Reclaiming Environmentalism: Saner Responses to the Ecological Crisis

I invited an essay from a conservationist who recently worked in the crucible of US politics, and is now seeking ways to bring more authentic attention to ecological realities. 

By Aaron Vandiver 

Over the past several decades, environmentalism has been driven far from its roots. What began as a movement grounded in ecological understanding, love for the living Earth, and resistance to industrial destruction has been reduced to a narrow technical problem: carbon emissions.

When, on this blog, Professor Jem Bendell explains a pan-ecological perspective, he is calling us back to a truth environmentalists once grasped intuitively. As Rachel Carson wrote, “Nothing in nature exists alone.” Forests, oceans, soils, coral reefs, and natural hydrological cycles are, as philosopher Charles Eisenstein puts it, the “vital organs” and systems of a living Earth. A mechanical climate model focused on atmospheric physics and emissions cannot capture this living dimension. As Professor Bill Rees put it in response to Jem’s essay, climate is not primarily a physical system but a “biophysical” one. Recognizing this requires elevating biology — life itself — to the same status that physics and chemistry have enjoyed in the institutions of science on environment and climate.

Rees has been direct: “Climate change is not the real existential threat; overshoot is.” Overshoot means consuming resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and dumping wastes faster than Earth can absorb them. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil depletion, and toxification are all symptoms of this condition. Addressing one symptom while ignoring the disease cannot succeed.

Social and political movements, nevertheless, often fixate on a single symptom or small set of symptoms of ecological breakdown. As I’ve observed in my time as an activist and through my involvement in U.S. politics, a narrow focus allows movements to be co-opted by political parties and power structures, with much of their energy diverted into partisan struggles and support for entrenched interests. By addressing symptoms rather than root causes, movements often unintentionally end up supporting maladaptive responses that worsen the underlying crisis.

A climate movement focused narrowly on one cause (carbon emissions) of one symptom of overshoot (climate change) has fostered disastrous illusions. Wind and solar have added energy to the economy, fueling further economic expansion at the expense of the natural world. While solar and wind may reduce carbon per unit of GDP, they increase total GDP — and thus total energy use, material extraction, and ecological damage. The results are predictable: rising emissions, accelerating biodiversity loss, degraded soils, expanding ocean dead zones, and accumulating pollution.

Ambitious ecological restoration policies — such as those proposed by Rob de Laet and by Jem in his pan-ecology essay — could make a real difference. These include massive reforestation, agroforestry, and ocean conservation. But such efforts, unfortunately, cannot be implemented at the necessary planetary scale within a perpetually growing global economy. As the economy grows, forests are razed for timber and agriculture to feed growing demand. The evidence is clear: annual net loss of forests globally is still 10.18 million acres per year, oceans are still overfished, and increasing amounts of plastic (2-3x current rates by 2050 at current growth trajectories) continue to be dumped in them.

Instead of confronting the reality of our predicament, major environmental organizations celebrate “green growth” that deepens ecological harm. We now witness the industrializing of oceans with massive wind farms, covering of deserts and grasslands with solar, and opening Indigenous lands to lithium mining – all under the banner of “climate action.” Many climate activists praise China’s alternative energy “miracle” while downplaying the vast ecological destruction tied to its rapid industrial growth. The so-called green transition is framed as a “50 Trillion Dollar Opportunity” and “the economic growth story of the 21st century,” while ignoring the destruction this entails. Too many climate activists seem to be unaware that their calls for governments to declare a “climate emergency” — and codify it in law — risk unleashing non-democratic powers that can be used to open up new lands and waters to energy development and even to suppress dissent.

Last-ditch proposals like geoengineering — now seen by some as our only hope — fall into similar traps. These schemes aim to suppress temperatures just enough to keep the global economy on track. Meanwhile, oceans would continue acidifying, forests disappearing, species dying, and toxic pollution spreading. Many geoengineering proposals entail profound ecological risks which could exacerbate the overall crisis in new, potentially catastrophic ways. The case of the Israeli-U.S. company Stardust, which is preparing to spray proprietary chemicals into the stratosphere for profit, makes the motivation clear: geoengineering is attractive to decisionmakers not because it protects the living Earth, but because it offers a cheap, easy, and profitable method of bringing down temperatures enough to to preserve the global economy (at least for a while).

The tech sector echoes this mindset. Tech bros and corporate elites tout AI as the next tool to tackle climate change, even as its energy and water demands soar. One company, OpenAI, projects electricity use by 2033 comparable to that of India’s 1.5 billion people! AI-driven growth exposes the fallacy of believing low-carbon energy is saving the planet while total energy and material consumption continues to rise. The massive capital allocated to AI companies ensures that their agenda dominates policy: AI investment now accounts for roughly half of U.S. GDP growth, and AI/Big Tech “Magnificent 7” stocks currently make up around 25-30% of the S&P 500 by market capitalization while oil and energy stocks now represent only 2-4%.

Sadly, an environmental movement once devoted to protecting whales, forests, rivers, and wild places has been superseded by a focus on technical (non-)fixes that promote corporate profits, the concentration of power, and more nature-killing industrial growth. It’s what Jem calls the ‘fake green fairytale’ that serves the ‘fake green globalists’. The guiding question is no longer “What protects life?” but “What reduces emissions in a computer model?” In this worldview, a whale matters less than a wind turbine, and entire ecosystems become expendable if projected carbon savings superficially appear favorable. As writer Paul Kingsnorth has said, “This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the non-human. It is the mass-destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy.”

Moving beyond symptom-focused thinking opens the door to saner responses. We can begin by reclaiming environmentalism’s original foundation: love and respect for the living world. In a culture of self-absorption, remembering that environmentalism began with reverence for life — forests, oceans, prairies, birds, and the web that sustains us — restores clarity and meaning.

We can support organizations that directly protect life and living ecosystems while remaining skeptical of those that justify ecological destruction in the name of “green” growth or projected carbon savings. We can do this while recognizing that a constantly expanding global industrial economy is chipping away at the major conservation victories of earlier generations and makes planetary-scale conservation impossible. 

Some of us can protect and restore nature with our own personal efforts, by regenerating a small piece of land, for example. Without lying to ourselves that we can save the planet with personal consumer choices, most of us in highly industrialized nations can look for ways to break free of destructive lifestyles and to live more in harmony with the Earth (something I need to work on harder). If more of us simply try, it might make it easier for everyone. That’s better than pretending that we can keep up the same life-killing consumer lifestyles, or exempt ourselves from the suffering we’re inflicting on the planet, if we just find a clever way to remove the carbon.

Politically, we can recognize that movements addressing isolated symptoms of our overall crisis cannot succeed without forming broader alliances. In the U.S., a new health movement that I helped get off the ground has emerged in response to rising rates of chronic disease driven by chemical exposures in food, air and water, and consumer products — another symptom of ecological overshoot. This new health movement arose partly in response to government and corporate abuses of power during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which virtually all mainstream climate activists and environmentalists failed to challenge and even championed (a subject Jem, Eisenstein, Kingsnorth, I, and others have written about extensively over the last 5 years). Yet, just as the modern environmental movement has been captured by entrenched political and corporate interests, the once-independent health movement, now known as MAHA or “Make America Healthy Again”, has aligned itself with partisan political forces. And just as the climate movement has embraced counterproductive policies that sacrifice the natural world to “green” growth, the health movement in the U.S. supports an administration that is axing environmental protections and deregulating corporate polluters in a short-sighted effort to boost profits and growth, thereby exacerbating the ecological crisis and worsening the toxic chemical pollution that’s a major cause of poor health outcomes. In the face of declining health and plummeting living standards that can be traced in large part to ecological factors, right-populists in the U.S. and around the world indulge a fantasy that strength and prosperity can be restored by exploiting nature even more aggressively.

Eisenstein, a friend and former colleague of mine, has said, “An unnecessary division between the environmental movement on the one hand, and the health activism movement on the other, limits the effectiveness of both.” Environmentalists and health activists could start to find common ground, in my view, by abandoning the delusion that we can heal the climate or make ourselves “healthy again” while ravaging the Earth in an endless quest for more growth.

Activists across many different movements can build alliances by recognizing that each is confronting a different manifestation of the same metastasizing crisis. Addressing root causes points toward difficult but necessary conversations about potential responses that transcend the logic of conventional growth-based financial and economic frameworks: ideas like degrowth, steady-state economics, alternative currencies, monetary reform, decentralization of power, and deeper philosophical and spiritual shifts. Bio-regionalism, an idea that emerged in the 1970s when overshoot first became apparent, may be a useful concept to the extent that it focuses on practical ways to connect people with the living systems (watersheds, forests, soils, food systems) on which we all depend. 

Any serious conversation about potential remedies or solutions must move past tired concepts that elites use to greenwash and profit from the ongoing destruction of nature (e.g. “sustainable development,” “natural capital,” “green credits”) toward real alternatives: new and different social, financial, and economic arrangements that are actually capable of conserving and regenerating the natural world and bringing our lives into harmony with it. These kinds of big-picture responses may fail to stem the crisis — but focusing on symptoms while ignoring root causes promotes delusional thinking, drives more harm, and makes failure guaranteed. And if we cannot find enough allies for such an agenda in countries that sit atop nature-destroying global systems, we can take the time to find international allies in communities around the world. Such communities are often closer to the worst ravages of globalization and a late-stage capitalism that is responding to ecological limits by becoming even more aggressive, and so that can also invite our attention, solidarity and support. 

A clear-eyed understanding and acceptance of our predicament is better than a frantic grasping after partial solutions, which keeps us in a state of easily-exploited agitation and anxiety. From that acceptance, I believe we could cultivate sanity, dignity, and better ways of living in a time of ecological unraveling.

W. Aaron Vandiver is a writer and an attorney. He has worked in wildlife conservation and served on the independent presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He joins the next Metacrisis Meeting in February. Register to join us below.