs and fates of others.

In putting together this series, as in all our work, we at Grist sought what moved us — emotionally, politically — and what we thought might move our readers. (To say nothing of our website traffic.) In that spirit, I’d like to mark the series’ end by offering up some of my own favorite moments from it: the words and thoughts and facts that clicked inside my own admittedly idiosyncratic head. I encourage all of you to follow suit by posting your own favorite fragments. And I thank all of you for partaking: the word means (here’s the editor in me again) to be involved, but also — crucially — to take one another’s part.

“People are an important part of an ecosystem. If they are poor and unhealthy, then the ecosystem is poor and unhealthy.” — Oliver Bernstein, “Walking the Line“

“Today, children in L.A. — 80 percent of whom are black, Latino, or Asian/Pacific Islander — breathe more air toxins in the first two months of life than is recommended in a lifetime.” — Francisca Porchas, “Fit to Be Ride“

“You need to begin to look for allies beyond the environmental community to get you to 51 percent in any policymaking realm, because, after all, you’re not going to succeed in your policy agenda until you get to 51 percent.” — Sheryll Cashin, “Integrate Expectations“

“Barbara Lott-Holland, a black woman, is going on the bus telling black people that they should not buy cars because small island states are being overwhelmed by global warming. Barbara is up on the bus saying to people, ‘Black people gotta give up their cars.’ They say, ‘Give up my car? I don’t got a car! It’s the white man who’s got a car! How come the white man gets everything and now, just when I’m about to buy a car, you’re telling me global warming? Who the hell cares?’ And Barbara’s saying, ‘Well, the reality is, we have always been the moral conscience of this country.’” — Eric Mann, “Movement Shakers“

“Shame on us who don’t listen, who put ourselves in a cocoon and say, oh, you know ‘those people.’” — Marlene Grossman, “L.A. Story“

“It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral.” — Robert Bullard, “Justice in Time“

Eric Mann.

When Eric Mann first encountered environmentalists, he saw them as a bunch of “arrogant, racist airheads.” When Frances Beinecke first encountered environmentalists, she felt she’d found her cause.

Frances Beinecke.

Nearly four decades later, both are tireless proponents of environmental sanity, but they work in very different ways. Mann is director of the Los Angeles-based Labor/Community Strategy Center, where he fights for environmental justice, immigrant and labor rights, and economic equity. Beinecke is president of Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation’s biggest and best-known environmental organizations.

As part of our Poverty & the Environment series, Grist invited the two to discuss the relationship between the mainstream environmental movement and the environmental-justice movement in the past, present, and — most important — the future.

Grist: Let’s get the ball rolling by establishing how each of you came to be doing the work you do today.

Beinecke: When I was in college, I knew I wanted to engage in social-justice issues, but didn’t know what. The first environmental job I had was working for the city health department, testing kids for lead poisoning through a college internship. About that same time, Earth Day came along and I saw the environmental cause as one that was exceedingly timely and new and energizing. So I got in on the ground floor — which I guess ages me somewhat — [and] I’ve been involved ever since.

Mann: Almost everything in my life is framed by the black movement and the war in Vietnam, so I begin with a very radical critique of the United States. In 1964, I was working for the Congress of Racial Equality. I then went to work for General Motors, to organize autoworkers. I saw the environmental movement as a bunch of white, privileged kids who were telling us what was wrong with the automobile and I was saying to them, “Hey look, we’re not building the B-1 bomber. You know, people gotta have a job.”

Mann rallying a crowd.

I was approached by Tony Mazzocchi who had been with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers and he said, “Eric, these kids may be arrogant. They may be racist. They may be airheads. But they’re right. You’ve got to take a look at the internal combustion engine.” And then, smart organizer that he was, he said, “I thought you were radical. The most radical thing is telling General Motors what they have to produce.”

And I’m a good convert. If you convince me, I organize other people.

Beinecke: I would agree that in order to really address environmental issues, you need a very, very broad movement, a movement that goes well beyond the environmental community as it is today. The environmental community is robust; it’s made up of as many as 10 million people [in the U.S.]. But 10 million people isn’t enough if you’re really trying to change society. I’m sure I’m not as radical as you are, but I would argue that I’m just as determined that we need a broad force to really [get] the attention of our leaders and of the people in the country.

Mann: Frances, here’s an example of where we don’t have a unified environmental movement. In Los Angeles, the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] is building these incredibly expensive rail lines to almost nowhere, with very, very low ridership, when we have the chance to have bus-only lanes, to have a fleet of clean-fuel CNG [compressed natural gas] buses. We want buses on the freeway, we want auto-free zones to stop the use of the internal combustion engine in large parts of Los Angeles.

Now, we get along very well with NRDC in L.A. This is not in any way a hostile relationship — in fact, it’s a very constructive one. Still, month after month, the lowest-income bus riders go to the MTA and are totally abused and insulted by Democratic Party liberals. And we cannot get white middle-class people to fight for this. It’s been 10 years of active outreach to people who are allegedly environmentalists, and they do not rally around low-income, people-of-color environmental issues. We are good organizers. We did not write them off. We’ve made endless appeals. It’s just not happening.

Beinecke: It sounds like a hugely challenging issue. Fundamentally, in all movements, organizations have their main focus and then they have areas where they work with partners. Here at NRDC, we have a much broader view of partnership than we’ve had in the past, and we’re looking for opportunities to develop that in a way that listens to community concerns and is respectful. It’s a learning experience to try to figure out the best way for an organization like NRDC — which is perceived as a big, national, white, wealthy organization, and you know in many respects that’s a correct characterization — [to] develop a relationship of trusted partnership. I’m sure that we have a long way to go, but it’s something we’re deeply interested in doing.

Mann: NRDC is perceived as a wealthy, predominantly white organization — but that’s not the critique. That’s what it is. In 1991, at the People of Color Summit, part of the dynamic was, you could say, jacking up the mainstream environmental movement. And it deserved it, and some people responded better than others to that critique. But in 2006, I’m not trying to replicate that phenomenon. This is a more subtle conversation. NRDC has been a friend, NRDC buys an ad in our annual book, we go to their events. This is not a story of not getting along; that is the progress that has been made. The more fundamental question is why the white middle class does not give a damn about the black poor and does not care about Latinos, even when the issues [are] right up their ideological alley.

Beinecke: I don’t know how to answer that question. I think people generally speaking do [care], but environmental issues are conveyed very much in terms of natural-resource issues. To separate the natural environment from the human environment results in a train wreck, because they’re so interconnected. That’s something that we have to convey much more powerfully than we have in the past.

Mann: Well, let me go a different way, because of course we both agree on that. The question is trying to figure out where we’re not [agreeing], right?

Beinecke: Yeah.

Mann: So let me just raise a couple of things. I think the work has to be independent of and hostile to the Democratic Party. We’re right now in the face of a right-wing, evangelical, neo-fascist movement in this country that is frightening the hell out of me, and I’m a pretty good fighter. That counter-revolution is being led by the Republicans, with the criminal conciliation of the Democratic Party. John Kerry goes on the radio with Larry Kudlow, who’s a right-wing TV reporter, and he says to Kerry, “Are you for free markets, John? Or are you for that socialistic control of corporate life that’s gonna squeeze profits and drive away people’s jobs?” “Oh, I’m very pro-business.” Larry Kudlow has got him groveling. It’s like he cannot push back and say, “Hey Larry, we believe in regulating the corporation, we think free markets lead to poverty, racism, and environmental degradation.”

Can we get a Democrat to say that? No. So the environmental movement is going to have to say it. But that’s not the discourse that I’ve heard. So that’s one of the problems.

Beinecke: I have absolutely no dispute that we’re sorely lacking in leadership. Both parties and particularly the Democrats have an opportunity to use the environment as an issue and haven’t used it. I think that change is not going to come from the federal government, it’s going to come from local leaders. At the local level, people are getting the issues out there in a way that people perceive that there are solutions. Over 200 mayors have signed on to curb global warming in their cities when you could barely get it on the congressional agenda. It’s important for us to be working in those places where change is possible.

Mann: But what I’m asking you is, do you have a theory of counter-hegemonic organizing? If NRDC issued a vote of no confidence in a group of legislators, both Republican and Democrat, for jeopardizing the public health and capitulating to corporations — which is different from what the Bus Riders would do, it would come [from] within your own culture — people would say uh-oh, NRDC is escalating the struggle in a way we’ve never seen before.

That would be a real contribution to the movement, and I don’t see it happening yet. And as an organizer, Frances, I’m trying to organize you to do it, because we need you to do more. You have the resources. I hope you know this is not an effort to jack you up. This is an effort to say, “Look, you’re an important piece of the puzzle.” Because in some way you are a public trust, right? You are an organization that has that level of public recognition, and people should be able to hold you accountable in a constructive way and urge you to do more.

Beinecke: I welcome the urge to do more. We have spent five years working as hard as we can to try to hold the line with the Bush administration’s rollback of environmental laws. And I think we’ve provided a huge service by doing that, but the period of defensiveness is over. So I welcome encouragement to be out there in a more aggressive way than we’ve been. We may disagree on exactly how that unfolds, but I think we will agree on the need to be a very powerful voice on these issues.

Mann: The second thing I want you to think about is a constructive proposal that came out of a criticism. I was at a meeting [last week] in Sacramento with about 25 environmental-justice leadership groups [and] maybe six liberal environmental — in a good sense — legislators. And what they said is, “When certain groups” — such as yours, Frances — “come to us to make proposals on a bill, in the past we thought they spoke for a broader environmental movement. What we realize now is they speak for part of the environmental movement, but in fact there are significant disagreements.”

So they proposed two things: One, for the EJ groups to please show up in Sacramento more. But two, could we and the so-called mainstream groups get our act together, work out some of these differences, and come back with a united front for the legislators of both parties? I thought that was a really good suggestion, and I’m offering it to you as another constructive thing we could do.

Beinecke: I think we should be doing that, and I’m surprised that we’re not. We will definitely be a stronger force if we can agree ahead of time on the agenda. But you know, Eric, there’s something I want to ask you.

Mann: Sure, sure, please.

Beinecke: You were saying earlier that you came out of the civil-rights movement. And I got in, as I mentioned, through Earth Day. That was a period of time where people marched. People spoke out. They thought their voice made a difference and could affect decision-makers — and did, in fact, because both the civil-rights movement and Earth Day had enormous impacts from a public-policy standpoint.

The issues that we’re facing today are equally great. And yet, we’re not marching. We’re not marching on Iraq, we’re not marching on the environment, we’re not marching on social-justice issues. Do you see that emerging again, or how do you see movement-building going into the future?

Mann: I completely agree with you that movement-building is the essential task facing all of us. The Strategy Center has a national school for strategic organizing, and we do go out into the street and do hand-to-hand ideological combat with the right. What I’m convinced about is the environment must be a cause — not an issue, a cause. It has to have a strong moral, transformative nature to it.

Barbara Lott-Holland, a black woman, is going on the bus telling black people that they should not buy cars because small island states are being overwhelmed by global warming. Barbara is up on the bus saying to people, “Black people gotta give up their cars.” They say, “Give up my car? I don’t got a car! It’s the white man who’s got a car! How come the white man gets everything and now, just when I’m about to buy a car, you’re telling me global warming? Who the hell cares?”

And Barbara’s saying, “Well, the reality is, we have always been the moral conscience of this country.”

My point is that we’re training people to do what we call transformative organizing, to have ethical and moral conversations with people. The thing that’s missing today is training centers for organizers. We’re trying to get to the point where we can train 100 organizers a year instead of about 10. I think the movement needs to figure out how we’re going to train a couple of thousand organizers a year. The Heritage Foundation now takes 64 summer interns a year.

Beinecke: I saw that.

Mann: And we take eight.

Beinecke: Right.

Mann: We could use your support to say, “Hey folks, we need to develop a cadre of environmental and environmental-justice and anti-racist organizers,” because taking it to the street is not primarily marching. Taking it to the street is primarily about addressing churches and addressing union halls and [getting] involved in the politics of transformational ideological conversion.

Beinecke: Yeah. Well, the thing about a march is that it sends a message much more broadly.

Mann: Oh, I agree.

Beinecke: What I’m saying is, the march needs to be a vehicle of the 21st century, of an outpouring of urgency that isn’t there. Intellectually, people get the urgency, but from a communication and action standpoint, I don’t feel it permeating as broadly as it could. If we could come together not only in organizing but in amplification to make these issues more broadly understood, it would be a great thing.

Grist: This is one role the media can play — and when the mainstream media doesn’t, that’s when more progressive and independent media ventures [like, eh-hem, Grist] have to jump in and fill the gap.

Mann: Right. I want to thank Grist for doing this, because I think this was a really good conversation between allies. I hope that’s clear from the beginning to the end. We began by saying that when you got involved, Earth Day was part of Anti-War Day was part of Civil Rights Day, right?

Beinecke: Mm hmm.

Mann: I mean, you didn’t join Earth Day; you were doing stuff on civil rights, and I’m assuming you were also doing anti-war work.

Beinecke: It was a continuum.

Mann: Exactly. And I think our goal is to rebuild that continuum.

Beinecke: I agree with that. We have a nation of great breadth, and to be successful as a movement we have to have connections with a broader array of communities. So it’s been a privilege to hear your perspective on this, and I am going to come find you when I’m in L.A.

Mann: Let’s make that happen.

Beinecke: I pledge it.

This month, the series focuses on the fate of DeLisle, Mississippi, home to a Dupont chemical plant. When the plant was first built, it was welcomed by DeLisle’s residents, who were hungry for steady work. Twenty-five years later, more than 2,000 current and former residents and employees are suing the company, blaming dioxin and other heavy metals from the plant for the cancer clusters and high illness rates in the area.

The 30-minute film, “Dioxin, Duplicity, and Dupont,” will air this Thursday (March 23) at 8:30 PM Eastern and Pacific on Link TV (DIRECTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410). You can also download the film to Video iPod.

This chronic editorial dilemma was particularly acute with the current series. Given the subject matter, “embarrassment of riches” is exactly the wrong phrase, but it is certainly (and sadly) the case that there’s no shortage of important stories to be told about the relationship between environmental and economic injustice. (That’s one reason I encourage all of you to use this discussion forum to share your own ideas and experiences, as well as your reactions to what you read here.)

We at Grist owe our familiarity with these issues to a great many people who took the time, early on in this process, to talk to us about their work and their vision for this series. That input was so valuable that I want to post some of it here; where we have not been able to incorporate it into the rest of the series, we can at least share it directly with our readers.

Herewith, then, a very abbreviated list of heartfelt thank-yous, helpful advisors, and important ideas:

Thanks to Michelle Depass and Jeff Campbell of the Ford Foundation, whose dedication to the overlapping terrain of economic and environmental justice first got me thinking about a special Grist series on poverty. (Jeff also planted the seed for two of the stories that will appear later in this series — on the federal guest worker program and U.S. forestry practices, and on fire management policy and poverty.)

Thanks to Orson Aguilar of the Greenlining Institute, who asked: Why do we define some issues as environmental and not others? Why haven’t mainstream environmental groups changed their practices over time, given that environmental-justice groups have been raising the same issues year after year? And: Why do so many civil rights groups often ignore the environmental issues that are crucial to so many of their constituents?

Thanks to Don Chen of Smart Growth America, who called out the environmental movement (including Grist!) for clinging to “its own culture, own heroes, own strategies.” Appropriately enough, Don urged a less isolationist and more ecological approach to social and environmental justice. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that Don sits on the board of Grist, and will be contributing an opinion piece on regional equity to the series.)

Thanks to Angela Park of Diversity Matters, who emphasized the lesser-known side of two important coins: first, that poor people not only suffer the most from environmental degradation but also benefit the least from environmental improvements; and second, that not only does the mainstream media neglect poverty issues, it also “obsesses over affluence,” making it all too easy for people to forget the crisis of poverty in the United States.

Thanks to Cynthia Renfro at the Marguerite Casey Foundation, who encouraged us, above all, to make sure that our focus on class did not come at the expense of talking about race. Along with other advisors, Cynthia drew my attention to the all-important issue of ongoing residential segregation. Simply put, if we don’t live on the same land, we don’t feel the same responsibility to take care of it — or of those who live on it.

This list does not begin to do justice to the many people who helped make this poverty series happen. And, in all probability, the series will not do justice to our advisors’ passion and ideas; quite possibly nothing could, given the depth of that passion and the diversity of those ideas. But we are no less grateful for the guidance, and we hope — as a magazine, and as a movement — to keep doing better; and to keep doing good.

I find this line of argument terrifying.  If we have to make the left into the right in order to win, I don’t want to win.  The problem isn’t Dean or Kerry.  The problem is that the left has utterly, drastically failed to generate a broadly compelling discourse about America.  We absolutely could do that — could saturate the nation with a democratic (small d and large) vision of justice, fairness, hardwork, opportunity, creativity, exploration, unity, diversity, solidarity, and success.  We could also expose the current far-right agenda for what it is really about: fear, control, cronyism, corruption, exploitation, homogeneity, and government and corporate control.

Instead, we’re squirming around inside the narrowminded narrative of the right, trying to carve out some tiny, safe, identifiable space that is ours.  It’ll never happen.  We can’t beat them on their terms — only when we begin to define the rules of the game.

Monster of God
By David Quammen
W. W. Norton &
Company, 384 pages,
2003

What this world needs,” opined the nature writer David Quammen in a 1984 column for Outside magazine, “is a good vicious 60-foot-long Amazon snake.” He was kidding, thankfully; the rest of the column goes on to describe the human tendency to massively exaggerate the size of anacondas in the Amazon. Now, though, 19 years later, Quammen has written Monster of God, a book arguing that precisely what the world does need is very large, very predatory animals.

I do Quammen a disservice by calling him a nature writer. To the extent that he is one, it is only because he — along with the likes of Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Terry Tempest Williams — has turned the genre upside down by allowing science, economics, politics, and culture to tromp all over its pastoral pages. By reinventing the content, these writers also reinvented the style: In Quammen’s work you will find no trace of the adjective-laden, sunset-stained daydreaming with which nature writing is, justly or unjustly, associated. Instead, you will find foul-mouthed Australians, baleful Siberians, frostbite, dictators, petty bureaucrats, history lessons, ethical impasses, crocodile blood on your glasses, and the occasional terrifying quadratic equation.

Crocodile blood notwithstanding, Monster of God does not belong to the genre Quammen characterizes as “predator porn.” Quite the contrary: In his last book, The Song of the Dodo, Quammen managed to turn the arcane field of island biogeography into a best-selling page-turner; in Monster of God, he reverses the trick, transforming stories of man-eating tigers and 20-foot crocodiles from tabloid perennials into a thoughtful exploration of the ecological and psychological roles of the beasts that eat us.

Lone shark.

Photo: NOAA.

A veritable ark of animals kill people — elephants, cobras, scorpions, spiders, malarial mosquitoes, the odd pit bull — but Quammen is not concerned with most of them in Monster of God. He’s interested strictly in those animals to whom we humans are meat, a group he denotes “alpha predators”: lions, tigers, bears, sharks, crocs, leopards, and a handful of others. All told, it’s a small group, and rapidly getting smaller. Exploding human population growth and related habitat loss are creating a vicious circle for vicious animals: With less territory to roam and fewer non-human prey available, alpha predators are increasingly likely to stray into populated areas, eat a person or two, incur the wrath of the locals, and be hunted in response — sometimes to local extinction. As Quammen observes, “man-eating is the most fatal of indiscretions, in that it often provokes retaliatory eradication.”

As a result, Quammen envisions a not-very-distant future — 2150, to be precise, although precision is a famously dicey hobby for prophets — in which the last viable wild populations of human predators will be extinct. The bulk of Monster of God is dedicated to explaining why, using case studies of four predators: the lions of the Gir forest in western India, the crocodiles of northern Australia, the grizzly bears of Romania, and the Siberian tigers of you know where. Quammen also looks at those predators that can’t be found on the Red List but stalk the forests of the imagination: Grendl (the bad guy in Beowulf), Humbaba (the nemesis of Gilgamesh), the biblical Leviathan, and, most oddly, Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Fearful Asymmetry

In literature and myth, monsters prey on the vainglorious, the impious, or the foolhardy; when all is said and done, there’s generally a moral written in the blood. In real life, predators prey on whatever — or whomever — is nearby, with brutal amorality. As it happens, those who are nearby are typically poor rural dwellers lacking either the material or political resources to protect themselves from predation. Thus, as Quammen notes, the hardships of living with alpha predators are borne largely by the world’s poorest and most disenfranchised people, while it is the wealthy who enjoy the lion’s share (so to speak) of the spiritual and aesthetic benefits of such animals. Not coincidentally, it is also the wealthy who most ardently advocate preservation.

When the cat’s away …

Photo: USFWS.

This unequal relationship to alpha predators is frequently overlooked by impassioned conservationists in the developed world. But Quammen never lets it recede too far into the background, thereby preventing the book from straying near sentimentality or self-righteousness. He asks: Can we have alpha predators if we’re unwilling to suffer and die because of them? And then: “Whom do we mean by ‘we’?” If the answer to the first question is to be “yes,” he says, the costs and benefits of alpha predators must be more evenly distributed.

To date, the only truly viable way to effect that redistribution is to offer financial incentives to locals to help conserve endangered species. Generally speaking, that means making a commodity of some small percentage of the animals — inviting foreigners to pay top dollar for the right to hunt bears in Romania, say, or creating a controlled global market for legally obtained crocodile skins or tiger pelts. If local people are involved in these transactions and receive a percentage of the profits, the logic goes, their livelihoods will depend on the continued existence of the animals and they will become highly motivated preservationists.

As Quammen shows, that theory is borne out in case after case, from Australia to Siberia. Yet however effective such programs may be, they generally receive a chilly reception from environmentalists, due to “popular resistance, based on principle or emotion, to the idea of killing so much as one tiger, one lion, one bear for someone’s profit.” Even Quammen, who is so wary of dogma that one suspects he fails his knee-jerk test at the doctor’s office, can’t help but balk at this Babbittry: “No matter how often I hear [this commodities argument] applied to one or another magnificent species in their various corners of the world, each time I find it tedious afresh. But, beyond quibbling over details … I can’t rationally disagree.”

A grizzly situation.

Photo: USFWS.

As both the cost-benefit conundrum and the commodities solution demonstrate, the logic of large-animal preservation does not cleave to moral law as closely as one might like. At times, indeed, it’s enough to make even the most philosophical of environmentalists squeamish. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly illustrated in Monster of God than in its brief history of Nicolae Ceausescu, under whose brutal dictatorship Romanians suffered appalling human rights abuses — and grizzly bears flourished. Quammen notes “a peculiar correlation between ursine abundance and autocratic oppression: positive.” More paradoxical still, Romania’s grizzlies flourished precisely because Ceausescu was a bloodthirsty hunter, single-handedly slaughtering some 400 bears during his reign — and thereby creating a very good incentive for forest managers (who were responsible for guaranteeing the dictator a successful hunt) to make sure bear populations thrived.

But not all political enterprises that have been devastating for humans have been kind to alpha predators. In Monster of God, Quammen offers a theory (“really only a notion”) that colonialism and the decimation of predators go hand in hand. Motivated by “detachment and ignorance and fear,” colonial powers destroy native predators to assert “their sense of cultural superiority, seize hold of an already occupied landscape, and presume to make it their own.” That hypothesis, he says, goes some way toward explaining the ongoing hatred many Westerners feel for the grizzly bear: “[A] war of territorial seizure that began with Lewis and Clark … won’t be over, not quite, until the last individuals of the animal … have been eradicated from the northern Rockies and the forests (on public land as well as private) are safe for white people and their cows.”

It’s Lonely at the Top of the Food Chain

These kind of side trips — to Ceausescu’s Romania, to the white Westerner’s id — are among the best things about Monster of God. In this book, as in Song of the Dodo, Quammen’s M.O. is the anecdote; he excels at finding the telling story, and at telling it. Who else would illustrate the relationship between market demand and endangered species conservation by introducing a taxidermist in the Australian outback who earns his living by preserving crocodiles for the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels? Trust me, you do not want to miss Quammen’s four-and-a-half page deadpan account of memorizing the recipe for pickled crocodile head.

In Song of the Dodo, Quammen used such anecdotes to breathtaking effect. Each tale on its own was gripping; pieced together, they eventually yielded a stunningly clear big picture, a sobering depiction of the workings of biogeography and its implications for our modern, crowded, all-too-human planet. I waited in vain for the same gratifying illumination in his new book, the a-ha! that punctuates the reading of a convincing and carefully wrought work. But Monster of God is more slideshow than jigsaw puzzle; each individual picture is lovely, but the effect is of repetition, rather than accumulation.

Lion in wait.

Photo: USFWS.

I suspect that this problem has more to do with the subject than the author. With his prodigious intellect, Quammen was right at home explaining some of the more obscure aspects of evolutionary theory. Monster of God doesn’t grapple with anything quite so dense. Habitat loss, the disappearance of prey, conflict with humans — these are the major factors that threaten alpha predators, and, as Quammen himself acknowledges, their inexorable interplay is obvious to even the most casual dabbler in ecology. As a result, there’s simply nowhere for him to go once he’s gotten started; one suspects that he needed, well, meatier material.

The potential impact on the human psyche of the wholesale disappearance of alpha predators should have provided just that kind of rich fodder, and Quammen makes a go at it with his forays into literature, myth, and moviemaking. It’s greatly to his credit that he can converse intelligently about ecology in one moment and about third century Babylonian literature the next (he frets that studying Gilgamesh, with all its translation and fragmentation issues, is like having “an important conversation on a cell phone while driving the freeway”), yet here, too, he comes up short. These forays are like blind alleys in a maze; they’re fun to explore, but they don’t lead anywhere and they don’t connect to one another.

That’s a pity, because there are truly important questions to be asked here. Once we human beings have ascended to the top of the food chain by lopping off its upper reaches, what will happen? Will some collective atavistic fear of ours be put to rest forever? Will we feel liberated? If so, what will that sense of liberation mean for the rather tattered notion that humanity is embedded in rather than above the natural world? And if that notion follows lions and tigers and crocs to extinction, what will that mean for efforts to protect the environment?

On the other hand, what if, instead of feeling liberated, we feel somehow bereft when alpha predators are gone? Quammen suggests that will be the case, and points to our appetite for movies like Alien as evidence that we yearn to be reminded of our fundamental edibleness. That’s interesting, but it’s hardly a strong case for the protection of species on this planet. Granted, arguments for the protection of species based on their psychological importance to humans are risky anyway, since they inherently promote the protection of charismatic megafauna at the expense of obscure (or noisome, or icky) microfauna. Still, I wish Quammen had done more to convey the sense of loss we may feel if we extinguish all our predators — and thus made the need to protect them more compelling.

Yet even with Monster of God’s shortcomings, I finished it asking myself the same questions I ask virtually every time I read anything by Quammen: How does anyone land such an impossibly fantastic job? And: When is his next book coming out? Even when he fails to live up to the rather high bar of class-A nouveau nature writing he helped set, Quammen makes for such an able and entertaining wilderness guide that you’re happy simply to be along for the ride. The vicarious thrill of skiing in Siberia or going nose-to-snout with crocodiles in Australia never pales, and nor does the delight of learning (sometimes in passing) things you never even thought to wonder about.

Nor, finally, does the sheer pleasure of his language. If Monster of God lacks the a-ha! of insight, it doesn’t want for the straight-up ha! of literary dazzle. This is a writer who pauses to note that important people get lionized, not tigerized; who characterizes Darwin, Australia, as “the capital of croc schlock”; and who describes the colors of homes in a Siberian village thusly: “What once may have been chartreuse now looks more like wasabi. Some sort of vivid cerulean has faded to cheery but flat shades of blue, the hue of wilting party balloons and elderly parakeets.” Wasabi? I’m glad ecology got him before J. Crew could. Given the dire state of the global environment, we’re lucky to have a voice in the wilderness this erudite, and this fun.

The medium for the message is The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg’s 500-plus page blow-by-blow of “the Real State of the World,” as the book is confidently subtitled. Lomborg’s thesis is simple enough: Environmentalists have deluded the masses into believing that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, when in fact, as the title of the first chapter bluntly states, “Things are getting better.”

As science writing goes, The Skeptical Environmentalist is C-minus stuff, as straight-forward and lackluster as a 10th-grade term paper. Oddly, this has not deterred the press from going mad over Lomborg, who has become the Danish darling of publications that ought to disagree with one another (the left-leaning London Guardian and the conservative Economist) and people who ought to know better (reviewers for the New York Times and the Washington Post).

So what has inspired this bipartisan media love-in? Certainly not the author’s credentials: An associate professor of statistics, Lomborg has never published an article or done original research in any field related to biology, ecology, or environmental science. And not his arguments, which weren’t peer-reviewed and in many cases are simply erroneous, as leading scientists argue in this special issue of Grist.

What the media love about The Skeptical Environmentalist is the tale of its genesis, which smacks of the apocryphal but, for what it’s worth, goes like this: Once upon a time, our protagonist earnestly believed in saving the world from ecological destruction. He believed so hard that he joined Greenpeace and stopped eating meat. Then one day he came across the writings of Julian Simon, who claimed that environmental concerns were largely bunk. Horrified, Lomborg set out to disprove Simon, only to find that he was correct in virtually every particular. With the blinders removed from his own eyes, Lomborg set out to enlighten the rest of us. And the media swallowed this creation myth whole — because, from Jim Jeffords to Jane Roe, the folks who switch horses in mid-stream make great copy.

However, they do not always make great sense. Such is the case with The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg doesn’t take issue with most primary research on the environment, which he says “generally appears to be professionally competent and well balanced”; his battle is with environmental advocacy groups, like the Greenpeace of his salad days. According to him, these groups have constructed a “Litany” of environmental woes — global warming, deforestation, extinction, air pollution, energy shortages, food scarcity, yada yada yada. Trouble is, he says, the Litany is a) false and b) disseminated so broadly and effectively that it leads us to make misguided policy decisions.

Eminently qualified people are tackling the first point elsewhere in this issue of Grist; I’ll take on the second. Although it has been largely ignored by the media, this point is of equal importance; indeed, it is why we care whether science is on the side of Lomborg or the Litany.

Good Causes and False Choices

Lomborg begins by making the entirely reasonable point that accurate information is critical to informed decision-making. If information is skewed to paint a bleaker environmental picture than is justified by reality, as he claims, then we will in turn skew our limited resources in favor of the environment and away from other important causes.

Fair enough. But then Lomborg proceeds to weigh the causes championed by the environmental movement against a deliberately circumscribed universe of other possible “good causes.” It is up to us, he says, to make responsible decisions about whether to protect the environment or “boost Medicaid, increase funding to the arts, or cut taxes.” But be warned: Environmentalists will do everything in their power to make the state of the world seem as bleak as possible because, “The worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather on hospitals, kindergartens, etc.” A few pages later he again claims that the purpose of the Litany is to cause us to prioritize the environment over “hospitals, child day care, etc.”

This argument is patently bogus — Lomborg fails to generate a single example of an environmental organization promoting its own ends at the expense of health, welfare, or education — and it is also patently divisive. One might, perhaps, justifiably charge the environmental movement with failing to sufficiently support other important progressive causes, but Lomborg is not trying to reform the movement; he’s trying to divide and conquer the left by blaming environmentalism for inadequate social welfare programs. Lomborg writes, “If we fail to consider how the money could otherwise have been spent, we actually create a societal structure in which fewer people survive. … We are in reality committing statistical murder.” But who is really failing to consider how our money is spent? As Lomborg notes, “We will never have enough money,” and therefore, “Prioritization is absolutely essential.” Why, then, does he weigh the environment only against hospitals and childcare, rather than against, say, industry subsidies and defense spending?

The Litany Vs. Life

After blaming the environmental movement for problems it did not cause, Lomborg proceeds to attribute to its leaders a power they do not posses, even in their wildest dreams. Lomborg tells us that in countries from Uruguay to India, from South Korea to Nigeria, the majority of people are terribly worried about the environment. Why? Well, apparently in large part because of Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, to whom Lomborg says expressions of the Litany can frequently be traced. (In the index to The Skeptical Environmentalist, Brown gets 15 references — more than nuclear power, oil, the ozone hole, and the Kyoto Protocol.)

This is quite a load to lay at Lester Brown’s door — or even at the door of western environmental organizations and media outfits more generally. To do so is unjust, and it is also grossly disrespectful of our capacity as individuals to understand and assess our world. Certainly, we are all influenced to one degree or another by the media (although one wonders how much sway Time magazine has over the average Nigerian), but Lomborg utterly fails to consider the possibility that the Litany may be compelling because of people’s lived experiences. Lomborg envisions the environmental movement as a vast, top-down conspiracy originating with mainstream organizations and spreading its tentacles into everything from CNN to the World Bank; he could not be less interested in the community concerned about the cyanide in its water supply, the neighborhood battling the smelter in its backyard, or any of the millions of people all over the world who confront the consequences of environmental degradation every day.

In Lomborg’s formulation, all of those grass-roots environmentalists are acting not out of rational concern, but out of irrational, inculcated dread. “The fear created by the Litany,” Lomborg writes, “… is absolutely decisive because it paralyses our reasoned judgment.” It is “a challenge
to our democratic freedom and contests our basic right to decide for ourselves how we lead our lives.” Furthermore, it “undermines our confidence in our ability to solve our remaining problems. It gives us a feeling of being under siege, constantly having to act with our backs to the wall, and this means that we will often implement unwise decisions based on emotional gut reactions.”

That is heavy-duty stuff, but once again (and unsurprisingly), Lomborg cannot generate a single example of anyone, anywhere, who ever committed a rash act based on sheer, uncontrollable terror about the worsening environment. In fact, he notes that people are generally much more worried about the economy, employment, the deficit, crime, drugs, and healthcare, while “The environment seldom rises above 2 percent in most important-problem polls.”

But never mind the statistics; to hear Lomborg tell it, you would think we lived in a Greenocracy, where eco-fascists let hospitals and kindergartens fall into disrepair in order to fund supplies of recyclable toothbrushes. This kind of purple prose and political divisiveness undermines Lomborg’s ostensible objectivity so significantly that not even 3,000 footnotes can restore it.

There is no question that, in the process of creating a political movement and seeking the scientific evidence to support it, environmentalists have sometimes made both factual and strategic errors — who hasn’t? But environmentalists are not devious puppeteers controlling the heartstrings of the hoi polloi and the purse strings of politicians. The skeptical environmentalist is jousting at windmills, whereas the people he denounces are fighting real battles. If the words of Lomborg’s nemesis-turned-idol Julian Simon come true — if “the material conditions of life continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time” — it will be with the help of, not in spite of, the environmental movement.