The Politicization of the Environmental Movement

The concept of the first Earth Day, which took place on April 22, 1970, is partly responsible for the politicization of the environmental movement. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Democrat from Wisconsin, is credited with the creation of this day. He ensured that large demonstrations and other public events were held in various U.S. cities. Nelson wanted to capture the protest activities, exhibited mainly by university students, who in those years championed the opposition to the war in Vietnam. Nelson himself admits to stating: “If we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force the issue onto the national political agenda.”

This quote explains the method and purpose of Earth Day: It endeavors to create a large and vociferous pressure group capable of attracting the attention of voters and politicians to environmental issues. However, the goal went beyond promoting public environmental awareness; it was specifically to influence the national political agenda. Perhaps because of his profession, Nelson thought that the solution to environmental problems would come from the legislative and federal level, not local. Pressure groups generate a political demand in democracies. The political class responds to this pressure if the group represents enough votes to claim the same set of interests, and if done by skilled operators.

The politicization of the environmental movement has two negative consequences in my opinion. The first is the manipulation of fear. The policy uses fear to seek changes. A banner on the first Earth Day was alarming: “Earth: Rest in peace in 1990.” The disaster did not really happen that year — rather, that was the year that the U.N. globalized the celebration — and they are still proclaiming a frightening future ahead. The crisis mentality is a bad state of mind to make sound decisions. When driven by a sense of haste and fear, we usually are willing to incur any cost and to tolerate mediocre solutions that are proposed.

The second flaw is imagining that a political solution is the only way to save the planet. We proceed as if we are wearing horse blinders. We set our minds into thinking that one can only preserve and protect by legislating, regulating, establishing specific bureaucracies and nationalizing natural resources. We accuse any critics of this strategy of being destructive, selfish and more, and we are blind to the eventual faults and corruption of public policies, in spite of the soaring costs incurred in failed solutions. This narrow view is unfortunate and harmful to the environment, as there is abundant evidence of the effectiveness of alternative solutions, private and voluntary, to protect the environment.