This Changes Everything (31 page)

Carson’s focus was DDT, but for her the problem was not a particular chemical; it was a logic. “The ‘control of nature,’ ” Carson wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance,
born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”
⁵³

Carson’s writing inspired a new, much more radical generation
of environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem rather than as its engineers or mechanics, giving birth to the field of Ecological Economics. It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism—that there would always be more earth for us to consume—began to be forcefully challenged within the mainstream. The pinnacle of this debate came in 1972 when
the Club of Rome published
The Limits to Growth
, a runaway best-seller that used early computer models to pre
dict that if natural systems continued to be depleted at their current rate, humanity would overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity by the middle of the twenty-first century. Saving a few beautiful mountain ranges wouldn’t be enough to get us out of this fix; the logic of growth itself
needed to be confronted.

As author Christian Parenti observed recently of the book’s lasting influence, “
Limits
combined the glamour of Big Science—powerful MIT computers and support from the Smithsonian Institution—with a focus on the interconnectedness of things, which fit perfectly with the new countercultural zeitgeist.” And though some of the book’s projections have not held up over time—the
authors underestimated, for instance, the capacity of profit incentives and innovative technologies to unlock new reserves of finite resources—
Limits
was right about the most important limit of all. On “the limits of natural ‘sinks,’ or the Earth’s ability to absorb pollution,” Parenti writes, “the catastrophically bleak vision of
Limits
is playing out as totally correct. We may find new inputs—more
oil or chromium—or invent substitutes, but we have not produced or discovered more natural sinks. The Earth’s capacity to absorb the filthy byproducts of global capitalism’s voracious metabolism is maxing out. That warning has always been the most powerful part of
The Limits to Growth.
”
⁵⁴

And yet in the most powerful parts of the environmental movement, in the key decades during which we have
been confronting the climate threat, these voices of warning have gone unheeded. The movement did not reckon with limits of growth in an economic system built on maximizing profits, it instead tried to prove that saving the planet could be a great new business opportunity.

The reasons for this political timidity have plenty to do with the themes already discussed: the power and allure of free
market logic that usurped so much intellectual life in the late 1980s and 1990s, including large parts of the conservation movement. But this persistent unwillingness to follow science to its conclusions also speaks to the power of the cultural narrative that tells us that humans are ultimately in control of the earth, and not the other way around. This is the same narrative that assures us that,
however bad things get, we are going to be saved at the last minute—whether by the market, by philanthropic billionaires, or by technological wizards—or best
of all, by all three at the same time. And while we wait, we keep digging in deeper.

Only when we dispense with these various forms of magical thinking will we be ready to leave extractivism behind and build the societies we need within
the boundaries we have—a world with no sacrifice zones, no new Naurus.

I
. “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,” wrote Thoreau in
Walden
of the famous Indian scripture. He continued, “I lay down the book and go to my well for water and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still
sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

“Vast economic incentives exist to invent pills that would cure alcoholism or drug addiction, and much snake oil gets peddled claiming to provide such benefits. Yet substance abuse has not disappeared from society. Given the addiction of modern civilization to cheap energy, the parallel ought to be unnerving to anyone who believes that technology alone will allow us to
pull the climate rabbit out of the fossil-fuel hat. . . . The hopes that many Greens place in a technological fix are an expression of high-modernist faith in the unlimited power of science and technology as profound—and as rational—as Augustine’s faith in Christ.”

—Political scientist William Barnes and intellectual historian Nils Gilman, 2011
¹

“The leaders of the largest environmental groups
in the country have become all too comfortable jet-setting with their handpicked corporate board members, a lifestyle they owe to those same corporate moguls. So it is little wonder that instead of prodding their benefactors to do better, these leaders—always hungry for the next donation—heap praise on every corporate half measure and at every photo opportunity.”

—Christine MacDonald, former
employee of Conservation International, 2008
²

“Our arguments must translate into profits, earnings, productivity, and economic incentives for industry.”

—Former National Wildlife Federation President Jay Hair, 1987
¹

“I know this seems antithetical, but the bottom line here is not whether new coal-fired plants are built. . . . If the new coal plants are coming online
under a cap that is bringing total emissions down, then it is not the worst thing in the world. Coal isn’t the enemy. Carbon emissions are.”

—Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, 2009
²

Before the twentieth century, as many as a million Attwater’s prairie chickens made their homes in the tall grasses along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana.
³
During mating season, they were quite a
spectacle. To attract females, the males stomped their feet in little staccato motions, made loud, spooky cooing noises (known as “booming”), and inflated bright yellow air sacs on the sides of their necks, giving them the appearance of having swallowed two golden eggs.

But as the native prairie was turned into subdivisions and sliced up by oil and gas development, the Attwater’s prairie chicken
population began to crash. Local birders mourned the loss and in 1965, The Nature Conservancy—renowned for buying up ecologically important tracts of land and turning them into preserves—opened a Texas chapter. Early on, one of its major priorities was saving the Attwater’s prairie chicken from extinction.
⁴

It wasn’t going to be easy, even for what would become the richest environmental organization
in the world. One of the last remaining breeding grounds was located on 2,303 acres in southeast Texas on the shore of Galveston Bay, a property that happened to be owned by Mobil (now ExxonMobil). The fossil fuel giant hadn’t yet covered the land in oil and gas infrastructure, but there were active wells on its southern edge, closing in on the breeding grounds of the endangered bird. Then
in 1995, came some surprisingly good news. Mobil was donating its Galveston Bay property to The Nature Conservancy —“the last best hope of saving one of the world’s most endangered species,” as the company put it. The conservancy, which named the land the Texas City Prairie Preserve, would make “the recovery of the Attwater’s prairie chicken” its “highest priority.” To all appearances, it was a shining
conservation success story—proof that a nonconfrontational, partnership-based approach to environmentalism could yield tangible results.
⁵

But four years later, something very strange happened. The Nature Conservancy began to do the very thing that its supporters thought it was there to prevent: it began extracting fossil fuels on the preserve. In 1999, the conservancy commissioned an oil and
gas operator to sink a new gas well inside the preserve, which would send millions in revenue flowing directly into the environmental organization’s coffers. And while the older oil and gas wells—those drilled before the land was designated a bird preserve—were mostly clustered far from the habitat of the Attwater’s prairie chickens, that was decidedly not the case for the new well. According to Aaron
Tjelmeland, the current manager of the preserve, the spot where the conservancy allowed drilling was relatively near the areas where the endangered birds nested, as well as performed their distinctive mating rituals. Of all the wells, this drilling pad was “the closest to where the prairie chickens normally hung out, or normally boomed,” he said in an interview.
⁶

For about three years, The Nature
Conservancy’s foray into the fossil fuel business attracted relatively little public controversy. That changed in 2002, when a piece in the
Los Angeles Times
exposed the drilling. For traditional conservationists, it was a little like finding out that Amnesty International had opened its own prison wing at Guantánamo. “They’re exploiting the Attwater’s prairie chicken to make money,” fumed Clait
E. Braun, then president of the Wildlife Society, and a leading expert on prairie chickens.
Then, in May 2003,
The Washington Post
followed up with a scathing investigation into the organization’s questionable land deals, delving deeper into the surprising fact that on the Texas City Prairie Preserve, one of the most respected environmental organizations in the United States was now moonlighting
as a gas driller.
⁷

The Nature Conservancy, sounding like pretty much everyone in the oil and gas business, insisted that, “We can do this drilling without harming the prairie chickens and their habitat.”
⁸
But the track record on the preserve makes that far from clear. In addition to the increased traffic, light, and noise that are part of any drilling operation, there were several points when
drilling and wildlife preservation seemed to come into direct conflict.

For instance, because Attwater’s prairie chickens are so endangered, there is a public-private program that breeds them in captivity and then releases them into the wild, an initiative in which The Nature Conservancy was participating on the Texas City Prairie Preserve. But at one point early on in its drilling foray, a delay
in the construction of a gas pipeline led the conservancy to postpone the release of the captive-bred chicks by three months—a dicey call because migrating raptors and other predators appear to have been waiting for them.
⁹

The bird release that year was a disaster. According to an internal Nature Conservancy report, all seventeen of the chicks “died shortly after their delayed release.” The science
director of the Texas chapter wrote that the months of waiting had subjected the birds “to higher probability of death from raptor predation.” According to
The Washington Post
report, by 2003 there were just sixteen Attwater’s prairie chickens that The Nature Conservancy knew about on the preserve, down from thirty-six before the drilling began. Though top conservancy officials insisted that the
birds had not been adversely affected by its industrial activities, it was a dismal record.
¹⁰

When I first came across the decade-old story, I assumed that The Nature Conservancy’s extraction activities had stopped when they were exposed, since the revelation had ignited a firestorm of controversy and forced the organization to pledge not to repeat this particular fundraising technique. After
the story broke, the organization’s then president stated clearly, “We won’t initiate any new oil, gas drilling, or mining of hard rock minerals on preserves that we own. We’ve only done that twice in 52 years but we thought, nonetheless, we should, for appearances’ sake, not do that again.”
¹¹

Turns out I was wrong. In fact, as of this book’s writing, the conservancy was
still
extracting hydrocarbons
on the Texas preserve that it rescued from Mobil back in 1995. In a series of communications, conservancy spokespeople insisted that the organization was required to continue fossil fuel extracting under the terms of the original drilling lease. And it’s true that the 2003 pledge had been carefully worded, promising not to initiate “any new” drilling activities, and containing a proviso that
it would honor “existing contracts.”
¹²

But The Nature Conservancy has not simply continued extracting for gas in that same well. A 2010 paper presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference, and coauthored by two conservancy officials, reveals that the original well “died in March 2003, and was unable to flow due to excessive water production,” leading to the drilling of a replacement
well in the same area in late 2007. It also turns out that while the original well was for gas, the new one is now producing only oil.
¹³

Given that close to five years elapsed between the death of the Nature Conservancy’s first well and the drilling of the replacement, it seems possible that the organization had the legal grounds to extricate itself from the original lease if it had been sufficiently
motivated to do so. The lease I have seen states clearly that in the event that oil or gas production ever stops in a given “well tract,” the operator has a 180-day window to begin “reworking” the well or to start drilling a new one. If it fails to do so, the lease for that area is automatically terminated. If The Nature Conservancy causes a delay in the operator’s work—which the organization
claims has regularly occurred, since it restricts drilling to a few months per year—then the 180-day window is extended by the equivalent amount of time. So, the organization insists that though it was “concerned” about initial plans for the new 2007 well, due to the proposed well’s proximity to the Attwater’s habitat, it believed it was “bound by the existing lease and required to permit the
drilling of the replacement well,” albeit in a different location. James Petterson, director of marketing strategies at the conservancy, told me that the organization had sought “an outside legal opinion from an oil and gas expert” that confirmed this view. Yet in an internal explanatory document on drilling entitled “Attwater’s Prairie Chicken Background,” the organization emphasizes that it maintains
the power to control what can and cannot occur on the preserve. “Given the birds’ endangered status,” the document states, “no
activity can take place that is deemed likely to harm the species.” Petterson insists that “bird experts were consulted” and “nobody [here] would want to do anything to harm an endangered species, particularly one as endangered as the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken . . . nobody
is going to choose oil and gas development over the last remaining handful of birds on the planet.”
¹⁴