What comes after Environmentalism?

On October 4, 2007, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are releasing their new book Break Through: From the Death of
Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility based on their previous essay, "The Death of Environmentalism (available from The Breakthrough Institute as a PDF). They are also the Managing Directors of American Environics, a
social values research and political strategy firm.

A synopsis of Break Through follows:

In
the fall of 2004, two young environmentalists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted
Nordhaus, triggered a firestorm of controversy with their essay, The Death of Environmentalism. In it they argued that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal
with global warming. Society has changed, and our politics have not kept up.
Environmentalism must die, they concluded, so that something new can be born.
Now, three years later, Break Through delivers on the authors' promise to articulate a new politics for a new
century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not
limits.

If environmentalists and
progressives are to seize the moment offered by the collapse of the Bush
presidency, they must break from the politics of limits, and grapple with some
inconvenient truths of their own. The old pollution and conservation paradigms
have failed. The nations that ratified the Kyoto Protocol have seen their
greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down. And tropical rain forest deforestation has accelerated. What the new ecological crises demand is not
that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands
not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot
tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of
the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of
the European Union - those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and
bold investments in the future.

The era of small thinking
is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and
interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon
greatness as the common good. Break
Through offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more than casual
consideration. With its challenge to conventional environmentalist,
conservative, and progressive thought, and its proposal for a politics of
possibility, Break Through will
influence the political debate for years to come.

The authors are also embarking on a massive North American book tour (including a stop at the University of Toronto's Rotman School) to have discussions about their ideas and what they mean for political movements current and future. A full list of their tour stops is also available at the Break Through Institute website (lower-right hand corner, "Upcoming Events").