Shades of green

Abstract

Alas, too few were persuaded of that change. By the end of the 21st century, activists looking at the world through green-colored glasses found the future bleak. Gains won in the ever-eager sixties and seventies sputtered out in the sprawl-dominated eighties and nineties. Complacency became the dominant mood. The opening months of the Bush/Cheney era of environmental hatchetry-with its dubious appointments and destructive assaults on the Arctic wilderness-energized the movement. Mounting distress over degradation of natural resources in tandem with global warming radicalized activists and recruited passivists on every front. With everyday consumers beginning to turn down the lights, buy shade-grown coffee, and rally against SUVs, the environmental movement seemed to be tilting leftward. Then came September 11. As the nation poured through the rubble of lives and landscape left by the fiercest battering since the Civil War, extremism of any sort was out of favor. The terrorist attacks and a down-spiraling economy seemed likely to make environmentalism a casualty of "patriotism" and "national security." In the wake of the attacks, mainstream organizations laid low and anti-globalization forces backed off from staging their planned Washington protest.