It will take historians many years to sort through the political, economic, and cultural wreckage left by Ronald Reagan and his ideological heirs. But the disappearance of ecological issues from the national agenda was an essential part of the devastation. Environmentalism was one of Reagan’s targets from the beginning. During the campaign, he and his handlers shrewdly exploited Jimmy Carter’s "malaise" speech of July 1979. Carter never used the offending word, though he did refer to an American "crisis of confidence," arising from the discovery that "owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning." Carter’s big mistake was to question this accumulationist ethos in arguing for conservation as a "moral equivalent of war" and committing the government to long-term research into alternative energy sources. It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, one that acknowledged the limits to economic growth and anticipated nearly all the environmental themes that have only recently returned to fashion.īut it was a political disaster for Carter. Polls indicated that popular reaction to the speech was generally favorable, but then the chattering classes weighed in.īy 1979 Carter’s media stock had bottomed out. Pundit after pundit took Carter to task for having the temerity to blame the American people for their wasteful ways. Reagan, meanwhile, was prepared to argue that any talk about limits was un-American. This was the country where the sky was the limit. "America is back," he announced after his election. He lost no time in removing the solar panels from the White House roof. The story of Carter’s speech is a cautionary tale for environmentalists. It suggests the ease with which environmentalists could be identified as puritanical moralists, dour pessimists, enemies of fun and the future. Carter’s public persona reinforced this connection-his sober homiletical tone, his sloping shoulders, his overall limpness. Reagan tilted his head with practiced spontaneity, smiled his lemon-twist smile, and dispensed upbeat aphorisms as if they were freshly minted. His shoulders were padded and his posture was perfect. He was superbly suited to exorcise the demons of doubt, even when doubt had a strong foundation in reality.Ī nd Reagan was not the only villain of this tale. The denial of environmental concerns was part of a broad cultural shift that also swept up the postmodern left. During the 1980s and 1990s, leftists were as likely as rightists to scold environmentalists for their allegedly puritanical preoccupation with limits-as Julian Simon did (from the right) in The Ultimate Resource in 1981 and Andrew Ross did (from the left) in Strange Weather in 1991. Ultimately this critique pushed beyond ethics to epistemology. At its most inane, the postmodern project challenged the very notion that something called "nature" existed apart from human constructions of it.īy the late 1980s, no self-respecting professor in the humanities would use the word "nature," or even the word "reality," without inverted commas. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson revealed the social origins of this style when he announced that "postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good"-a view that could be held only by an upper-class professional who spent most of his waking hours insulated from the natural world. The bizarre notion that "nature is gone for good" had unintended political consequences.
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