Cranks Rule: Why Environmentalism Needs Troublemakers

A sprawling and provocative essay on the contradictory history and impulses of American environmentalism, “The Usefulness of Cranks,” is up on The New Republic website. In reviewing several recent environmental books, including Eco Barons, TNR writer Jackson Lears decries what he sees as the debased meaning of the very language of green in contemporary discourse:

Concern for “the environment” is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

He goes on to argue that modern America has long been in the sway of denialism when it comes to the environment, and that the big-talk-little-action approach that now dominates ecological discourse is just a variation of the same theme.

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Toward the end of the piece, Lears strikes a more optimistic tone, suggesting that an increasingly muscular and effecitve brand of enviromentalism is emerging, and here Eco Barons is his chief source of evidence, demonstrating the value of environmental cranks, gadflies and visionaries. They stray outside the mainstream, and are therefore better able to see what needs to be done, and (now and then) actually push events in the right direction. This brand of environmentalism had its heyday in the 1970s, then was squashed during the Reagan Revolution (which managed to re-brand such bipartisan 1970s measures as the Endangered Species Act into left-wing conspiracies), only to rise once again in the 21st century. I particularly like this bit from Lears’ piece: “Echoing the title of The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson’s classic account of Napoleonic financiers in the first Gilded Age, Eco Barons translates environmental activism into the idiom of business heroism. No longer knobby-kneed nerds in Birkenstocks, Humes’s heroes are resourceful, shrewd, hip entrepreneurs.”

Lears then hones in on Eco Barons‘ chapter on the electric car and its modern champion, Andy Frank:

The history of electric cars is a green parable for our time. It raises subversive questions about roads not taken. It shows that, without adequate public backing, green entrepreneurs–no matter how shrewd–cannot successfully buck the corporate consensus. And above all it challenges the fundamental dogma of development, technological determinism….

Humes’s account reveals that technological progress is not the product of some irresistible demiurge called “modernity”; and that human beings have the capacity to direct technology rather than merely genuflect to its force; and that in fact the very definitions of progress can be challenged and changed by cranks who resist conventional wisdom. But only–it should be clear–if the cranks have a shot at some money and some power.

Explore posts in the same categories: Global Warming, Green Economy, environmental activism

Tags: Andy Frank, electric cars, environmental activism, global warming denial, green business

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