Articles by Grist staff

Carl Pope reviews Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Two years ago, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's widely discussed essay "The Death of Environmentalism" predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath. The self-proclaimed "bad boy" authors must be embarrassed now. With their new book on the same theme about to land in bookstores, environmentalism is alive and perhaps prematurely giddy over progress made and even victories won in the fight against climate change.

But don't dismiss Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility just because its authors are lousy soothsayers. The book's secondary thesis -- that progressive politics, including environmentalism, is in dire need of optimistic grounding in 21st century reality -- is too important and intriguing to leave unexplored.

Progressive politics, the authors persuasively argue, is rooted in economic, social, and environmental nostalgia. Nostalgia for the New Deal era of solidarity driven by shared material scarcity; nostalgia for the post-war era of homogeneous and stable communities held together by neighborhood, workplace, and church; nostalgia for an American landscape not yet reshaped by industrial society. Stubbornly refusing to move beyond this nostalgia, progressives cling to an interest-based politics and an almost fundamentalist faith in rationality. When their efforts fail, they conclude that the problem is corporate money or media monopolies or human nature -- anything but their own politics.

Bush administration push for drilling in Colorado angers GOP constituency

Republicans in western Colorado, long a GOP stronghold, are losing patience with the Bush administration’s relentless push for resource extraction in the state. According to a new report from the Wilderness Society, western Colorado currently has 4,500 oil and gas wells on federal public lands, and 22,000 more are in the proverbial pipeline. A total […]

Mercury contamination in fish declines when emissions go down

Mercury contamination of waterways and marine life doesn’t have to be an ongoing problem — all we have to do is limit industrial mercury emissions. Easy! After a seven-year experiment in a Canada lake, researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that mercury concentrations in fish would decline relatively quickly […]

New York state investigates power companies, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: The Spillage Voice Swap Meat Congress Sees the Lighting on the Wall Sass Is in Sessions The Investor Class Owns the Means of Reduction Seeing Red Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Brood Awakenings Hog Futures Gilled Complex Not So Fast