Promoting Pluralism: Big Green Groups as Anthropocene Architects

• In Event: Untangling the Mess: The Promise and Peril of Eco-Progressive Politics

Abstract

Many aspects of the inherent methodological, demographic, and theoretical diversity of the field of Environmental Politics and Theory are occluded by the complex interconnections in environmental politics and pluralistic political values, which prize the place of legal process, expertise, interest groups, toleration, mutual respect, democracy, and political equality in civic deliberations.  Do these prevailing approaches, however, obscure more than they reveal? Since the twentieth century in the USA, for example, greater or lesser progress often is judged by big business, consumer groups and labor unions in terms of attaining economic growth to share greater material prosperity along with demonstrable changes in, or at least apparently improving, conditions for wildlife, slowing climate change, forests, realizing environmental justice or oceans.  Arguably, the tensions between the inherently global nature of environmental politics and the inexorably local experience of environmental change are mediated by promoting greater pluralism, particularly by major change agents, like "Big Green" environmental groups that approach global, national, regional and local governance regimes by promoting pluralistic institutions and values to stage environmental protection actions.  In adopting these strategies, however, how much has the environment been truly protected in comparison to the degree that planet's environments have been reimagined locally and globally as material and symbolic goods managed, guarded, and exchanged in pluralistic struggles to enhance the survival not only of Nature's bounty as much as the pluralistic groups promoting what, where, when, and how this outcome is attained in ways that embed their survival in perpetuating these environmental struggles to match their anthropogenic agendas, anthropocentric interests, and anthropocenic imaginaries of a "greenpeace," "wilderness society," "environmental defense funds" or "the defenders of wildlife."  Over decades, then, have the designs of pluralistic interest groups, consciously and unconsciously, shaped Nature and Society around their architectures for such "natural resource defense councils" to advance their interests as well as those of business, consumers and labor?  In some manner, they have.  Yet, is their collective project now the on-going design and management of the Anthropocene as they all tussle to reconcile the technocratic aspects of environmental policy and policy making with the popular and democratic politics needed for such policies to succeed?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Author

• Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Tech