I’ve just finished reading this terrific history of the American environmental movement by Phil Shabecoff. He was America’s first environmental reporter and he’s quite the historian too. The title comes from a line from Aldo Leopold’s poignant essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.”
He recounts the grand sweep of how Americans have treated their air, lands and waters. There are scores of heroes including Thoreau, Leopold, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, David Brower, Rachel Carson and Lois Gibbs, and not a few villains, among them Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. There are epic battles such as trying to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a bitter loss, particularly for John Muir, to staving off the Storm King Mountain project, a victory that heralded the birth of environmental law in the United States.
We sit here in 2010 as the beneficiaries of so much of what the movement has produced, from a thoroughgoing understanding of and respect for the value of nature – and many of the tools to protect it, to a grasp of the critical importance of sustainability for our survival as a species, to the ability to wield the tools necessary to forge a newer world in which people can live again in harmony with our cosmos: the law, the science, the power to communicate our message, and the will to fight the necessary battles.
Shabecoff wrote the first edition of this in the late 1980s and early 90s, then a second that came out in 2003. With the onslaught of the Bush/Cheney regime, Shabecoff was clearly shaken from his earlier optimism. In this quick summary of a recent interview with him, at the website of a new movie called, perhaps not surprisingly, “A Fierce Green Fire,” he’s demoralized, not sure that the species isn’t dragging our planet down around our ears. I certainly feel exactly that way myself sometimes.
In the book, he writes: “Freeing ourselves from the machinery of the industrial age and replacing it with a technology that serves both organic nature and human society is today’s mission into the wilderness.” He identifies one of the principal enemies: consumerism. He also calls on the environmental movement to kick itself into a higher gear, as the planet’s survival more or less depends on our success.