Читать книгу Environmental Political Theory - Steve Vanderheiden - Страница 18

Within the United States, the reception of ecological limits would lead to changes in the partisan alignment around environmental protection. The conservation movement that preceded the environmental movement as the dominant vision for reforming the relationship between humans and their environment largely appealed to (with its main nongovernmental organizations mostly led by) white, male, and upper-middle-class resource users. The landmark environmental laws adopted in the late 1960s and early 1970s (the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, etc.) enjoyed bipartisan support in the US Congress and were championed by the Republican President Richard Nixon, who also presided over the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. California Republican House member Pete McCloskey served as the co-chair of the first Earth Day in 1970, with numerous members of both parties in the House and Senate claiming strong environmental credentials. For generations, protection of the environment enjoyed bipartisan support, which would begin to erode after 1972, in part due to the way in which the idea of ecological limits had been received and translated into policy.

By the 1980s, changes within the US Republican Party led to an abandonment of Nixon’s environmental leadership and its replacement with the deregulatory and obstructionist politics of the Reagan administration, with the widening of partisan polarization on environmental issues in Congress beginning with its shift to the right in the early 1990s. As Dunlap, McCright, and Yarosh show, this widening partisan gap is reflected in widely disparate attitudes and beliefs about climate change, with those identifying as Republicans, in the electorate as well as government, increasingly embracing a particular version of one of the three possible responses to ecological limits to be considered next: supporting business as usual (i.e. enacting no new environmental protections as well as rolling back existing ones) on the basis of climate science denial, which shows similar patterns of partisan polarization.¹³

The environmental movement, by contrast, increasingly (if haltingly and inconsistently) moved away from what I shall, below, call the “eco-fortress” response (characterized by a desire to maintain exclusive control over scarce resources at the expense of the disadvantaged) that was characteristic of the early conservation movement, and toward what I call the “just transition” response, which aims to protect ecological goods and services for all. In doing so, it embraced multilateral cooperation and centralized environmental regulation, at the same time that US conservatives were rejecting these. The idea of ecological limits could not be ignored, but how the idea was received gave rise to widely disparate and competing political visions. Some chose science denialism or other forms of dismissal, while others saw limits as justifying the exclusion of others from the benefits of development or enjoyment of increasingly scarce ecological goods and services, and still others saw the challenge as requiring a new focus on equity in understanding the causes of and solutions to environmental problems. To those three kinds of response and to their implications we shall now turn.