Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 221
the legislation that will achieve action on global
warming and other issues....
Above all else, we need to take a hard look at
the institutions the movement has built over the
last 30 years. Are existing environmental institu-
tions up to the task of imagining the post-global
warming world? Or do we now need a set of new
institutions founded around a more expansive
vision and set of values?
Source: Michael Schallenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The
Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming in a Post-
Environmental World.” http://www.Breakthrough.org./pdfcan call our own. Most of the intellectuals who
staff environmental groups are so repelled by the
right’s values that we have assiduously avoided
examining our own in a serious way. Environ-
mentalists and other liberals tend to see values
as a distraction from “the real issues” – environ-
mental problems like global warming.
If environmentalists hope to become more
than a special interest we must start framing our
proposals around core American values and start
seeing our own values as central to what moti-
vates and guides our politics. Doing so is crucial
if we are to build the political momentum – a
sustaining movement – to pass and implement
DOCUMENT 157: Bruce Babbitt Proposes a New Approach to Federal
Land-Use Planning (2005)The federal government owns approximately one-eighth (253 million acres) of the landmass of the fifty states.
In addition to the national parks and forests, the government controls a vast number of both large and small
tracts of land. Bruce Babbitt, who was secretary of the Interior during the Clinton administration, here offers
some advice about how the federal government, working together with local, state, and regional entities can
make better use of those lands.It may come as something of a surprise to
learn there is such a thing as “federal land use
planning.” The notion that land use is a local
matter has come to dominate the political rheto-
ric of our age, obscuring the historical reality
that the national government has been involved
in land use planning since the early days of the
republic. In fact, there is, by whatever name, a
considerable body of law that can and, in my
view, should be used toward enhanced federal
leadership in land use planning and preserva-
tion.
The case for federal leadership in land use
planning must begin with a consideration of
exactly what the national interest consists of. No
one, for example, suggests that Congress should
be concerned with street patterns in a suburban
development or the location of schools or public
facilities in your community. But most of us would
agree that the national government should be
concerned with protecting disappearing species,
the integrity of rivers that cross state line, our
coastlines, our forests, and regions of special
significance for their scenic, ecological, or his-
torical values. Yet with few exceptions we have
not engaged in a national discussion of how to
define the interest, where to draw the lines and
how to involve the states in the process.
* * *
The Florida Everglades represents our most
notorious example of a great national park
nearly destroyed by highways, water diversions,
encroaching development, and agricultural con-
version. The area has now become the subject
of the largest restoration project ever authorized
by Congress, and at the heart of this effort is a
comprehensive land use planning initiative for
the entire Everglades watershed extending down
the Florida peninsula from Lake Okeechobee to
the waters of Florida Bay.
* * *