BLUE PROJECT YI PLASH PROFESSIONAL
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. 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. Ultimately this critique pushed beyond ethics to epistemology. 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. The denial of environmental concerns was part of a broad cultural shift that also swept up the postmodern left. 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.
His shoulders were padded and his posture was perfect. Reagan tilted his head with practiced spontaneity, smiled his lemon-twist smile, and dispensed upbeat aphorisms as if they were freshly minted. Carter’s public persona reinforced this connection-his sober homiletical tone, his sloping shoulders, his overall limpness. It suggests the ease with which environmentalists could be identified as puritanical moralists, dour pessimists, enemies of fun and the future.
The story of Carter’s speech is a cautionary tale for environmentalists. He lost no time in removing the solar panels from the White House roof. "America is back," he announced after his election. This was the country where the sky was the limit. Reagan, meanwhile, was prepared to argue that any talk about limits was un-American. Pundit after pundit took Carter to task for having the temerity to blame the American people for their wasteful ways. 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. 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. 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. During the campaign, he and his handlers shrewdly exploited Jimmy Carter’s "malaise" speech of July 1979. Environmentalism was one of Reagan’s targets from the beginning. But the disappearance of ecological issues from the national agenda was an essential part of the devastation. It will take historians many years to sort through the political, economic, and cultural wreckage left by Ronald Reagan and his ideological heirs. Who could be bothered with worry about waste amid acres of wired McMansions and herds of lumbering SUVs? Quite the contrary: for most Americans it was as if the 1970s-the decade of the "energy crisis," Small Is Beautiful, and presidential commitments to solar energy-never happened. Noble green intentions left little impact on everyday life. For the last thirty years-despite the absorption of environmentalist slogans and sentiments into our popular culture, the frequent legal skirmishes on behalf of endangered species, and the spread of serious ecological thought into many academic disciplines-broad environmental concerns all but disappeared from mainstream political debate. Their amnesia is an understandable response to recent history. Yet contemporary politicians and pundits treat green concerns as if they were fresh discoveries. The pragmatic, ethical, and aesthetic arguments for conservation are roughly the same as they were in the 1970s-the only difference being that they have acquired even more urgency in the face of depleted oil reserves, fished-out oceans, and "climate change," the current euphemism for global warming.
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