How refreshing to be finally moving into the era of green-green conflicts — ecological controversies in which both sides claim to be defending what we used to call “nature” (or “the ecology”) and both actually make a good case for it. The Cape Wind energy project presages the kind of ecological conflict we will hopefully see much more of in the future.
By “hopefully” I mean to suggest that if things go better rather than worse, we will one day be telling stories about how it was in the pre-ecological era, when the typical environmental conflict pitted ‘greens’ against dinosaur industrialists, property-rights libertarians, economic-growth statists, and retrograde rednecks. The difference with Cape Wind is that, as this Boston Phoenix story makes clear, there are not only Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue, but environmentalists, labor groups, and civic activists are also split along not-very-traditional lines. (For instance, Greenpeace, the National Resource Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Massachusetts Audubon Society are all for it; the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the Animal Welfare Institute, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Industrial Wind Action Group, among others, are against it).
This is the point, then, where the “environmentalist” designation starts to break down (or self-differentiate, to put a Deleuzian spin on it), and where the slogan “we are all environmentalists now” — attributed, ironically, to George Bush the Elder — begins to take on a truthfulness it has never really had.
What accounts for the strange mix of alliances on both sides? At first blush, politicians seem to fall almost randomly this way or that (the late Ted Kennedy and his Republican successor Scott Brown against it, Massachusetts Democratic governor Deval Patrick for it). But I think there’s some pattern to the chaos, with eco-pragmatists, including the “realos” in the Obama administration, such as Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, being for it because it will help the U.S. start catching up with Europe’s and China’s progress on wind power (emphasis on the “start”). Pragmatism on a national scale, however, can butt heads with pragmatism on a local scale, especially in a place like Nantucket Sound, where tourism is a leading industry.
