We’re all environmentalists now

A quick visit to Google reminded me that today is Earth Day, and that I’m a terrible person. I commute forty minutes to work (each way), haven’t regularly recycled since that one summer in college when I experimented with Birkenstocks, and actively vote for non-environmentalist politicians.

So today I’m reminded of the guilt I don’t feel, and the absolute cliquishness which surrounds the issue of environmentalism, especially on college campuses.

It’s now tantamount to social suicide for college students–at least for those who are politically active on campus–to renounce environmentalism (which I think can be reasonably defined as excessive love for “Mother Earth” combined with a political agenda to legislate away pollution). As Stanley Kurtz notes in his NRO series on fossil-fuel divestment:

In a referendum held in November of 2012, 72 percent of participating Harvard undergraduates called on their university to sell off the stock in any large fossil-fuel company held in the school’s $32 billion endowment, by far the largest in the nation. That vote drew significantly higher student turnout and support than a 1990 measure pressing Harvard to divest from South Africa, when apartheid was still in force. Indeed, the avowed purpose of the divestment campaign now sweeping America’s colleges — it was active on 256 campuses at last count — is to make this nation’s leading energy companies as repugnant as apartheid was.

So environmentalism has become the moral equivalent of apartheid for thousands of little guilt-stricken bourgies at America’s elite colleges.

Enter Vassar College.  A student-led movement calling on the administration to dump investments in fossil fuel companies got heated on February 24, when the Student Association passed a “divestment resolution” by a margin of 23-1. Kurtz notes that

As with the “debate” on fossil-fuel divestment at Harvard, no student prior to that vote mounted a challenge to the fundamental premises of the movement: that fossil-fuel producers are “public enemies” every bit as contemptible as South African apartheid, that catastrophic levels of global warming are imminent, and that America’s fossil-fuel industry can be effectively shut down by government fiat without massive social harm.

One courageous student, Julian Hassan, who leads Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA), attempted to counter the prevailing student opinion. I’ll let you read Kurtz’s full account here, but here’s the skinny: Following the student vote, Hassan invited Alex Epstein, President of the Center for Industrial Progress and a proponent of conventional energy sources, to speak on campus about the positive effects of fossil fuels on our economy and environment. Two students, Jeremy Bright and Will Serio, both former presidents of MICA, did everything they could to stop the event, kill discussion on the issue, and silence their opposition, even going so far as to pay Epstein not to speak. Threats on Epstein’s Facebook page ensued, and posters advertising the event on campus were stripped down.

At the event, nearly one-third of the audience (some wearing Dick Cheney masks—clever!) staged a pre-planned walkout. You can watch it on YouTube.

I’ll defer to Kurtz on the harm of such senseless acts:

Vigorous but peaceful protests outside a lecture with masks and street theater are fine, of course. Interrupting a talk is different. It’s got nothing to do with education, for one thing. As Epstein wrote me afterwards, “While some bodies walked out of the room in the middle of the speech, their minds never really walked in.” And a brief interruption tolerated becomes a precedent for more serious interruptions down the line.

Vassar claims that its mission is “to develop a well-qualified, diverse student body which, in the aggregate, reflects cultural pluralism, and foster in those students a respect for difference and a commitment to common purposes.” The administration needs to prove that they are serious about diversity of thought, and encourage their students to discuss, debate, and freely exercise their views, rather than engage in petty acts of defiance and disrespect. Yet, as Kurtz argues, “students like Serio are responding to an atmosphere of political pressure and cramped debate that the administration and faculty have allowed or encouraged at Vassar. Political intimidation among Vassar’s students flourishes on the model provided by adults.”

With environmentalism, “a commitment to common purposes” clearly outweighs “respect for difference”.