Articles by David Roberts

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.

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.

Save the Roadless Rule

Monday (Nov. 15) is the last day to comment on the Bush administration's unbelievably awful proposal to overturn the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. You can send comments directly to the feds here. Or, you can submit a comment through the Wilderness Society, who will cc your governor, here.  If you're not yet convinced that scrapping the Roadless Rule is a manifestly bad idea, the Wilderness Society has the top ten reasons. They've also got a fact sheet on roadless areas in various states. They've also got a handy chronology of the rule's history.  Come to think of it, the Wilderness Society is all over it. You should be too.