The brutal truth about the environmental movement

The last three decades of climate campaigns have proved hopelessly ineffective, writes activist Chris Bowers. We need a radical new approach if we have any hope of averting an oncoming catastrophe

The ‘camp fire’ of 2018 was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history (AFP via Getty)

Campaigning is a mug’s game at the best of times. Very few campaigns ever achieve what they seek, and measuring success is often difficult anyway. But by any reasonable measure, the efforts of the environmental campaigners of the late 1980s and early 1990s have proved hopelessly ineffective.

At that time, global warming was sufficiently accepted that it was no longer just a fringe hypothesis. There were plenty of doubters (there still are a few), but the scientific consensus was clear that the Earth’s climate was warming – and there was ample reason to suspect it was caused by human activity. Even the conservative US president George HW Bush committed in 1990 to the precautionary principle: that it was better to assume that global warming was happening and be proved wrong, than to assume it wasn’t and be proved wrong.

Now in 2023, with record-breaking temperatures in southern Europe and yet another urgent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying that we have just a few years to avoid a calamitous tipping point, progress is still pitifully thin. And there’s only so long you can pretend the elephant in the room isn’t there. Apart from minor successes, the environmental movement has failed, certainly on climate change, and more broadly to instil in citizens an awareness of emissions and resources, and the importance of nature.