Environmentalism is Dead

The thumbsuckers in the environmental movement are going through some psychic pain on this Earth Day Eve, and one writes in the LA Times that environmentalism is dead thanks to global warming:

ENVIRONMENTALISM is dead.

True, there are plenty of events Sunday marking the 38th anniversary of Earth Day. But most of the causes Americans associate with traditional environmentalism — recycling, cleaning up a local waterway, protecting a piece of open space, saving an endangered species or even cleaning up the air — well, they're pretty much irrelevant now.

It's not that such green activism is ineffective (as two progressive activists, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, asserted in a provocative 2005 white paper, "The Death of Environmentalism"). My point is more basic. Environmentalism is dead because the vast majority of environmental causes simply don't matter any more. They don't matter in the way that holding a full house doesn't matter when the guy across the table is holding four aces.

Traditional environmental concerns have been trumped by a single, overriding problem: global climate change. Henry David Thoreau asked, "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

Environmentalists today face a similar question. Why fight for a local or even national cause when a global change could erase any victory? Preserving a beach ecosystem becomes meaningless if the coast is obliterated by a rising sea. Putting polar bears on the endangered species list is risible if the Arctic ice cap melts away to nothing each summer.

If you are a dyed-in-the-wool environmental activist, that funny feeling you have is the ground shifting beneath your feet.

We're all doomed! Screw the whales and the polar bears - we must save ourselves first! That's basically what he says:

Instead of triage, the right response is to accept the hard truth that the only thing that matters is controlling global warming and preventing catastrophic climate change — and then to fight like never before to do that. The dedicated, single-focus activists who make up so much of the environmental movement may, in the future, still be able to save the redwoods, or the Mexican gray wolf, or the whales — but only if we save ourselves first.

And in one last fit of self-delusion, he closes with this:

Environmentalism may be dead, but we're all environmentalists now.

No....we're not.