We're Winning

When Silent Spring appeared in 1962, Chemical World News condemned it as "science fiction." Time magazine dismissed it as an "emotional and inaccurate outburst." Reader's Digest canceled a contract for a 20,000-word condensation and ran the Time piece instead. But only seven years later Time used a photo of Carson to illustrate its new Environment section. Silent Spring was not a prediction, as anti-environmentalists profess; it was a warning, full of hope. "No," Carson wrote her friend Lois Crisler, "I myself never thought the ugly facts would dominate. . . . The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind." If Rachel Carson could find hope in the face of what and who were closing in on her, no environmentalist has the right to feel discouraged in 2004.

Today, as always, environmentalists face challenges that only seem hopeless. Exaggerating those challenges, as they occasionally do, provides fodder to environmental exploiters, their hirelings, and parasites who, using a few truths to frame a house of lies, profess that the greens are making everything up as a funding gimmick. For example, a 39-year-old Dane—one Bjorn Lomborg—has scrambled to media prominence by indulging anti-environmentalists with their favorite fantasies. Last April Time even named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. In rambling harangues Lomborg attempts to debunk all claims of the environmental community, exaggerated or not. He purposefully confuses decades-old warnings of what might happen, such as Silent Spring, with predictions of apocalypse. Then he and his flock gleefully publish all the angry reactions, thereby attracting still more media attention.

One of Lomborg's favorite targets, Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson, is as full of hope as warnings. He sees humanity in a "bottleneck," but poised to break out. "There's every good hope that human population on the planet will peak, because fertility is dropping and the average number of children each woman has is dropping worldwide," he declares. (His big questions are when it will peak, and how the environment will be affected.) Wilson also cites major improvements in public attitudes, as illustrated, for instance, by the membership surge in the World Wildlife Fund during the 1980s, from 100,000 to one million.

To check on my own perspective, I interviewed leading environmental activists who have roughly the same number of years on me that I have on Catherine Schmitt. I started with my dear friend and mentor, Michael Frome—the environmental author and professor who in the early 1970s began the seemingly hopeless task of whipping me into shape as a writer. It took me 20 minutes to get him off the subject of the Bush administration and the timidity and torpor of academia. But finally he said: "For the long term I'm an optimist. I express my optimism by not giving up. I feel better for staying in there swinging; it keeps me young. And I do find young people who care."

Nathaniel Reed, the heroic assistant secretary for fish, wildlife, and parks under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and a former Audubon board member, unloaded on the Bush administration, too. But when I urged him to step back and give me a then-and-now assessment, he said: "We've made enormous gains. I'm an optimist."

Audubon's former board chair Donal C. O'Brien Jr. worries about habitat for migratory birds, but said: "I'm basically optimistic because of enormous successes with species-specific conservation." Among his examples: the Atlantic salmon, restored throughout most of its range—that is, Canada. As American chair of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, O'Brien helped make that happen.

Tom Bell, biologist, environmental activist, and founder of High Country News, expressed grave concern about global warming but said: "I'm an optimist. When I started there was very little to go on. You just stuck your chin out and challenged these people. Enough of us did that, and Congress passed the laws."

Stewart Brandborg—one of the fathers of the Wilderness Act, past director of the Wilderness Society, and special assistant to the National Park Service director in the Jimmy Carter years—called himself a "worried optimist." He told me, "I believe good people will rise to the occasion."

"The environmental movement is doing fine," said Brock Evans, formerly of the Sierra Club and Audubon and now president of the Endangered Species Coalition. "I remember in the 1960s rivers were burning. There were no laws; there was only hope. Today we win most battles. I don't get scared anymore when I see another Republican assault on an environmental law. We've been there before; we saw it in 1995 when Gingrich came out with his Contract on America." Evans cited seemingly hopeless battles won at the 59th minute of the 11th hour—the California Desert Bill, saving Hell's Canyon from dams, establishing the wilderness areas in the Cascades, the Alaska Lands Act. "Our greatest victory was the ancient-forest wars from 1988 to 1994. We got allowable cut in the Northwest knocked down 95 percent. Politicians from both parties were opposing us. I kept an 1,800-page diary of it. Scary reading, but we did it. I'm optimistic because we win. We win so much, I've come to believe there's no such thing as miracles. We win by standing tall, by not quitting against seemingly hopeless odds, by endless pressure endlessly applied."

The war is longer than our lives and our children's lives, but it goes well. We haven't just established a beachhead; we've broken out of the hedgerows. There's fierce fighting ahead, and there won't be time to relax. But there will be time to learn from the past and catch our breath. Enjoy the beginning of the post-industrial revolution, the age of restoration. Be part of it.