How Environmentalists Can Keep Piling Up Victories

Following the Clinton administration’s approval last month of the most draconian urban air-quality standards ever proposed, a decision vehemently opposed by virtually every mayor and labor union in the country, environmentalists suddenly find themselves with an unusual problem: Will winning go to their heads?

That certainly wasn’t their worry that long ago. The Reagan and Bush administrations were largely unsympathetic. The Republican revolution explicitly targeted “envi- ro kooks” for extinction. Business advocates filled the media with regulatory horror stories--the bird that shut down a county, the bug that thwarted a hospital, the fish that torpedoed a dam. Huge environmental rollbacks seemed all but inevitable.

They never occurred.

The courts consistently upheld air, water and species protections against even the toughest allegations of bad science or constitutional infirmities. Environmental leaders skillfully won the media war as their opponents often indulged in bizarre, widely alienating arguments--characterizing conservation of wildlife and land, for example, as a sin that immorally elevates Earth above man. As the nation’s economy recovered, more and more people began to feel they could once again afford an environmental agenda.

Today, despite a Republican Congress and still strident conservative talk shows, environmental regulations are, as the new air standards show, becoming even more stringent. After years of inaction, the list of plants, animals and insects afforded endangered-species protection is expanding monthly. Heartened environmentalists are already planning for the day when an unambiguous supporter, Vice President Al Gore, takes over the White House.

But though they have triumphed, unless environmentalists outgrow their traditional ideologies, they will tragically sow the seeds of their own political defeat, and help despoil the very natural resources they so revere.

To an unmatched degree, the environmental movement is championed by overwhelmingly white, privileged, urban and suburban elites. They have the economic wherewithal to advance their agendas irrespective of cost, and, perhaps uniquely, the political and social power to relentlessly court legislators, bureaucrats and the media.

These advantages work well in crisis situations--defeating a hostile bill or saving a forest--where nuance and perspective are unimportant. But they have also blinded the movement to the broader problems it must solve to ensure survival.

The most important is to accommodate urban economic development, the nation’s most effective mechanism for producing high-wage and high-skill jobs for the broadest range of people. Paradoxically, however, environmentalists focus attention on precisely the urban communities where development should occur, generating almost unimaginably Byzantine regulatory oversight of even the most beneficial projects. The consequences are alarming.

As environmentalists and their wealthy NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) supporters stymie urban expansion, businesses, families and workers flood into lower-wage, less-diverse, low-skill regions--the South, the Southwest and Intermountain West, for example--that market themselves as relaxed regulatory havens. This progressively weakens the nation’s industrial base and spreads development over an ever broader area of the country.

As urban economies erode, battles between NIMBY-haves and immigrant and ethnic have-nots flare, fragmenting the urban political base that sustains environmentalism in the first place. Growth moves to less diverse communities that are least supportive of environmentalism. Indeed, leaders in states like Idaho or Nevada, and the Southern and Inter mountain Republicans that now control Congress, are only too happy to help environmentalists impose ever heavier burdens on urban economies. Not only do their constituents benefit from the outflow of jobs and capital, but political opposition to environmentalism is also strengthened.

The final irony is that this transformation is the worst possible outcome for the environment, because it pushes development away from cities and other population clusters into pristine, irreplaceable habitats. In America today, it is far more difficult to recycle an abandoned, polluted, degraded urban site than to destroy virgin forests or grasslands to build factories, offices or homes. Minute urban environmental oversight produces largely uncontrolled, profoundly damaging sprawl as huge sections of cities are idled while vast expanses of untouched wilderness are lost forever.

If environmentalists treat their hard-earned victories as vindication of past strategies, they will seriously, if not permanently harm their own interests. To realize a happier alternative, they need to turn their thinking inside-out by encouraging urban growth and shifting the nation’s regulatory focus to the much more ecologically significant, and ideologically hostile, periphery.

The place to start is by helping to energize urban development. If cities could offer building initiatives utilizing abandoned, frequently contaminated sites to the growing number of industries that need dense, tightly integrated facilities, they could compete on a more than equal footing with peripheral communities. As urban business expanded, emergent economic classes would have the opportunities they need to succeed. Political comity among key urban interests would be assured, rural sprawl alleviated.

Paradoxically, environmentalists not only religiously oppose urban projects, in general, they are especially skeptical of reusing sites that are anything less than restored to state-of-nature levels. Regulators who propose programs to allow old factories or warehouse facilities to be reborn for new industrial uses--not to totally pristine, unnecessary standards--are accused of “going soft” on polluters or “selling out” to business. Although there is widespread recognition that urban reuse is critical, these attitudes have precluded all but a handful of the potentially tens of thousands of sites, and hundreds of thousands of jobs, cities could redevelop if given the flexibility to do so.

To break this logjam, reward their strongest allies and concentrate industrial activity in more appropriate regions of the country, the environmental community should embrace reasonable criteria for cleaning up urban sites for reuse for industrial and commercial activities. At the same time they help supercharge urban markets, environmentalists must shift their regulatory attention to conservation and oversight of the far more valuable resources in the periphery.

To be sure, there has been no lack of grandiose rural-preservation schemes, usually involving huge government payoffs to buy lands for conservation purposes. But such tactics are increasingly difficult: governments lack the money for more than a handful of projects; peripheral communities deeply resent, and often repel major initiatives as illegitimate exercises of public power; unseemly competitions for scarce acquisition dollars erupt, and they are often settled in ways that satisfy few, if any participants. Frustrated by such obstacles, it is understandable that environmental elites focus on urban areas, where they have more influence, but the cost is that critical habitat and biological communities remain insufficiently protected.

The way to resolve these difficulties is to link peripheral conservation with urban development. Economic interests that want to grow in the cities should be able to earn the right to do so by buying and permanently protecting large-scale assets in rural and suburban areas. Such a system would vastly enhance environmental protection by simultaneously encouraging concentrated urban development and pristine habitat conservation.

Achieving this result would require that traditional environmental policy be dramatically transformed. Reflecting their deep ambivalence toward urban development, for example, many activists flatly reject any development-rights approach; others would limit the “market” in which such rights might be purchased to extremely small geographical areas, effectively trading one urban site for no development on another.

Instead, environmentalists have to be more willing to expand the development-rights market to include much larger interstate and national, if not international, regions. Similar programs, are successfully helping to preserve rain forests in South America. As an additional benefit, the prospect of earning premium profits for rural land would generate strong support from powerful rural political interests, something that would help mute inevitable resistance from peripheral elites.

Few political movements have the luxury to define a future agenda before latent challenges ossify into intractable stalemates. Even when they do, most unthinkingly defend ideas that may have succeeded in the past, but which will fail in the future. It is rare in U.S. politics that interest groups choose to reinvent themselves in ways that ensure the continued vitality of their core agenda, but which require major strategic and ideological changes. Environmentalists now have that historic opportunity.