The trouble for environmentalists is that the public is getting a big taste of degrowth right now with the current privation and danger from a more immediate threat than climate change. To a public that has been showing signs of apocalypse fatigue for some time, it is dawning on many that the current lockdown, and the palpable enthusiasm of so many politicians toward extreme control, is a dry run for the permanent regimentation of the Green New Deal. To which many environmentalists lend credence with their current celebrations of how great it is that the lockdown is lowering pollution, not to mention some famous old environmental hits such as the research biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, David Graber, who wrote years ago in the Los Angeles Times that humans “have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Think of Graber as a member of the Deep-Six State perhaps.)
As equally debilitating as Malthusianism is the way environmentalism after Earth Day became fully an adjunct of leftism. It is still occasionally recalled that the first Earth Day was a wholly bipartisan project, with support from President Richard Nixon, Governor Ronald Reagan (“[There is an] absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment,” Reagan said in 1970), along with liberal Democrats like Sen. Gaylord Nelson. The activist left was split on “ecology” at the time, worried that it would distract from the anti-war and civil rights movements. Some leftist groups and civil rights leaders advocating a boycott of the first Earth Day. Time magazine quoted a “black militant” in Chicago saying, “Ecology? I don’t give a good goddamn about ecology!”
It did not take long for the activist left to recognize the potential of environmentalism for what became known as “watermelon” politics: green on the outside, red on the inside. The New Republic columnist James Ridgeway wrote shortly after the First Earth day: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society . . . [and] developing a more coherent central state. . .” The major environmental advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, which once boasted many Republican supporters, swung hard to the left. It’s only a hop, skip, and jump to the current attitude expressed in Democratic Congressman James Clyburn’s statement that the coronavirus crisis is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
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