Polity

. Volume 45, Number 2 . April 2013

r 2013 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/13 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

Thinking about Nuclear Power Bob Pepperman Taylor University of Vermont This article makes two sets of observations about the moral bases of opposition to nuclear power. First, the article distinguishes between survivalist opposition to nuclear power (built on a conviction that the central moral fact about nuclear power is the cataclysmic threat it represents) and a more political opposition that focuses on matters of justice and democratic equality. Second, the article notes that the tension between these two styles of moral reasoning reflects a more general tension in the environmental movement as a whole. The movement against nuclear power therefore provides an illustration writ small for why environmentalists would do well not to rest their politics entirely on claims about human (and broader ecosystem) survival. Polity (2013) 45, 297–311. doi:10.1057/pol.2013.3; published online 18 March 2013

Keywords

nuclear power; democratic theory; American political thought; environmental ethics; environmental politics

Over twenty years ago, James Jasper concluded his careful study of the American nuclear-power industry with the suggestion that the technological flaws and economic costs of nuclear power were so great that the industry had already self destructed before the anti-nuclear movement had emerged as a significant political force.1 As he put it, “ . . . nuclear power in the United States has dug itself a hole so deep that it will take many, many years to climb out, if it can at all.”2 Climate change and the development of new technologies, however, have conspired to revive nuclear-power production as a legitimate topic for political debate. Even environmentalists are divided. Some environmentalists, once the implacable foes of nuclear power, now argue for the design and production of a new generation of reactors. Others, of course, remain deeply skeptical about, even alarmed by, any attempt to revive and expand the nuclear-power industry. This essay analyzes two very different styles of moral argumentation found in the anti-nuclear power movement. On the one hand, there are survivalist arguments, built on a conviction that the central moral fact about nuclear power I would like to thank Ben Minteer, Patrick Neal, Nancy Schwartz, Fran Pepperman Taylor, and two anonymous referees for Polity for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. James M. Jasper, Nuclear Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 123. 2. Ibid., 217.

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is the likely cataclysmic threat it poses to human (and, more generally, ecosystem) life. On the other hand, there are more political arguments that focus on matters of justice and equity, and that express a concern that nuclear power undermines democratic social, economic, and political relationships. Although survivalist concerns played a dominant role in prompting uncompromising opposition to nuclear power in the past, only the latter and less widely articulated democratic critique can convincingly defend such strong opposition today. The second section of the article argues that the tension between these two elements of the anti-nuclear power movement reflects a more general tension in the environmental movement as a whole. Consequently, the competing moral approaches to nuclear power provide an illustration writ small of why environmentalists would do well to avoid resting their politics entirely on a science of human (and broader ecosystem) survival.

The Politics of Survival Opposition to nuclear power arose thirty-five years ago from a simple terror of the technology. The Austrian Green activist, Robert Jongk, expressed a widely held view when he wrote that the “hazards of nuclear energy know no bounds.”3 Gerard Siegwalt, co-author of a 1976 World Council of Churches volume, Facing Up to Nuclear Power, spoke of the “apocalyptic horizon facing us.”4 The editors of the volume, John Francis and Paul Abrect, captured a similar fear in their forward. They wrote that nuclear energy “epitomizes the dilemma of infinite potential coupled with infinite risk to the community at large.”5 The Clamshell Alliance’s “Founding Statement,” which also was publicly released in 1976, asserts that, “nuclear power poses a mortal threat to people and the environment.”6 The group’s “Declaration of Nuclear Resistance,” which was adopted the following year, held that “Nuclear power is dangerous to all living creatures and to the natural environment.” These dangers, the declaration insisted, “are intolerable.”7 The opponents of nuclear power offered additional reasons for their political stance. They noted the potential connection of nuclear power to nuclear weapons, and observed that highly centralized and capital intensive technologies are inherently undemocratic and exploitative. But, the “no-nukes” movement drew its energy primarily from raw fear of the technology combined with suspicion 3. Robert Jungk, The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us (New York: Fred Jordan Books/ Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), 3. 4. John Francis and Paul Abrect, eds., Facing Up to Nuclear Power (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 156. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p ¼ 319, (accessed May 2012). 7. http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p ¼ 314, (accessed May 2012).

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about the untrustworthy human authorities who would place us in such extreme peril. As James Jasper writes, at the center of the anti-nuclear sentiment was the belief “that there are fundamental laws of nature, that modern industrial societies are ignoring them, and that catastrophe (or the retribution of nature) will result.”8 Different reasons were given for the expectation of a catastrophe. They ranged from the dangers presented by both the production process and the handling and storing of nuclear waste, to the presumed political impossibility of long-term responsible control of such dangerous technologies, to the seemingly inevitable link between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The common thread was that the production of nuclear energy poses an unacceptable risk of nuclear catastrophe. These claims created two problems for anti-nuclear advocates. First, given the dramatic and unacceptable risk that they discerned, how could they explain existing support for such a terrifying technology? There were only two possible explanations, neither entirely persuasive. On the one hand, it could be the case that supporters of nuclear power were horrifyingly ignorant about its attendant risks. This might be true of lay people, but the argument was less plausible when applied to the scientists, engineers and other experts who supported nuclear-power production. On the other hand, corruption (caused by greed and the lust for power) might explain the willingness of political, industrial, and scientific elites to place the earth’s people and environment in jeopardy. Vacillation between pleas for sanity and scathing condemnations of the moral turpitude of nuclear advocates became commonplace in the movement. The extraordinary fear driving the movement thus produced a distorted democratic politics, as many anti-nuclear activists became unable to view adversaries as anything other than fools or knaves. It became difficult to identify rational grounds upon which to debate political opponents. The second problem with arguments about an impending disaster results from building an absolute moral position on consequentialist foundations. Survivalist concerns are, after all, ultimately utilitarian. The persuasiveness of the argument dissipates if the dangers are mitigated, or if alternatives prove to offer even worse options, or if the scientific analysis upon which the fears are built is exaggerated, mistaken, or underdeveloped. The environmental movement of a generation ago “categorically” rejected nuclear power on consequentialist grounds. Science and technology, however, proved to be unreliable movement allies. New scientific findings and technological discoveries began to subvert the rationale for an absolutist position against nuclear power.

8. Jasper, Nuclear Politics, 32.

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The Erosion of Anti-Nuclear Solidarity In light of the evolving opinions within the scientific community, it is not surprising that the relatively solid block of environmentalists who are opposed to nuclear power began to fracture in recent years. When Representative Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced in 2007 that she had changed her view on nuclear power, her comments disappointed many within the environmental movement. But her statement could not have come as a great surprise. For a number of years there had been public and bitter environmentalist defections from the antinuclear movement. Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote in Technology Review in 2005 that climate change had made nuclear power the only viable alternative to our current “carbon dioxide loading” of the atmosphere.9 In expressing that position, he was not a maverick. Many others had already come to believe that in the context of current knowledge about the dangers of carbon-based energy production, nuclear power is looking better. Brand commented, “It’s not that something new and important and good had happened with nuclear, it’s that something new and important and bad has happened with climate change.”10 The February 2005 edition of Wired magazine published an article entitled “Nuclear Now!,”11 which prompted Al Gore (and many others) to complain directly to the editor in chief. In response, the editors wrote half humorously, “In February, we suggested it’s time to reconsider nuclear power; readers had a meltdown.”12 The authors of the article, Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss, argued what many had already said and more would say: global warming had changed the calculation about nuclear power.13 Michael Shellenberger likewise has contended that there is “no realistic scenario to decarbonizing without nuclear power.”14 Even after Fukushima, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), despite its skepticism about nuclear power, pointed out that “the public health impacts from routine operation of the nuclear fuel cycle in the United States, while certainly not zero, have been dramatically less than those of fossil fuels, 9. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/16398/page3/, (accessed May 2012). 10. Reported by Felicity Barringer, “Old Foes Soften to New Reactors,” http://www.nytimes.com/ 2005/05/15/national/15nuke.html?pagewanted ¼ all, (accessed May 2012). 11. Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss, “Nuclear Now!,” Wired, issue 13.2, February 2005, http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html, (accessed May 2012). 12. For an account of these matters, see Barringer, “Old Foes.” For a more recent and thorough presentation of Brand’s thoughts on nuclear power, see Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (New York: Viking, 2009), chapter 5. 13. For example, James Lovelock, author of the famous “Gaia hypothesis,” announced in 2004 that, “nuclear power is the only green solution.” James Lovelock, “Nuclear Power is the Only Green Solution,” The Independent, 24 May 2004. 14. Richard Heffern, “Environmentalists Spar Over Nuclear Power,” National Catholic Reporter, 15 March 2011. See http://neronline.org/blogs/eco-catholic/environmentalists-spar-over-nuclear-power, (accessed February 2013).

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especially coal.” The NRDC concluded that “nuclear power. . . is both a political and technical reality that we must cope with and manage responsibly as we make the transition to a sustainable clean energy economy.”15 The group Environmental Defense has been even more supportive, has called the safety record of U.S. nuclear-power plants “impressive,” and has suggested that the “problem of global warming is so serious that we must thoroughly consider every low-carbon option for generating power.”16 Many environmentalists who are anti-nuclear have criticized Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace who has become a paid spokesman for the nuclearpower industry. Even if we discount his actions as a case of political opportunism, it is clear that the terms of the nuclear-power debate have changed dramatically over the past decade, and a driving force is the growing alarm over climate change. But climate change is not the only factor causing reassessments about the value of nuclear power. If we consider immediate threats to human safety, the arithmetic of human suffering is not obviously pointing us away from nuclear power. Cool-headed evaluations of the dangers and benefits of nuclear power, such as those published by the MIT Energy Initiative in 2003 (and updated in 2009), acknowledge the high costs and dangers of nuclear-power production and waste management; but they also contend that nuclear production is a necessary component of any realistic mix of energy sources in a stable and sustainable future.17 Even the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is primarily concerned about inadequate safety oversight and exorbitant costs, argue that the most significant problems with nuclear power involve expense and poor regulation rather than the technology itself.18 Three Mile Island, for example, produced far less danger to human health than was widely feared at the time of the accident. Of course, the approximately four thousand premature deaths attributed to the disaster at Chernobyl19 as well as the currently unknown toll from the Fukushima disaster illustrate the terrible dangers of nuclear-power production. The number of premature deaths doesn’t even begin to touch on the suffering and the anxiety caused by dislocation and the poisoning of communities. Such examples of acute human suffering take on full meaning, however, only when compared to other options. Coal generation of electricity, which has flourished amid the overall stalling of nuclear power in the United States, is conservatively estimated 15. “The Fukushima Accident and Its Implications for Nuclear Power in the US and Globally,” www.nrdc.org/nuclear/11061701.asp, (accessed May 2012). 16. Heffern, “Environmentalists Spar Over Nuclear Power”. 17. http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/, (accessed May 2012). 18. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclearandclimate.html, (accessed May 2012). 19. This is the United Nation’s estimate. Physicist Richard A. Muller, in his influential Physics for Future Presidents (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), presents reasons why he thinks this figure may be significantly inflated. See 102–10.

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to produce 21,000 premature deaths annually as a result of particulate pollutants (sulfur dioxide) in the air.20 Coal production ravages land, local communities, and coal miners.21 Coal-burning plants are, in addition, the single biggest producers of greenhouse gases.22 All this, of course, does not begin to address the possible “costs” (indeed, the increasingly likely cataclysms) that climate change may produce in both the short and longer terms. The flavor of some scientists’ concern is captured by the title of John Terborgh’s recent review of Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet: “Can Our Species Escape Destruction?”23 In terms of human and global survival, nuclear power is not the only, or even the most, threatening technology. As the other options prove exceedingly dangerous, and nuclear technology becomes more sophisticated and potentially safer, the moral balance shifts. The utilitarian reasoning, which had fueled the first wave of anti-nuclear activism, now is undermining the survivalist position, because it has been discovered that nuclear power is no longer the worst option available. Even those environmentalists who remain opposed to nuclear power, such as Greenpeace, no longer talk about an impending cataclysm and, instead, talk more dispassionately about high construction and maintenance costs and the draining of resources away from safer renewables.24

The Democratic Critique of Nuclear Power A second moral vision inspired the original anti-nuclear power movement but never was as prominent as the survivalist fear. The Clamshell Alliance, for example, condemned the “abuse” of energy and the “exploitation” of people for private profit. Allegedly, the nuclear industry concentrates “profits and the control 20. This is the figure given by William D. Nordhaus in a recent New York Review of Books review. He points out that other estimates are significantly higher. William D. Nordhaus, “Energy: Friend or Enemy?,” New York Review of Books, 27 October 2011, 30. For another set of estimates, see the Civil Society Institute’s discussion at www.civilsocietyinstitute.org/media/b012511release.cfm, (accessed May 2012). 21. There are also serious environmental dangers and environmental-justice concerns associated with uranium mining. See, for example, Doug Brugge, “The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People,” The American Journal of Public Health 92 (September 2002): 1410–19. 22. The New York Times’s “Green Blog” from 17 February 2011 is helpful on these matters, and it provides a link to a detailed report on the cost of coal by the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and Global Environment: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/premature-deaths/, (accessed May 2012). 23. New York Review of Books, 13 October 2011, 29–32. 24. See Greenpeace at http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear/, (accessed May 2012). Of course, many individuals still subscribe to the older “absolutist” position. Greenpeace’s Chris Miller, for example, has recently argued that the environmental risk of nuclear power is simply too high to contemplate. See Erika Lovely, “Environmentalists See Fission on Nuclear Power,” Politico, 31 January 2008. My point is not that everyone has abandoned the absolutist position, but that this position is no longer as widely accepted or fully persuasive as it had been a generation ago.

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of energy resources in the hands of a powerful few, undermining basic principles of human liberty.”25 In 1982, the scholar Jim Falk had noticed the movement’s moral sub-current: “ . . . the concern over the physical hazards of nuclear power held by its opponents may have beneath it a more general, not yet necessarily consciously recognized, concern. That is, a perception of the characteristic which underlies many of the attractions of nuclear power for the other side: the centralization of power inherent in technology.”26 Alain Touraine and his colleagues likewise suggested that, “This, surely, is where the popular social movement will take shape, in opposition to technocratic power, to the domination of a whole sector of social life by a system able to create and impose products and forms of social demand serving only to reinforce its own power.”27 Nuclear power was, according to its movement critics, a perfect example of oppressive tendencies within industrial capitalist societies that threaten democratic values. In an influential 1976 essay, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?,” Amory Lovins clearly articulated this position. He famously distinguished between “hard” and “soft” energy paths. The former energy systems are strikingly capital intensive, organizationally centralized, and, as he says, “brittle”—subject to interruption and accidents that endanger all or large sections of the system at once. The soft paths are decentralized, adapted to local conditions, and spread risk so widely that no single error or accident could affect the overall energy system. The consequences of these different technological structures are, above all, political in a broad sense of the term: the “kinds of social change needed for a hard path are apt to be much less pleasant, less plausible, less compatible with social diversity and personal freedom of choice, and less consistent with traditional values than are the social changes that could make a soft path work.” The hard path, Lovins argued, threatens to encourage “friendly fascism”—that is, a “managed society which rules by a faceless and widely dispersed complex of warfare-welfare-industrial-communications-police bureaucracies with a technocratic ideology.” In contrast, soft-energy technologies encourage “[s]uch values as thrift, simplicity, diversity, neighborliness, humility and craftsmanship.” For Lovins, even if we could solve the safety problems of nuclear power, it would still produce a society that is governed by an “elitist technocracy,” and that threatens democratic values. “For all these reasons, if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign per se, it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy 25. http://www.clamshellalliance.org/legacy/?p ¼ 319, (accessed May 2012). 26. Jim Falk, Global Fission: The Battle over Nuclear Power (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 327. 27. Alain Touraine, Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3.

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it would lock us into.” In Lovins’ opinion, the solution to this political threat is largely a technological matter. He writes that a “largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic.” He admits that this technical claim rests upon a citizenry committed to “less craving for consumer ephemerals” and to more “personal and public purpose.” There would be real economic costs; a soft-energy society would no longer be committed to economic growth. Instead, it would cultivate local communities and postmaterialist political, social, and personal goods.28

Anti-Nuclear Politics and the Environmental Movement The original anti-nuclear movement in the United States, then, was motivated by a mixture of survivalism, which was its predominant impulse, and a secondary democratic argument. This dual moral impulse places the anti-nuclear movement squarely within the traditions of the U.S. environmental movement as a whole. Alarm about public health and safety always formed the emotional core of the modern environmental movement, alongside a humanism of higher virtues and satisfactions.29 This sub-theme’s taproot reaches back at least to Jeffersonian pastoralism and expresses a kind of democratic Aristotelianism. Its nineteenth-century genius was Henry David Thoreau, and its greatest twentieth-century exponent was Aldo Leopold. These writers, and the broad tradition they represent, argue that in order to maintain the promise of American freedom, citizens in the United States need to limit their pursuit of material wealth for the sake of both personal independence and social equity. Independence and equity will, in turn, produce maximal social cohesion. We therefore must cultivate a kind of humility in our relationship with the natural world, and should approach nature with a combination of scientific sophistication (Jefferson, Thoreau, and Leopold were all, after all, scientists) and materialist restraint. The goal is to foster a sense of humble stewardship that will allow both humans and nature to flourish. Traveling down this political road requires that individuals discipline themselves to no longer approach nature as something to master, dominate, bend to 28. Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” originally published in Foreign Affairs, reprinted by Friends of the Earth, Special Reprint Issue, Not Man Apart, November 1977, vol. 6, no. 20. This can be found at http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNot Taken, (accessed May 2012). 29. In his classic essay, “Conservation is Not Enough,” Joseph Wood Krutch captures this dual mood by simultaneously warning us that our material voraciousness is responsible for “the most prodigious imbalance in the natural order which has ever existed,” yet reminding us both that we should allow the “earth to produce beauty and joy” and that “[w]e must live for something besides making a living.” Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert (New York: William Sloane, 1967), 201–202, 200.

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human will, and reshape radically according to our wants and desires. In the history of the United States, this discipline, of course, has never been able to withstand the full force of American civilization. Material wealth, consumer wants, and the concomitant desire to impose our will on nature have obviously shaped our society. The vision of a modest society in which an agrarian plenty replaces commercial luxury nonetheless remains a strong undercurrent in American culture and democratic theory. This vision presumes healthy individuals, democratically organized local communities, and fecund nature all thriving simultaneously in a pastoral setting. The vision of an “American Pastoral” always has provided symbols and expressed longings at odds with America’s urban industrial culture. The idea of a “middling” society, which is located between the completely wild and the entirely artificial, may always be a minority idea in the United States; but it remains alive and powerful nonetheless. The most visible contemporary expressions of this tradition are perhaps the local-food exchanges and other “new agriculture” movements. Kristin and Mark Kimball, who farm in New York’s Adirondack region, exemplify the contemporary “back to the land” movement and its rejection of the glitter, materialism, and inequality of urban American life. Just as Scott and Helen Nearing retreated to Vermont in the 1930s (and then on to Maine) to cultivate the “good life,” so Kristin Kimball gave up her career as a writer in New York City to share “the dirty life” with her husband on a Community Sustainable Agriculture (CSA) farm. She moved from a world where “the central question in the kitchen would have to change from What do I want? to What is available?”30 She now relies on the help and goodwill of her neighbors.31 Instead of either ignoring the natural world or enjoying it purely for recreational purposes, she engages in a “great and ongoing war” with it.32 Outdoor work is physically taxing in the extreme, and has no end. Prosperity is uncertain, and one’s fortunes change with the weather.33 Rural life is earthy and frankly dirty, rather than luxurious and sterile. The popularity of Kristin’s memoir suggests that a modest life defined (brutally, at times) by significant natural limitations continues to resonate in American culture. The Kimballs’ experiment is part of a long and distinguished American agrarian tradition. It has strands that are more and less utopian (Brook Farm on the one hand, and, say, Wendell Berry on the other). It also is a subset of a broader environmentalist tradition that emphasizes simplicity, artisanship, and local and 30. Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love (New York: Scribner, 2010), 161. 31. Ibid., 169. 32. Ibid., 201. 33. “Farmers toil. Nature laughs. Farmers weep. There’s your history of agriculture in a nutshell.” Ibid., 207.

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small-scale technology and production.34 At times, participants in the agrarian tradition dream of the elimination of social class (or at least its significant mitigation). While there have always been social critics in the United States who worry about capitalism fostering social divisions, about the growth of luxury and economic inequality, and about the triumph of the market over other human goods, the environmental movement gives a special twist to these arguments. Nature itself is being destroyed by a profligate society. Unless we return to simpler forms of living, the ecological foundations of society will be damaged to such a degree that the survival of our civilization will be threatened. To survive, we need to listen to the ways of nature. Nature’s needs and rhythms can teach us how to live sensibly—in a manner that we would have chosen in the first place had we been more disciplined and intelligent. Ernest Callenbach (a long-term and influential participant in the environmental movement) recently expressed environmentalist conventional wisdom when he declared that sustainability and material growth are incompatible, and that we therefore need to contract our economic life and bring it into line with the ecological facts of life. Happily, it turns out that living more simply, with fewer consumer goods and material comforts, will enrich and authenticate our lives: “Spending more time together rather than interacting with expensive electronic toys will mean going back to our human nature.”35 Our current lifestyle is not only extravagant and destructive; it is vacuous and degrading. Living “better on less”36 will allow for healthier relationships with both nature and our human fellows. In significantly more sophisticated form, Bill McKibben has probed, theorized, and promoted this position. Defending a vision of “deep economy” (a wordplay on the name of a branch of radical environmentalism, “deep ecology”), McKibben contends that our “affluence isolates us ever more.”37 A locally based “economics of neighborliness,”38 however, can produce stronger communities, more ecologically viable communities, more meaningful personal experiences,39 and a greater sense of personal belonging.40 His position is both ecological and communitarian: 34. Christopher Lasch provides the best discussions of the artisanal and populist versions of this impulse. For a short version of Lasch’s argument, see the essays in the first section (chapters 1–5) of his The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). For a more fully developed version, see The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 35. Ernest Callenbach, “Sustainable Shrinkage: Envisioning a Smaller, Stronger Economy,” Solutions 2, issue 4, 11 August 2011, 12. http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/968, (accessed May 2012). 36. Ibid., 11. 37. Bill McKibben, Deep Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 96. 38. Ibid., 122. 39. “[I]t’s enough to say that, for reasons of ecological sustainability and human satisfaction, our systems and economics have gotten too large, and that we need to start building them back down.” Ibid., 141. 40. “In a changed world, comfort will come less from ownership than from membership.” Ibid., 120.

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“Hyper-individualism is not just lonely; it’s also. . . insecure and foolhardy.”41 His vision is not apocalyptic or revolutionary (“I’m not suggesting an abrupt break with the present, but a patient rebalancing of the scales.”),42 but it is strongly reformist and recognizes how these claims resonate, if only as a minority tradition, in American political culture. The fundamental idea, expressed in the title of another of his books, Enough,43 is that a free, democratic, and humane society requires significant material restraint. In his thinking, there is an Aristotelian emphasis on sufficiency rather than luxury, and an insistence that the economy provide the foundation for higher human goods rather than becoming an end in itself. Our immediate environmental problems, of course, are terrifying (McKibben is perhaps the foremost climate-change activist in America). They need to be addressed for the sake of social stability and perhaps even for survival. But his overall project rests upon particular understandings of human nature, satisfaction, and democratic community. His first book, The End of Nature, meditates on the human need to be properly oriented toward a larger natural (and spiritual) world.44 His position is neither Luddite nor primitivist. He, instead, emphasizes the need to remind ourselves continually that our economies and technologies become valuable when they allow for the cultivation of the highest human values, which are themselves neither economic nor technological, but communal and political. McKibben supports farmers’ markets built around local agriculture, not because they provide more choice for consumers, but because they offer high-quality and healthful food under environmentally sustainable conditions. Even more importantly, this scale of production and commerce reflects our deepest human natures (and therefore our greatest satisfactions).45

Science, Technology, and Democratic Politics From the perspective of America’s pastoral environmental tradition, nuclear power is clearly problematic because it produces and serves an undesirable social order. This line of moral reasoning has the advantage of tying environmental and democratic values together in an argument about local communities, rewarding work, independence, and democratic equality. The vision, while clearly utopian, continues to appeal to Americans, and it has many practical implications. Its target is a new society with significantly more manual labor and significantly less 41. Ibid., 231. 42. Ibid., 120. 43. Bill McKibben, Enough (New York: Times Books, 2003). 44. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). 45. In a comment that is perhaps a little too flip, McKibben suggests that we are biologically adapted to farmers’ markets. Interview of McKibben by Krista Tippett, “The Moral Math of Climate Change,” Speaking of Faith (NPR) 10 December 2009. See http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/moralmath/, (accessed May 2012).

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technology and physical comfort than exists today.46 What the new order takes away in terms of luxury and comfort, it returns in both personal and communal satisfaction.47 When environmentalists rely on survivalist foundations, their claims are subject to the unpredictable evolution of science and technology. When they advance democratic commitments and values, however, the choice between their position and their opponents’ is removed from the contingencies of scientific understanding. The debate is reshaped as a contest between moral perspectives. In their influential 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that the environmental movement is deeply removed from the progressive currents of American politics. It is (they argue) stuck in a special-interest ghetto and cannot possibly inspire a broad political coalition.48 They develop this point three years later in Break Through, in which they urge environmentalists to cease talking about limitations and restraint, and instead find ways to tie environmental programs into the expansive aspirations that define American culture: . . . environmentalism has . . . saddled us with the albatross we call the politics of limits, which seeks to constrain human ambition, aspiration, and power rather than unleash and direct them. In focusing attention so exclusively on the nonhuman worlds that have been lost rather than also on the astonishing human world that has been created, environmentalists have felt more resentment than gratitude for the efforts of those who came before us.49

46. One of the least persuasive elements in this tradition is the suggestion by some that there will be no significant cost to choosing a simpler life. It is often assumed that we can have all manner of “good” technologies without being burdened by those thought to be counterproductive to the good life, even though they are all of a piece. See, for example, Callenbach’s assumption that we can throw away what he takes to be our alienating cell phones without inhibiting the robust development of desirable medical and reproductive technologies. See “Sustainable Shrinkage,” 12. 47. In the opening pages of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes of the triumph of science over nature and of the threat this poses to our ability to think and speak politically and through a common language. “The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of ‘character’—that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons— or their naivete´—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power.” Like McKibben, Arendt fears that the radical human control of nature poses a grave threat to democracy. But she also offers reasons that environmentalists, such as McKibben, haven’t yet fully explored. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 4. 48. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “The Death of Environmentalism,” http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2004/10/the_death_of_environmentalism.shtml, (accessed May 2012). 49. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 17.

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According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, what we need now are policies that “unleash” rather that “constrain” human creativity,50 and that allow us to consume at high levels without suffering the ramifications generated by today’s consumption habits. For them, the thesis that nature teaches us to be humble and moderate is romantic nonsense. Instead they call for intelligent technological control of nature. “The issue is not whether humans should control Nature, for that is inevitable, but rather how humans should control natures—nonhuman and human . . . We are neither a cancer on, nor the stewards for, planet Earth . . . Rather, we are the first species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve.”51 Nordhaus and Shellenberger are optimistic about the ability of engineers to solve our environmental problems without sacrificing our comfort and wealth. They appeal to Emerson’s dictum that “the only sin is limitation,”52 and claim that adopting this attitude will allow the environmental movement to appeal to mass publics. “What was special about environmentalism—its commitment to ecological thinking, its scientific questioning, and its understandings of humans as beings of earth—must be brought forward into the new politics. Its . . . philosophy of limits . . . must be left behind.”53 The politics of limits, they warn, can only be reactionary: “The politics of limits will be anti-immigration, antiglobalization, and anti-growth. It will be zero-sum, fiscally conservative, and deficit-oriented. It will combine Malthusian environmentalism with Hobbesian conservatism.”54 From their perspective, we need to move into the future confident in our unbounded potential. According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, “[w]e have risen, not fallen”; and they paraphrase another environmental renegade approvingly: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”55 While some readers may find Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s rhetoric startling, it is less so when we recall that Nordhaus and Shellenberger wish to bring environmentalism into the mainstream of progressive politics.56 Extolling the benefits of an 50. Ibid., 120. 51. Ibid., 135. 52. Ibid., 211. 53. Ibid., 238–39. 54. Ibid., 270. 55. Ibid., 271. 56. Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s defense of an expanding economy and consumer culture is remarkably compatible with James Livingston’s recent left-wing defense of consumer culture, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Livingston writes (43), “We need to map a new moral universe, where the deferral of gratification—postponing our desires, withholding our income from immediate consumption—serves neither the public good of fostering economic growth nor the private purpose of building individual character.” Like Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Livingston is a progressive who deeply distrusts those who would criticize material excess (see 79).

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expanding economy, expressing faith in human ingenuity, and appealing to infinite progress connects environmentalism to conventional Enlightenment liberalism. Whether Norhaus and Shellenberger’s faith in “new high-tech businesses and the new creative class” for designing “a new clean-energy economy”57 is justified is very much uncertain. But there is no doubting their political instinct. They are absolutely right to think that such values make it much easier to build political coalitions and appeal to mass publics.58 The example of Nordhaus and Shellenberger is germane not because all environmentalist supporters of nuclear power share their robust optimism (on the contrary!). Rather, Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s arguments illustrate, in exaggerated form, the range of moral and emotional appeals employed by those who wish today to continue thinking about nuclear power as a viable option. If one, by chance, agrees with Nordhaus and Shellenberger that rejection of economic growth and consumer culture is not a viable political strategy because it will not garner allies, one needn’t embrace contemporary society as lustily as Nordhaus and Shellenberger do. Still, it is possible that a realistic environmentalist case should assume an expanding, market-driven, and global economy. After all, climate change may compel America’s economy to move as quickly as possible toward non- or low-carbon technologies. If this is true, then political realism requires, at minimum, a rigorous cost-benefit evaluation of nuclear power as one among many, very imperfect options. If, however, we want to move nuclear power completely off the table, then we need to defend a vision of democratic society in which our technologies are not aimed at increasing mastery, comfort, and wealth. There is a noble tradition for imagining an environmentally humble, economically moderate democratic theory and practice. Consistent anti-nuclear absolutists would do best to cast their lot with this minority democratic tradition. But such anti-nuclear absolutists also need to admit frankly that this tradition demands significant economic sacrifice, even as it promises significant social and political gain. An economically and technologically modest society has its obvious romantic attractions. However, we could not expect anything close to the wealth or relief from labor that today we take for granted. The challenge for opponents of nuclear power is to make a compelling case that the personal, social and

57. Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Break Through, 16. 58. For an even more polemical attack on those who would rein in the power of science and technology, see David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (New York: Viking, 2011). Deutsch (441) inveighs against the environmentalism of technological modesty and natural limits: “There is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle (which would really mean achieving only the semblance of sustainability), but even the aspiration is dangerous. For what would we be aspiring to? To forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes.”

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political gains of a simpler society would significantly outweigh the material sacrifices. Bob Pepperman Taylor is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. His most recent book is Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy: The Education of Democratic Citizens. He can be reached at [email protected].

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