Environmentalism

Here's what the shelves reveal when you line them up: the environmental movement is the ur-case of what Putnam calls "citizenship by proxy," and nobody seems to have reckoned with how completely it rewrote the playbook for every cause that followed. By 1989, only 13 percent of Sierra Club members had attended a single meeting. The movement that Earth Day built became, within two decades, a direct-mail operation where "membership simply means that you gave us some money at least once in the last two years." Meanwhile, the spiritual wing—Berry's "mystical communion with Earth," Lovelock's Gaia, the whole panentheist current—was filling exactly the emotional vacuum that professionalization hollowed out. The movement bifurcated into two things that barely speak to each other: a Washington lobbying apparatus staffed by Ivy League lawyers, and a diffuse eco-spirituality that honors soil as "a divine locus." Dubos saw this coming in 1968, noting that environmental improvement had become "palliative measures" driven by "fear or panic rather than constructive thought." What nobody predicted was that the gap between the technocratic and the sacred would become the movement's permanent architecture—and that nearly every social movement since would reproduce exactly this split.