Why Environmentalism is Irrelevant

I recently wrote that environmentalism was fading fast as a meaningful movement, and argued that only green modernists could resurrect it. The piece got bounced around a lot on twitter and elicited both praise and barbs. Discover magazine asked if I would do my promised follow-up for them.

Here’s a teaser from the opening:

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

Read the whole piece over at Discover.