Authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger discuss their book “Breakthrough” as part of the Authors@Google series. Breakthrough is the awaited follow-up to the original essay, the authors give us an expansive and eloquent manifesto for political change. What Americans really want, and what could serve as the basis for a new politics, is a vision capable of inspiring us to greatness. Making the case for abandoning old categories (nature/market, left/right), the authors articulate a pragmatism fit for our times that has already found champions in such prominent figures as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This book will hit the same nerve as What’s the Matter with Kansas and Don’t Think of an Elephant. But its analysis will reshape American politics for decades to come.
Seeing a connection between the failures of environmentalism and the failures of the entire left-leaning political agenda, the authors point the way toward an aspirational politics that will resonate with modern American values and be capable of tackling our most pressing challenges.
Link to book
Link to book on Amazon: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
Break Through
I’ve read Break Through twice now and find it both exciting and annoying. I’m excited about what they’re doing, and annoyed about the way they do it. The authors say they’re for pragmatism and against essentialism. For instance, they suggest we change the capital N in the word Nature to a lower case n, make the word plural, and you have many natures, not one Nature. Many sciences, not one Science. Do that with all essentialist terms, including Self. Each human being is many selves. In other words, there are no single, unchanging, independent entities. Everything is “perspectival.” That’s the conceptual core of the book. Out of that core grows their critique of environmentalism as we’ve known it. However, their carping about the “politics of limits” as a feature of environmentalism through the years sounds very much like adolescents sneering about the stupidity of their parents. Nordhaus and Shellenberger won’t admit their debt to the greats of the past – John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson (they call Silent Spring a “polemic”), for instance. That’s strange, because they make a poignant plea for Gratitude, oops, gratitude, as their book comes to a close. However, I do appreciate their attempt to put a positive face on the politics of ecology. They’re right that dealing with global warming requires a lot more than cutting back on carbon emissions. And if their cheerleading for both prosperity and post-materialist values (no contradiction, really!) can attract a huge number of young people to their cause, well, the more power to them.