by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 29, 2012 | Climate Change, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Climate scientists are clear that modern human societies are changing the atmosphere of the planet, mainly by clearing forests, grasslands, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems for the purposes of development and logging and by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. These activities are releasing greenhouse gases and destroying natural greenhouse gas reservoirs. The result of all this activity is that the Earth is growing steadily warmer, year after year, and this is causing problems all over the world.
That additional heat is powering up weather systems and altering global flows of energy. Storms are more powerful and frequent than in the past. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and other weather patterns are becoming increasingly unpredictable and dangerous. “Freak” events like the disastrous heat wave in Russia in 2011 are becoming more common. Annual deaths ascribed to climate change were estimated in a 2002 study to be 150,000 per year at that time, using what the authors called an “extremely conservative” methodology.
Every year representatives from governments around the world gather to discuss the problem of global warming as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1994 treaty which has been signed by 194 nations. In 2012, the 17th annual meeting was held in Durban, South Africa. The stated goal of these meetings has been to limit global warming to 2° Celsius – about 3.5° Fahrenheit over average pre-industrial temperature. This is the maximum level of warming that has been labeled as safe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations scientific advising body on the matter.
Warming beyond this level is not safe because it threatens to accelerate due to “tipping points” in the global climate. These tipping points refer to a specific time at which a natural system, after being stressed by global warming, “flips” into a different state and begins to release greenhouse gases in a self-sustaining reaction instead of being a carbon dioxide ‘sink’. James Hansen and other climate scientists have issued dire warnings about this possibility. In fact, Hansen and other scientists have recently revised their assertions that limiting warming to 2°C will prevent climate tipping points. They, and many other climate scientists, believe now that warming must be limited to 1°C to avoid these catastrophic feedbacks, which are already beginning to take effect.
“With the current global warming of ~0.8°C evidence of slow feedbacks is beginning to appear,” Hansen wrote in 2011.
These “slow feedbacks” include processes like ice sheet melt and the release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost and warming shallow oceans, and threaten to rapidly increase the effects of global warming if climate tipping points are exceeded. Their effects are rarely included in climate models and policy, and are a major reason why some scientists are concerned that estimates and forecasts have been underestimating the speed and severity of climate change.
“There’s evidence that climate sensitivity [to greenhouse gases] may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University.
That is why many scientists and policy analysts are calling for greater emissions cuts than what has been proposed in international negotiations. So what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming?
According to the climate-modeling group of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, we need 100% cuts by 2050 to avert 2°C warming. Their calculations show that even this rate of reduction would leave a 1 in 3 chance of rise over 2°C. James Hansen, in the same 2011 paper referenced above, notes that if emissions cuts don’t begin until 2020, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, currently around 395ppm, will not decline to 350ppm (considered the highest safe level for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) for almost 300 years.
George Monbiot, the noted climate journalist and researcher, has called for a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute calls for at least 80% cuts by 2020. Hansen notes that 6% cuts per year beginning in 2012 would prevent substantial warming beyond 1°C – this is equivalent to a 100% emissions cut by 2030. To be successful, Hansen also notes that these cuts would have to be combined with a massive campaign to restore forests and other natural carbon sinks.
As we can see, the consensus among the most informed individuals is that emissions need to be near zero by 2030 and more likely by 2020. To achieve this by systemic means, emissions need to peak between 2012 and 2015 and begin to decline rapidly, but the trend has been moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2010, emissions rose about 3% per year, and projections from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development assert that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be 50% higher than current levels by 2050.
Business As Usual Is A Dead End…
Obviously, the rate of emissions cuts being promoted by governments around the world are not sufficient to avoid 1°C of warming (or even 2°C warming), regardless of new technologies brought into play. And what is the foundation of the cuts that are proposed? What are the technologies being relied on to reduce emissions?
Most of the proposed solutions to global warming focus on a revolution in transportation that leaves fossil fuels behind and transitions to electric transportation, and a conversion from fossil fuel electricity generation to “renewable” energy generation. Among policymakers, governments, and environmentalists, “green energy” is often considered the Holy Grail of the new green economy. Excitement and investment has focused on solar energy, wind power, and biofuels as the technologies that will herald the new ecotopian future.
But do these new technologies actually represent real solutions? Serious concerns have been raised about the true sustainability of these and other “green” technologies. Author and activist Lierre Keith writes:
“Windmills, PV panels, the grid itself are all manufactured using that cheap energy [from fossil fuels]. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible: sic transit gloria renewables… The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels… And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time.”
Biofuels are similarly plagued by criticism. Many biofuels simply take more energy to produce than can be extracted from them. Those that do produce energy produce an exceedingly small amount. These fuels are often created by clearing natural ecosystems such as tropical rain forests or prairies for agricultural production, a process which releases even more greenhouse gases, reduces biodiversity, and reduces local food availability. Biofuel production is considered a major factor in rising food prices around the world in recent years. These rising food prices have led to widespread starvation, unrest, and violence.
Digging Out of a Very Deep Hole
Some governments, corporations, and advocacy groups are calling for emergency efforts to stop global warming using techniques collectively referred to as geo-engineering. Proposals include injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation, dumping huge loads of iron into the ocean to stimulate phytoplankton growth, or even putting massive reflectors in space to redirect solar rays before they hit the earth. But many worry that these solutions could cause more problems than they solve.
“Einstein warned us and told us that you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them,” says physicist and sustainable agriculture activist Vandana Shiva. “The sun is not the problem. The problem is the mass of pollution we are creating.”
Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere would certainly reduce global warming, but only as long as these injections are continued. This would mean that if, in the future, society was unable to maintain atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide, these levels would rapidly fall and warming would commence once again. It is a false solution based on offloading the effects of global warming onto future generations.
Ocean fertilization would also be effective at reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels by stimulating the growth of phytoplankton who absorb greenhouse gases. However, the side effects of modifying oceanic food chains and energy flows on the scale that would be required for this to be effective are unknown, and could be catastrophic for oceans already reeling from decades of overfishing and industrial pollution.
Reflectors in space are a logistical nightmare. The massive amount of energy that would be required to manufacture and deploy such technology would greatly exacerbate warming. These reflectors would also have unknown effects on plant growth, vitamin D synthesis in humans, weather patterns written by solar energy, and other global systems. It is possible that this “solution” could devastate the planet.
Beyond these issues, none of the geo-engineering proposals address some of the fundamental issues of climate change that go beyond global warming. For example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are dissolving into the oceans where they become carboxylic acid. This acid is lowering the pH of the entire ocean and interfering with fish and shellfish reproduction, coral reef growth, and numerous other living systems that, aside from their intrinsic value, provide a good deal of human nutrition around the world.
Geo-engineering also fails to deal with the issue of rising seas – we are already committed to several feet of sea level rise, which is likely to displace tens of millions of people around the world and inundate ecosystems. While reducing warming through these techniques would slow the melt of mountain glaciers and ice sheets, it would do nothing to address the natural systems already in dire straits because of warming up to this point.
What about simple living?
Faced with these problems, many people are addressing some of the fundamental issues at hand, such as the culture of consumerism that is fueling the industrial machine. Millions of people are embracing the need for voluntary simplicity and taking steps to reduce their waste, use less energy, support local economies over corporate globalization, and become self-sufficient wherever possible.
This is an excellent first step. However, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of energy consumption and waste production comes from the commercial and industrial sectors – that is to say, business. So even if all of the 350 million people in the United States reduce their energy consumption and personal waste production drastically, it would have marginal effects on the global situation. It bears repeating often and loudly that the US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuel on the planet. So while simple living is certainly a moral necessity, it does not fundamentally challenge the globalized industrial economy that is based on colonization and extraction of resources.
So what could work?
But plants can be grown for food in ways that are in accord with the needs and desires of a particular landscape, as has been demonstrated by thousands of cultures throughout history. These cultures practiced gardening, tending wild plants, and horticulture – practices which revolve around closed loop systems of perennial polycultures, communities of plants that supplement and support each other. The modern idea of permaculture evolved from these roots. Permaculture uses thousands of techniques, precisely adapted to the region, climate, soils, and microclimate to create edible ecosystems which provide food as well as quality wildlife habitat.
Annual grain monocrop agriculture is certainly no solution: it is based on drawdown of finite soil reserves and enables the population growth that is currently stretching the carrying capacity of the planet to its limits. In fact, the history of agricultural civilizations is precisely the history of environmental devastation, from the deforestation of Babylon-era Mesopotamia, to the felling of great forests of North Africa to construct the Roman fleets, to the great dust bowl of the 1930s and onwards.
Permaculture, as well as other traditional subsistence methods such as hunting, animal husbandry, fishing, and gathering, must be the foundations of any future sustainable culture; otherwise any claims to being “green” will be falsehoods. Perennial polycultures, both cultivated and wild, can also supply the other basics necessities of life: clean water, clean air, material for clothing and shelter, and inspiration spiritual nourishment.
Addressing the population bubble…
The skyrocketing world population will need to be addressed if climate change is to be averted. This is technically possible, but socially and politically very difficult. About half of all children born are unplanned, which means that by simply reducing or limiting unwanted pregnancies, we would solve the population problem. The most effective means of reducing unwanted pregnancies is by empowering women, making birth control easily available and culturally appropriate, and by combating the effects of patriarchal, male-focused culture.
It is also critical that we note that population is a secondary issue; consumption has a more direct effect on climate change and population. What I mean by this is that a single person in the United States is likely to have a massive climate impact compared to a dozen or more people living in poor nations. So while population must be addressed, we must also address the issue of overconsumption and industrialization.
A human-rights issue
Global warming is a human rights issue, so perhaps it will be useful for us to look at past struggles for human rights. It is important for us to recognize that global warming is also a value-laden issue. It is inherently political and partisan. There is a clear dividing line between those who are making fortunes off industries and lifestyles of flagrant consumption, and those who are bearing the brunt of the effects of global warming.
What does this mean for our strategy? For one, it may mean that legislative change will be too slow to stop catastrophic global warming: powerful interests are so entrenched within our political system that booting them out is a long-term process. For another, it means that in addition to allies, we must concern ourselves with enemies. There are specific corporations, governments, and individuals who will consistently side with profit and with business rather than with human health, dignity, and good relationship with this land underneath our feet and this air flowing in and out of our lungs.
We should learn from past struggles, like the civil rights movement, where people used a variety of strategies and techniques to make social change. We should learn from independence movements like the Indian resistance to British colonization, and from the successes and failures of the environmental movement in the past.
Above all, we should be prepared to escalate. Powerful entrenched forces seldom concede their position willingly, and the history of social movements is a short history in escalation of tactics. We must never forget that there are lives on the line, both human and non-human, lives numbered in the billions. There is a continuum of tactics that we must consider, beginning with raising awareness, lobbying for legislative change, and mainstream political engagement, moving through legal challenges and court battles to mass protest and civil disobedience, and, at the last, ending with direct action against polluting industries.
Regardless of the strategies and tactics that are used (which are likely to be a broad combination of these and many more), averting catastrophic global warming is a daunting task. It will require courage, commitment, creativity, and groups of people working together in concert to achieve their goals. This work is already being done, and the only question is this: will you join us?
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Lester Brown’s exhaustively researched book, Plan B 4.0 – Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is a bold and impressive effort to chart a course to ecological sustainability, one of very few books that attempts this worthwhile goal. Brown lists 4 steps that Plan B 4.0 focuses on to achieve sustainability:
- Stabilize climate by cutting emissions by at least 80% by 2020
- Stabilize population at 8 billion or lower
- Eradicate poverty
- Restore natural earth systems (soil, aquifers, forests, grasslands, oceans)
These are excellent goals to begin with, and show that Brown is extremely serious about his mission, and is truly concerned about justice and the welfare of the human population. They also show that he understands one of the fundamental obstacles to true change – the interlocking relationship between environmental destruction and human exploitation. For example, Brown calls for debt relief for poor nations – an admirable position against the interests of international financiers and for the interests of poor and exploited people. Few analysts truly understand this relationship at both a theoretical and real-world level, and Brown moves beyond the average call for sustainability by acknowledging the seriousness of this issue.
Plan B lays out a compelling and comprehensive vision of the converging crises that are threatening life on earth – from oceanic collapse and peak oil to soil erosion and food instability. Brown understands that the collapse of global civilization is likely if business-as-usual continues. The undermining of the biological life-support systems of the earth has left life as we know it teetering on the brink. For many species and communities around the world, it is already too late.
The fundamental basis of Brown’s approach is that it is a social change approach. Brown understands that social problems require social solutions. While personal lifestyle changes (to transport, diet, and other consumption) are an important and moral way to address these problems, they are not sufficient to solve ecological and social injustice by themselves. This is an important step – a foundation for serious political work. From here, we can analyze each of the goals of Plan B 4.0 for strategic soundness, moral rigor, and good scholarship.
Step 1: Stabilize Climate
Brown’s approach to solving the climate problem relies on several strategies. First, he advocates massive adoption of alternative energy. Second, he calls for replanting of billions of trees to sequester carbon and rehabilitate habitat. Third, he describes an efficiency revolution centering on recycling, reusing, and refining urban planning and architecture and material flows throughout global society.
The focus on replanting of forests and restoring habitat around the world is extremely important and is an admirable goal, as is the elimination of coal and gasoline as energy sources. However, the fundamental failure of Brown’s approach to solving climate change is the insistence on maintaining an industrial way of life. Efficiency in cooking, housing, and production is doubtlessly important, but too many of Brown’s solutions call for centralized industrial production instead of local self-sufficiency – the maintenance of privileged lifestyles.
In short, while Brown’s plan is truly radical, he does not go far enough. In advocating massive production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and trains, a “smart grid,” and other industrial technologies, Plan B 4.0 does not question the fundamental system of resource extraction and industrial production. It does not question global capitalism, which will continue to get rich by feeding on human and non-human communities.
The industrial products sold within the capitalist economy are created through a complex global system of mining, refining, production, distribution, and trashing/recycling. In each stage of this process, natural communities of humans and non-humans are exploited, poisoned, and destroyed for the sake of luxury goods like cars and electricity.
Electric cars and alternative energy do not address this fundamental destruction that is required for industrial technology to exist. Wind turbines, to use one example, still require mining for bauxite, the ore refined into aluminum. In central India (and other regions around the world) mountains containing bauxite are blown up and strip-mined to extract bauxite. About six tons of bauxite and a thousand tons of water a required to produce one ton of aluminum. There is no sustainable way to do this – most rich countries have exported this process to poor nations. The pollution is hidden.
This process not only destroys or displaces the non-human life on these mountains, but leads to runoff, pollution, and extirpation of indigenous communities. Smelting bauxite requires extremely high temperatures – usually provided by big dams – and leads to vast amounts of carbon emissions and other air pollution. And the entire system of distribution depends on vast ocean-going ships that burn bunker fuel, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. It is estimated that one container ship releases as much carbon dioxide as 50 million cars.
Another example: the Toyota Prius, widely praised by environmentalists (including Brown), requires 5 times as much energy to produce as an average car due to the complex process of creating electric motors, circuitry, and batteries. Accounting for production energy and transportation fuel and average over the lifetime of the car, a Prius actually uses 1.4x as much energy per mile as the average American car.
Solar panels provide another example. The average solar cell requires the mining of about 2,000lbs of earth material for Silicon. The production process is extremely dangerous – in China, workers at a solar panel factory went on strike in 2011 because of the pollution released by the plant had toxified a lake nearby that was causing respiratory problems and cancers in the community.
This is just touching the surface of the devastation that is wrought by these “environmentally friendly” technologies. These technologies also require rare earth minerals like cadmium and tellurium, which simply do not exist in sufficient quantities to allow mass adoption of alternative energy.
This reliance on technological solutions is one the major failings of Plan B 4.0. Brown has bought into the hype surrounding these alternative technologies, when in reality they only represent more of the same – more resources extracted from poor nations, more money flowing to corporations and rich nations, more pollution, more destroyed communities. While the standards of research and scholarship in Plan B 4.0 are generally very high, Brown does not apply the same rigorous research methods to the technological solutions he advocates.
A better model for halting global warming would revolve around the creation of land-based communities that are able to take their sustenance from within healthy, flourishing ecosystems that they coexist with. This model is the way of life practiced by humans for 99% of our existence, so it is clearly not impossible, but it would require addressing the serious issue of population, to which Brown turns next.
Step 2: Stabilize Population
In addressing overpopulation Brown is facing an issue before which many have balked, with good reason. There is a history of racism, eugenics, and forced sterilization that makes population reduction a touchy issue to deal with directly. But Plan B 4.0 takes the right tact. Brown’s plan calls for massive programs of education and empowerment of women, combined with government incentives for small families, widespread family planning programs, and universal birth control availability. This humane and effective model has been used around the world in places like Iran with great success.
While this approach is laudable, Plan B 4.0 could use a slightly more radical feminist analysis. While Brown does call for the education of women, he does not explicitly state that empowered women rarely chose to have large numbers of children. High birth rates usually occur in patriarchal arrangements where women have few rights and little power of their own. Acknowledging this fact and working to dismantle patriarchal social forms will be a much more difficult task than the more straightforward path that Brown presents, but will lead to more lasting and fundamental change in birth rates and the overall direction of society.
Step 3: Eradicate Poverty
By acknowledging the fundamental connections between global poverty and environmental degradation, Brown goes further towards truth than many of his contemporaries. He advocates for debt relief for poor nations, which would go a long way towards relieving the pressures on “developing” nations. He calls for an increase in small gardens and other simple techniques that reduce burdens on poor people around the world, planting forests and allowing degraded lands to fallow.
However, without access to land, poor people have no chance for survival. The critique of contemporary land grabs is an important part of Plan B 4.0. Here Brown details how food importers, nations that cannot grow enough food to support their population, are purchasing and leasing arable land in poor nations to grow food for export. Many times these poor nations cannot even feed their own population, so these vast foreign-held farms must employ armed guards to ensure that the food is not taken back.
Brown understands that agriculture, logging, and overgrazing are devastating much of the land around the world through salinization, soil erosion, and desertification, and that this process is destabilizing populations and leading to poverty and social breakdown.
However, Brown is lacking a fundamental critique of industrial agriculture as a practice. He advocates the use of pesticides and fertilizers, which are overwhelmingly toxic and derived from fossil fuels. He advocates for increased efficiency in irrigation, while acknowledging the fact that 70% of the fresh water used worldwide is used for irrigation. And he advocates for the use of genetically modified and high-yield varieties, which is a gamble with the genetic code. This is also leading to a narrow range of varieties, which are more vulnerable to future disease of plague. The result has been an arms-race between GMO and pesticide companies and the constantly evolving creatures that feed on monocropped fields.
Even more fundamentally, Brown does not appreciate the fact that annual monocrop agriculture is the practice that has enabled rampant overpopulation. Population tracks food supply, and it has been well documented is recent years that many creatures (including humans) regulate their own population based on the food available. When humans began farming the land and stopped getting their food from within biodiverse, perennial ecosystems, they stopped paying attention to these natural limits. They were not sharing their food anymore.
This lack of sharing is also the foundation of modern ecological devastation. After all, agriculture is the practice of clearing natural ecosystems and replanting them for human use. The forests and grasslands that have fallen before the plow are the primary location for species loss worldwide. Ninety-eight percent of old-growth forests and 99% of native grasslands are gone. Human population has grown in direct proportion to the decline in non-human populations worldwide, because they have been consumed by civilization, by agriculture.
Brown’s failure here is the same as above – he has no fundamental critique of capitalism (the dominant economic system) and civilization (the dominant form of social organization – a way of life based on annual monocrops and life in cities). These systems are a major reason why people are poor.
By extracting resources in destructive ways and exploiting workers for less than the full value of their labor, capitalism impoverishes people around the world. A large class of poor people is required for the functioning of the global economy – it is structurally mandated. And civilization is a social form that inevitably leads to overshoot of natural limits, colonial expansion, wars of conquest, further environmental damage, and finally collapse (for a further explanation of these ideas, see Sources). Any efforts to address poverty will have to first deal with the stifling influence of capitalism and civilization.
Step 4: Restoring Earth
The final goal of Plan B 4.0 is to restore natural ecosystems around the world – oceans, grasslands, soils, and forests. In order to protect biodiversity and the range or natural services provided by these ecosystems, Brown advocates massive replanting of forests (as previously mentioned), soil conservation measures, and the creation of protected marine zones in the ocean, as well as a program of parks and other measures to protect biodiversity.
Replanting forests is an important way to restore the life-support systems of the planet, and Brown is the right advocate for it. However, he also advocates for an increase in plantation style forests to be grown for timber and pulp products. While the US Forest Service is a division of the Department of Agriculture, forests are not fields, and few soils can sustain more than three consecutive harvests of timber before soils are too depleted to continue. An imposition of human standards upon a natural system decreases the health of the system, and as such, plantations are not a long-term solution.
Restoring soils is perhaps the most critical task in this section. Terrestrial life as we know it is only possible because of a thin layer of topsoil – without it, plants cannot grow. Brown’s tactic of allowing steeper slopes and other marginal farmland to fallow and return to forest is a good one, but he still lacks a full critique of agriculture as a practice. Annual monocropped fields lead to erosion and loss of soil fertility – this type of agriculture kills the soil. This is true around the world, except in small river valley regions where alluvial soils are constantly replenished.
However, these natural wetlands are also biodiversity hotspots, which means the one place where agriculture can be practiced somewhat sustainably is also the place where it will lead to the biggest loss of habitat for other creatures. Brown’s plan for protecting biodiversity is not elaborate – there are almost no details in the book. But any course of action that does not challenge the human appropriation, destruction, and toxification of land, water, and atmosphere will not lead to substantial progress in the conservation of biodiversity.
Conclusion
Plan B 4.0 is a unflinching attempt to chart a course for sanity, but Lester Brown and his researchers fail to apply the same rigor to human society and proposed solutions that they apply to environmental problems. Brown states that in 1950 the world economy was based on “sustainable yield, the interest of natural systems.” This is simply not true. Europe was deforested before industrialization. So was the Middle East. The forests and soils of North Africa fueled the Roman war machine until they were exhausted, and now support only goats and olives – ecological poverty food that can survive on desiccated, impoverished soils. The forests of the United States were felled largely before the mechanical saw. While industrialism greatly accelerated in the 1950’s, the problem goes much deeper than that.
Brown’s approach, along with the approach of many other environmentalists, is fundamentally anthropocentric and short sighted. He does not account for the experience of prehistory, that span of 99.7% of human existence when the natural world flourished alongside us. He does not even mention indigenous people, the only communities that have truly lived in a sustainable manner. Any understanding of environmental sustainability must advance from the basic position that humans have the ability to coexist with the natural world. These model societies exist, but they are being destroyed by the very industrialism that Brown supports with his calls for alternative technology (for example, the Dongriah Kondh of the central Indian foothills).
Instead of exploring how human societies may better conform themselves to the needs of the land, Brown falls into the trap of reform – how can we adapt nature to better fit our needs? How can we maintain the energy grid, industrial production, a high population, and the conveniences of globalized capitalist civilization while simultaneously addressing environmental problems? The fundamental answer to this question is that such a solution is not possible. In failing to see this point, Plan B 4.0 stumbles and falls along with the vast majority of the environmental movement.
