The Vision Thing, or We Are All Environmentalists

I struggle with myopia.  It’s not just that I’ve worn glasses ever since I realized I didn’t need to squint to read the blackboard.  It’s that I strive to live my life through an overall set of values, all of which reflect “love thy neighbor as thyself,” while professionally, I devote myself to a single issue. 

Of course, that issue of “housing justice” – the right of individuals to access the housing of their choice free of bigotry and the affirmative obligation of communities to provide for a diversity of housing choices – has all kinds of benefits beyond four walls and a ceiling, from an improved economy to healthy children.  I believe in it passionately. 

But, as Mark Twain wrily phrased it, “if your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.”  One can spin any problem as a root cause for all others.  Issue silos also provide an attractive clarity and incremental “wins” to point to.  

Issue myopia is a source of debate on the Left.  Back in 2005, when abortion rights groups endorsed a pro-choice Republican (Lincoln Chafee) over a Democrat (Jim Langevin), Markos Moulitsas, founder of a popular political blog,The Daily Kos, took his liberal colleagues to task for campaigning against someone who, in the long run, supports the core principle of a Right to Privacy, behind which everything from concern about the PATRIOT Act to prayer in the schools lies.  It’s a principle by which a Senator evaluates Supreme Court nominees as well, the irony being that a Democrat in the Senate would more likely support a nominee upholding a Right to Privacy (which includes reproductive rights) than a Republican. 

Writes Kos, the Democratic Party “has ceded way too much power, way too much control, to those single issue groups.  We don't stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes. We don't have a core philosophy, we have a list with boxes to check off.  So while Republicans focus on building an ideological foundation for their cause, we focus on checking off those boxes on the list.” 

Candidate Barack Obama understood this leading up to his success in 2008.  He attracted voters through appealing to core values such as an inclusive community.  He understood that, as Kos put it, “A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts.” 

But in 2011, we are back to a lot of loose parts and checklists – jobs, deficits, taxes – and short on ideology.  To be fair, as a practitioner with boots on the ground, my staff is so busy working with people losing their homes to foreclosure or eviction that it’s almost impossible to tell families or a funder to whom we report counseling hours that we’re shifting gears to broader advocacy of equal rights or to organizing residents across issues around the banner of inclusion.

Ideology matters nonetheless.  It’s who we are are human beings.  We are an integrated whole, never living outside the context of our relationships, our personal health, and our embeddedness in community.  Our best-loved touchstones -- core religious texts in any faith, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution – undergird our values.  Likewise, an overall vision needs to define our approach to “problems” not vice versa.  Living with integrity, in all senses of the word, matters deeply, not only to ourselves but to our environment.

This summer, I assigned my Northwestern University students one of the most important and provocative articles on the “environmental crisis” in recent years, “The Death of Environmentalism” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.  I asked them to consider this quote from the article:

“Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like global warming – which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century – considered “environmental”?  Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is?  What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem – and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to ‘environmentalists’?”  (emphasis by the authors)

The implication of this article is that defining “environmentalism” as a “thing” with its own set of technological solutions to match, like “cap and trade” or energy efficient bulbs, misses the bigger picture: a coherent set of values that moves us together.  Imagine how, under such a scenario, “environmentalists”, union members, peace activists, immigrant rights supporters, public school reformers, women’s rights advocates, affordable housing advocates and anti-poverty groups work together under a common equal rights agenda that unites education, job creation, universal health care, reduced tensions in the world, and, yes, a clean environment.

In short, imagine selling solutions rather than crises.

These days, my eye doctor has me wearing “progressive” lenses – another way of saying tri-focals for near, close, and far sightedness.  I take this as a metaphor for how to live my own life.  As Shellenberger and Nordhaus remind us, before the environment became a special interest, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, observed, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”