Overview

The Environmental movement in the US was predicated on stopping things because cities were choked in pollution, rivers were catching fire, and the countryside was being bulldozed to build houses and freeways with little consideration for anything other than rapid growth. I explain this history further in my invited talk to the Idaho City Club.

It’s been said the 1960’s era Environmentalism that created our bedrock environmental laws (e.g. Clean Air/Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency) had ‘cautious’ themes to their policy enforcement. Before new projects started construction, environmental reviews needed to take place and check what impacts they would have. We became very cautious builders because of our past mistakes.

Today’s Environmentalists find themselves in an odd position; climate change is a crisis and in order to preserve the ecosystems we’ve spent decades protecting from direct-human impacts, we need to build a lot of new energy projects. The alpine wilderness area of the Sawtooth Mountains or Sierra Nevadas will never host wind turbines, but they are now seeing less snow pack and more invasive species because of climate change. Just because there is no direct human touch on these special places, climate change is disrupting these places faster than they can adapt. If we want to save these ecosystems from collapse, we need to build a lot of new clean energy projects. And we need to build them fast.

Do you see the juxtaposition yet?

You can read real-world examples of these conflicts for a wind and solar projects I dealt with. They happened while working for an environmental non-profit with a history of stopping all kinds of projects in the Mountain West. They often leveraged the impacts to the Greater Sage-Grouse as a way to ensure greater protections for the bird and its habitat. Like most non-profits, their culture developed a knee-jerk reaction to project proposals that have any negative impacts. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a zero-impact project. You can, however, avoid as much of the harms as you can, minimize the actual impact where possible, and finally mitigate the actual impacts you had in other nearby places, You should be able to identify this as the “cautious” Environmentalism, this framing makes up a substantial percentage of memberships/contributers to environmental non-profits. But remember, we now have to deal with the “crisis” Environmentalism that we exist in today.