What liberals and their allies in the environmentalist wacko movement fail to understand is: their message has gotten out. Their anti-capitalist, socialist, gloom-and-doom, fear-based, lunatic ravings have been amplified — and Americans understand exactly who they are, and what they’re about. As the “Mr. Big” of the vast right-wing conspiracy, I am proud, ladies and gentlemen, to play a major part in the exposé leading to their depression.
- Rush Limbaugh April 25, 2005

Currently, about 20 million people tune in to Rush Limbaugh every week. His lingo is now conservative lingua franca. Limbaugh figured out that if you repeat your best lines — e.g., “environmentalist wackos” — often enough, they become more than just funny catchphrases; they become a reconfiguration of reality and a call to arms. In his world (and it’s a world in which a lot of people live), you can’t be an environmentalist and escape wacko-ism.

In Limbaugh, a large group of Americans who felt their country was being taken away from them found an emotional outlet. If his facts didn’t always ring true, his anger did. Limbaugh proved that someone with a quick wit and a microphone could wield tremendous power, and his success spawned a legion of copycat shows across the country.

Filmmaker Patrice O’Neill at a
community screening of “The Fire
Next Time” in Montana’s Flathead
Valley.

Photo: Chris Peterson.

One of them is hosted by John Stokes of KGEZ in Montana’s Flathead Valley. Stokes is featured in the new PBS film The Fire Next Time, which premieres Tuesday, July 12. The documentary was made by Patrice O’Neill and The Working Group, a film company that also works with communities to overcome intolerance. The film follows several groups in Kalispell, Mont., over a two-year period in which their community goes up in flames — figuratively and literally — over conflicts about environmental preservation.

Everybody in Kalispell cares about trees. Trees feed the timber industry, help drain the land, attract tourists, and provide habitat for wildlife; and they also catch fire and endanger homes and lives during the annual forest-fire season. Talking about trees in Kalispell means talking about livelihoods and lifestyles, and the valley’s different interest groups are like sticks dangerously rubbing together in its drought-plagued forests.

Enter Stokes, radio host and human blowtorch. On environmentalists, Stokes has this to say: “Eradicate ‘em. Their message stinks. They’re destroying America. And it all came out of the Third Reich. You know, the Third Reich was born out of the environmental community. I don’t make it up. It’s there.” Stokes attends town meetings, holds rallies, and burns green swastikas to protest what he sees as the tyranny of liberals, the U.S. Forest Service, immigrants, the government, and, of course, the people he refers to as “eco-Nazis” and “green Nazis.”

John Stokes prepares to burn a
swastika to draw attention to
“green Nazis.”

Photo: Montana Human Rights Network.

“John Stokes came to this valley and all of the sudden the people had a way of telling the truth,” says one timber worker featured in the film.

Clearly, Stokes and his listeners are angry. They’re angry at the Forest Service and the more uncompromising environmentalists for not letting loggers thin the forests in a way that will (they think) boost the flagging Montana economy and prevent fires. They’re angry about losing their timber-industry jobs. They’re angry about watching property values soar as millionaires buy weekend ranches in the valley.

During forest-fire season, when the valley’s residents are at their most vulnerable, Stokes’ provocations are strongest. “Anybody who’s ever written a check to the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Audubon, Citizens for a Better Planet,” he says, “hope you’re happy with yourself, ’cause we blame you.” Stokes warns his listeners to be careful, because “there are eco-arsonist terrorists out there.” He holds up a copy of an Earth Liberation Front manual and tells the camera, “They just had a terror training camp in Missoula in June.”

It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter: with his rants, Stokes has placed environmentalism squarely in the middle of the most charged discourse in post-9/11 America — the one revolving around the word “terrorism.” And while Stokes seems extreme, these days, he’s not the only one warning of an alleged link between environmentalists and terrorists. Joe Friday is too.

Hummers: innocent victims?

Photo: FBI.gov.

Fed Up

On June 21 of this year, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis called eco-terrorism one of the top domestic terrorist threats in the U.S. One month earlier, he’d made similar statements before a congressional committee. The FBI claims that 1,200 acts of eco-terrorism have taken place since 1990, causing over $110 million in property damage. Although ELF has said that it has never and would never target humans, the FBI is worried that might change. It has decided that ELF and the Animal Liberation Front pose a threat comparable to militias of the Timothy McVeigh stripe (whose numbers have fallen but whose threat remains significant [PDF], especially in Montana), and to white supremacist groups (whose numbers are rising, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center). Ironically, the Flathead Valley was home to one of the more notorious militia groups, Project Seven, which in 2003 was found with a cache of arms and a hit list of government officials.

The FBI says its concern is based on the fact that eco-terrorists are currently the most active of domestic terrorism groups. But when I spoke with FBI spokesperson Bill Carter, he was unable to detail the nature of the 1,200 “acts,” how many had occurred in each of the past few years, or how many people have been involved in committing them (although Lewis’ testimony says about 150 cases are currently under investigation). Even the top brass at the FBI seems confused about the extent of the threat. In February, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified before the Senate Committee on Intelligence that major incidents of eco-terror had actually declined in 2004.

Meanwhile, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) recently published a policy paper [PDF] that questioned why a draft of the 2005 terrorism priorities of the Department of Homeland Security reportedly did not mention right-wing terrorist groups (such as militias), while eco-terrorism was placed front and center. Thompson asked to testify before a May congressional panel that discussed eco-terrorism and threats to the nation’s infrastructure, but his request was denied by the panel’s chair, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). It was only the second time in history, according to a Democratic spokesperson for the House Committee on Homeland Security*, that a member of Congress had not been given the privilege of making remarks before a panel.

According to the Associated Press, Inhofe said he hoped to investigate how ELF and ALF raise money and support from “mainstream activists.” “Just like al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization, ELF and ALF cannot accomplish their goals without money, membership, and the media,” the AP quoted Inhofe as saying.

Now what self-respecting terrorist
would rescue cute li’l puppies?

Photo: arkangelweb.org.

It’s not that Thompson — or anyone, for that matter — is defending acts of terrorism on behalf of the environment. (Thompson has denounced ELF and ALF, as has every major environmental group.) It’s that they are trying to figure out how and with what consequences environmentalism and terrorism got coupled together in the first place. Yes, some expensive and illegal acts are committed in the name of the environment; and yes, the framework of terrorism is an easy and useful one for the FBI and the DHS to use when handling those incidents. (By calling ecological sabotage “terrorism” as opposed to arson or vandalism, federal officials are given slightly greater powers in investigating and bringing perpetrators to justice.) But what does it mean for environmentalism when the whole movement is defined by its margins? And what does it mean for the nation and the world when language is used so loosely even as last week’s attacks in London make the danger of real terror tragically plain?

For some, broadening the term “terrorist” to include organizations like ELF is bad for both environmentalists and for our sense of what real terror is. “These people are not environmentalists, they’re arsonists,” says Eric Antebi, a Sierra Club spokesperson. Antebi also rejects the idea that ELF’s actions constitute real terrorism. “Eco-terrorism is not a legitimate phrase — it cheapens what real terrorism is. We have seen in this country the real forms that terrorism takes,” he says.

However atypical ELF and ALF may be of environmentalism, they have come to characterize the movement for many on the right, in Congress, and in law enforcement. The backdrop to this development, of course, was September 11, 2001. First of all, 9/11 solidified the power of a government that also happens to be anti-environmentalist. Second, because of a (perhaps justified) national state of paranoia, 9/11 complicated the use of a tool that has been always essential to the environmental movement: direct action.

“We used to put banners on bridges, banners on big monuments,” says John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA. “When people are worried about this kind of structure, you don’t see us doing that. Our direct actions always have to be in the tone and the temper of the time.”

The FBI insists it distinguishes groups like ELF and ALF from the rest of the environmental movement, and is committed to the lawful expression of free speech. But the government has occasionally raised the specter of terrorism to support its cause, even if it meant darkening the name of mainstream environmental groups. In a widely publicized 2003 case in which Greenpeace activists boarded a ship carrying illegal mahogany from the Brazilian Amazon bound for the U.S., the Department of Justice seemed so bent on prosecuting the environmental group that it dug up an obscure 1872 law prohibiting “sailor-mongering.” Greenpeace’s Passacantando says that during the trial, federal prosecutors regularly referred — directly and indirectly — to 9/11. (At one point, he says, federal prosecutors stood a scale model of the ship on its aft next to two other scale models: a skyscraper that looked like one of the twin towers, and a 747.) “Even with Greenpeace, a group that’s been doing nonviolent action for 30 years, they tried to make us look like terrorists,” he says. The case was thrown out of court.

Meanwhile, few seem to be paying attention to another kind of eco-terror. For many environmentalists and politicians, eco-terrorism used to mean blowing up a nuclear plant or poisoning a water system — actions that, unlike those of ALF or ELF, would deliberately put thousands or tens of thousands of lives at risk. Ironically, the post-9/11 crackdown on terrorism has stifled some of the organizations that used to draw attention to those threats. “Greenpeace used to go into nuclear plants, chemical plants,” Passacantando says. “We don’t do that anymore. We could — the security there is terrible. We put out reports instead.”

In a country where up to 80 percent of the citizenry professes some support for environmental protections, the environmental movement has somehow found itself on the fringes of the political discourse. In part, that’s because people like Rush Limbaugh and John Stokes have been effective at reducing the image of the environmental movement to a group of little green Hitler elves, running around blowing things up.

Clearly, destroying private property in the name of the environment is a crime, and the few activists doing so are a proper focus of law enforcement. But equating ELF and ALF direct actions with the deadly attacks of terrorist groups fuels the anti-environmental rhetoric of the right and irresponsibly conflates two very different kinds of criminal activity. What we lose in the process is our grasp on both the real nature of environmentalism and the real nature of terrorism. For someone like John Stokes, who is only interested in exploiting his listeners’ fear, the difference doesn’t matter. For the rest of us, it should.

Correction, 11 Jul 2005: This article originally cited a Democratic spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security; it should have cited a Democratic spokesperson for the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Jared Diamond.

I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase “east-west axis of orientation” the most talked-about kind of orientation there was — freshman, sexual, or otherwise. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question — “Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?” — and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. To broadly simplify, Diamond’s book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. It had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned Diamond — a professor of geography at UCLA — into something of a rock star.

If Guns venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond’s newest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society’s response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society’s demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society’s response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can “choose to fail.”

Collapse by Jared
Diamond, Viking
Books, 592 pgs.,
2005.

Diamond then identifies the 12 environmental problems that are portents of doom: destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact.

These issues, which dovetail neatly with the flashpoints of the modern environmental movement, will be familiar enough to readers of Grist. But while the factors that Diamond believes lead societies to collapse may be clear, his definitions of both “society” and “collapse” are less so. “Collapse” can refer to complete extinction (Pitcairn Island), population crash (Easter Island), resettlement (Vikings), civil war (Rwanda), anarchy (Somalia, Haiti), or even just the demise of a political ideology (the disintegration of the Soviet Union). His definition of “society” is equally vague; he variously uses it to refer to a settlement (e.g., various Viking communities), a nation (ranging from Rwanda and Haiti, two of the smaller countries in the world, to China, one of the largest), a state (Montana), and an island (Easter). Each individual example makes sense, but as analogues — to each other or to the situation in today’s globalized world — they often falter.

The best examples in Collapse are those that avoid this apples-and-oranges problem by comparing two societies at the same moment in time and in the same place, such as the chapters on the Greenland Norse and on Hispaniola. In the case of the Vikings, as one historian said, they came to Greenland, “it got cold, and then they died.” But somehow, Diamond rejoins, the Greenland Inuit came, stayed, and survived — right up until this day. The point? Cold or not, the Greenland Norse didn’t have to die. Diamond elucidates how they mistreated their environment (without even realizing it in some cases) and refused to adapt to its variations. The Vikings, Diamond notes in his customary casual style, had a “bad attitude” and thought the Inuit were “gross weirdos.” As a result, they didn’t adapt to the Greenland environment as the Inuit did, and, eventually, starved to death.

Although it’s the chapter on Greenland that has thus far won the most acclaim, Diamond’s treatment of contemporary Hispaniola might be more relevant to the complexities of today’s world. Two countries share the island — the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Their resources, climate, religion, and history as colonies are markedly similar. And yet, their current situations couldn’t be more divergent. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only 1 percent of its land is covered in forest, compared to 28 percent in the D.R. While the D.R. is by no means rich, its economy continues to grow, its environment is protected, and it reaps the benefits of munificent relations with the international community. In Haiti, there are too many people, too few resources, too few jobs, and, at the moment, scarcely a government. Diamond argues that the proximate cause of collapse in a society like Haiti — a coup d’état or a flood resulting from a hurricane, for instance — is only a manifestation of the ultimate cause: the mismanagement of its environment and resources.

These days, many Haitians — and indeed much of the rest of the developing world — face a stark choice: protecting the environment or eating. If it weren’t for foreign aid, Haiti could never support its population. And while the D.R. is a magnificent success by comparison, it’s important not to underestimate the similar tension it faces between the forces of development and the fight for environmental preservation. The difference is that the D.R.’s leaders and citizen-activists had the foresight to protect their environment before it was beyond repair.

This is an essential issue in Collapse, because Diamond’s goal in historicizing our understanding of the relationship between a society’s development and its environment is to prove that the two impulses are not antithetical. Much as Guns, Germs, and Steel was crafted in part as a response to books like The Bell Curve, which had managed to repopularize theories of racial determinism, Collapse is partly a response to the dominant environmental discourse in the United States today, which holds that environmental concerns are secondary to economic and security concerns. Rather, Diamond argues, environmental concerns are at least equal in importance, and inextricably linked, to all other aspects of a society’s success. His examples imply that, when it comes to the environment, a stitch in time means more than saving nine — it’s the difference between keeping and losing your shirt.

Don’t Give Away the Ending …

Collapse is a long book, and because Diamond is a guileless writer, you understand right from the introduction why he thinks societies falter, and to a certain extent what he thinks we should do about it. If you take it as a given that Diamond will prove his thesis (and I’m certainly not suggesting that you should), you could read the introduction and the last few chapters and get the point. But then you’d miss out on what Jared Diamond does best: tell stories.

Like Guns, much of Collapse is propelled by a quasi-Socratic question-and-answer style. The questions are sometimes obvious (“How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?”), sometimes poignant (“What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” “Did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’” Diamond wonders), sometimes charmingly pointy-headed (“Which year did he go there and in which month? Did he find any stored hay or cheese left?”). The larger ones establish the contours of the book, while the smaller ones fill in the details that render what could be a tedious tome delightful: the fact that 1816 had no summer due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, say, or that there are only 578 U.S. college students studying mining. But there are also the meatier details of Diamond’s profession: how to carbon date, how to read tree rings, and, in a hilarious example of mad science, how to date the middens of packrats. (Packrat middens, in case you don’t know, are urine balls that, even thousands of years after they’re excreted, still taste surprisingly sweet. Yes, taste.)

Diamond’s sense of humor and eye for detail breathe life into people, places, and subjects that are foreign to most readers. He’s always been good at this — he can take a community of Easter islanders who’ve been dead for hundreds of years and make them sound like your next-door neighbors. So when Diamond makes a case study of the people who actually are his next-door neighbors — the residents of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley — his analysis is particularly compelling.

When Diamond first visited Montana 50 years ago, it was one of the most prosperous and environmentally pristine states in the U.S. Today, it’s one of the poorest, with a grim environmental outlook. Global warming, leach mining, tourism, and libertarian values knock heads in a particularly violent way under the Big Sky. From dairy owners and politicians to mine workers and militia members to wealthy Californians who daytrip to Montana in their private jets, Diamond describes a community of such diverse and conflicting interests that miracles are more likely to solve its problems than any kind of compromise.

The trouble is, Montana’s problems have to be solved. Its glaciers are disappearing, many of its mines are polluting the land and water, and its old industries — farming, mining, and ranching — are bordering on extinction. But the old guard has one idea of what to do about it, the new billionaire landowners another, the farmers another, the miners another, the teachers another, and so on. Diamond has fewer hard and fast answers about what should be done in Montana — the place he knows best — than he does about any other case study.

Whether such profound clashes can be resolved, Diamond argues, comes down to that great buzzword of 2004: values. He suggests that the “bad attitude” label that he used for the Vikings could be applied to the libertarian streak in Montanans, the inability of U.S. citizens to learn from past events like, say, the 1973 fuel crisis, and, notably, the reluctance of environmentalists to engage the proponents of business development. “Perhaps the crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold onto, and which ones to discard and replace with new values,” Diamond writes. In many ways, the main point of Collapse is to get us to assess the environmental impact of our values — whatever they are — and do something about the ones that don’t work.

The examples Diamond cites where this has actually happened provide the grace notes to Collapse — moments when the book becomes less about failure and more about how a society might beat the odds and come out on top. For instance, Diamond devotes a large section of his conclusion to outlining examples of successful collaborations between corporations and environmentalists. If these examples sometimes seem rather rosy, that might be part of Diamond’s plan. “My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead,” he writes. To that end, he saves some of his sharpest tongue-lashing for average citizens, who could put more pressure on lawmakers, on corporations, and on themselves (mostly in the form of taxes) to clip the fuse of the environmental time bombs. In a world where public companies are legally required to maximize their profits, the burden is on citizens to make it unprofitable to ruin the environment — for an individual, a company, or a society as a whole.

For Diamond, there is no project more urgent facing the world today. Late in the book, he puts two maps of the world side by side. One map highlights today’s environmental trouble spots, the other highlights political trouble spots. The two maps are identical, and seem to provide striking visual proof of Diamond’s thesis: poor environmental management leads to violent conflict and the brink of collapse. Of course, it would be easy to fill a map with politically stable nations that are suffering from environmental troubles (China, the U.S., and Australia, to use some of Diamond’s own case studies from the book), and there are places of conflict where environmental troubles are not a significant issue — Kosovo and Northern Ireland come to mind. Diamond’s tendency to present his theories in overly neat packages like these makes Collapse occasionally feel like a game of Sim Society. You might reasonably find yourself thinking, “If I planted just enough forests and remembered to eat my fish and not let my sheep graze for too long, I could be as successful as the Inuit or the shoguns of Japan (barring Godzilla), and would never succumb to the fate of the Vikings or contemporary Rwanda.” Considering that Edward Gibbon spent over a thousand pages on the fall of Rome alone, it’s easy to see how Diamond’s 20-to-40 page thumbnails on societies’ declines can seem like caricatures.

It’s small soft spots like these maps that have led some critics to call Diamond a fearmonger. But Collapse is more warning than prophecy, and the sheer number of examples Diamond provides — dozens of versions of what might happen, because it already has — is what gives the book its admonitory power. Even if its disparate stories never perfectly meld into one convincing argument, the scope of the work is breathtaking. And if I read Diamond’s ambitions right, he’d rather Collapse be read as an imperfect call to action than a perfect work of airtight logic. Ultimately, the proof of Collapse‘s value will not lie in the book itself, but in what people are inspired to do after reading it.