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The Frame Game

Do enviros need to pay more attention to the way they talk? Republican pollster Frank Luntz is famous for his memo to party bosses warning them about their vulnerability on the environment and coaching them on the proper way to frame their positions. Enviros tend to scorn this sort of message massaging, but then again, […]

Whither the environmental movement? III

(Part I is here; part II is here.)

I was going to do a policy post next, but an insightful comment from reader Sandy M got me thinking again about framing.

The second piece of unsolicited-with-good-reason advice I'd give the environmental movement, with apologies to Apple computer, is: Talk different.

It's time for enviros to think in a more careful and calculated way about the way they frame their issues. Progressives are forever wedded to the idea that the unvarnished truth is all we need: Give the people the facts and they'll draw the right conclusions. "That," says UC Berkeley professor and newly minted pundit George Lakoff, "has been a disaster."

Electoral gasp, scientific progress

In the shadow of an election that left many environmentalists gasping for air, a scientific meeting in New Orleans yielded a series of results that at first, second, and perhaps third blush are stunning.

Covered by science reporter Janet Raloff in the newest issue of Science News, they identify new links between environment and health, including a common plastic additive (phthalates) and babies' reproductive development; uranium and cancer in Navajo girls; and DDT and miscarriage in China.

Vision trouble

Democrats, environmentalists, and other left-leaning sorts are arguing heatedly over whether to move the party to the left or to the right in the wake of the election (those who aren't arguing over whether the election was legitimate, that is).  One wag challenged those who disapprove of any rightward slide to ask themselves: "What states did John Kerry lose that Howard Dean would have won?"

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.

Ted says all is not lost

Veteran environmental writer Ted Williams says that, despite recent setbacks, the green movement has made enormous progress since it was born and there is ample reason for optimism.

Wise words

If I sometimes seem obsessed with the cultural dimensions of contemporary politics, it's because I am in a continuing rage over two dumb ideas that far too many Democrats are determined to embrace, losing election after losing election: (1) economic issues, if you scream about them loudly and abrasively and "populistically" enough, will trump cultural issues, which are essentially phony, and (2) there's no way to deal with voters' cultural anxieties without abandoning Democratic principles, since cultural issues are all about banning abortion and gay marriage and so forth.

Read the whole thing.  More on this stuff later.

Sage Brush With Death

Millions of oil and gas dollars at stake in sage grouse controversy The question of whether to list the sage grouse — a chicken-sized bird that roams the sagebrush plains of the U.S. West — as threatened is shaping up as an epic conflict, with millions of dollars in revenue from oil and natural-gas drilling […]

Umbra on birds bursting into flames

Dear Umbra, I saw the following on the CNN website. Can this possibly be true? I see birds hit, land on, peck at, and poop on power lines all the time, but I’ve never seen one burst into flames. LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — Weather forecasters predicted little relief Monday for firefighters battling wildfires that […]

Whither the environmental movement? II

If the U.S. environmental movement was unwise enough to ask me my advice, I could summarize it in two words: Go local.

At the moment, several things stand in the way of environmentalism coalescing as a coherent, effective national movement.

Whither the environmental movement?

This post, and this one, and this discussion are part of a larger conversation going on among left-leaning types about how to react to the recent electoral ass-whooping we received.  Initially, a lot of the talk focused on the "moral values" voters who came out to prevent the cosmic apocalypse that is gay marriage.  Least that's what the exit polls seemed to show. However, this article, and several like it, cast substantial doubt on that theory.  In fact, there doesn't seem to be much of a rational pattern.  Bush gained among Hispanics and women, actually went down among rural voters and up among urban voters, lost among self-described moderates, increased the turnout of rich people, won on terrorism despite majorities who said he was screwing Iraq up ... in short, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet theory to explain the loss (more on all this here). It was a hotly fought ground war, a game of inches, and Bush's team got lots of things right, pardon the pun.

Nonetheless, the question of where the environmental movement goes from here is still relevant.  I think we can all agree that, regardless of this election, environmentalism is not where it should be. Nobody, after all, cites the environment as a reason that any candidate won or lost.  Nobody much cites it at all as a player in electoral politics, aside from a few extremely narrow issues like Yucca Mountain, which is more of a "don't dump radioactive crap in my back yard" issue than a strictly environmental one.

So, I've got some thoughts on the matter.  I'll do my best to get them down in a series of posts, starting with the next one. I hope it sparks some pragmatic discussion, because I gotta tell you, whatever this is, most of it isn't particularly pragmatic.