Environmentalism is Still Dead

Teryn Norris of the BreakThrough Institute wrote a post Environmentalism is Still Dead, criticizing environmentalists' stubbornness in opposing Pelosi's energy bill because it included approving limited off-shore drilling. I completely agree with Teryn.

I wrote this comment

Environmentalism is dead. Long live Environmentalism.

It seems to me that we need to figure out a way to distinguish “greens” from pro-sustainability pragmatists who also sometimes call ourselves green. Calling greens “idealists” is too general and to some extent, we are all idealists. Other labels don’t really work, either. But we don’t want the message to be anti-green. Unless we do, and we need to call the new environmentalism something else.

I find that sustainability is more descriptive of the new brand of environmentalism, and it is already becoming the new “it”. But I’m not sure what color it is. Maybe it should be the letter S. The new environmentalist group at MIT is sustainability@MIT, and it is a merger of a few of the old groups. There is also S-labs (sustainability labs), which is a class in the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

It would just be nice for there to be a distinction between the old approach and the new approach. Or else it seems like we are arguing with ourselves.