Critics of environmentalism have often charged that the movement is “elitist.” By this is meant, among other complaints, that environmentalists are mainly members of the middle and upper classes who have achieved a comfortable level of economic well-being and who want to “lock up” natural resources, discourage economic growth, and withhold upwardly mobile job opportunities from less privileged economic groups in the society. Environmentalists, of course, dispute this criticism, arguing that it is unsupported by any reasonable interpretation of either environmentalists’ goals or the socioeconomic data. Nevertheless, the criticism strikes a sensitive nerve. It is interesting that the charge is directed at environmentalists, a majority of whom are liberals or progressives, both from the right, which claims environmental regulations choke off economic opportunities, and from the left, which argues that skirmishes over resource policy represent just one more episode in the ongoing war between the classes. What is undeniable is that the growth issue is the most difficult one facing environmentalists today. Here is a real dilemma. If environmentalists embrace economic growth in America, they apparently embrace endless sprawl, boom towns, high energy use, degradation of watersheds and wetlands, more chemicals—evils without end. If they oppose growth, however, they appear to favor unemployment, reduced wages, and economic stagnation. About growth, the dilemma encourages ambivalence and waffling: In 1977, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund published The Unfinished Agenda: The Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Issues, which emphasized a need for “a major transformation in human values” and argued that the United States has “enjoyed a development that is no longer possible for most [nations].” The United States must, the report urges, aid in “the transition from abundance to scarcity” and provide examples of how, “in a ‘Conserver Society,’ quality of life can be preserved (and, for many, increased) in an era of scarcity.” In the years since the Reagan antiregulatory revolution, however, environmentalists have also emphasized the importance of economic growth in achieving environmental goals. In a 1985 agenda document (environmentalists love to compose agendas), the Group of Ten (chief executive officers of ten leading environmental organizations) said: “Continued economic growth is essential.
A Well-Being Snapshot in a Changing World
