Question Earthority!

In the Grist commentary I’ve chosen for this week’s QE! backgrounder, Mike Tidwell writes “while I do believe we have a moral responsibility to do what we can as individuals, we just don’t have enough time to win this battle one household at a time, street by painstaking street, from coast to coast.” Tidwell’s paean to urgency is unsurprisingly accompanied by a call for “Churchillian” mobilization to save the planet by legislative fiat, just the way the civil rights movement got rid of the n-word and “discrimination in housing, employment, voting, and other realms of national life.”

“[E]very time an activist or politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new bulb or spend extra on a Prius,” writes Tidwell, “ExxonMobil heaves a big sigh of relief.”

This is what libertarian environmentalists are up against … and it’s also a sign that we’re winning the battle.

When the advocates of tyranny begin to shriek that a government response is required now, it’s a sure bet that they see their opportunity to seize power slipping away. It means they’ve noticed the rest of us accomplishing the goals they claim to support … without any need, or desire, on our part to take marching orders from them to get the job done.

Tidwell’s invocation of the civil rights movement is telling: He ignores the voluntary actions that rolled back 100 years of Jim Crow “one household at a time, street by painstaking street, from coast to coast,” from the buses of Montgomery to the lunch counters at Woolworth’s, and focuses on the law — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that froze those gains in place, took the steam out of the true movement, and ensured that discrimination, having been made formally illegal, would nonetheless survive for use as a political chew toy by those to whom the struggle was not for equality, but for power.

Newsflash: The “n-word” is still in use. Apart from some “quota-filling” to get by, racial discrimination remains the rule, not the exception, in employment and housing in many parts of the country. And if you don’t think that there’s still discrimination in voting, you slept through the 2000 presidential election. The civil rights movement made huge gains through voluntary action and grassroots activism … and got stopped cold by the people who insisted that the struggle could not be won “one household at a time, street by painstaking street, from coast to coast,” when in fact that’s the only way a moral or political crusade is ever truly won.

The question for genuine environmentalists is whether they’re interested in saving the Earth, or in garnering power for their self-styled “leaders.” The two objectives are not compatible. One must be chosen. And the future of the planet hangs in the balance.