I think this is true of an environmentalist movement that wants there to be a healthy environment for humans; I’m not sure this is true of an environmentalist movement whose main goal is to dismantle capitalism.
FWIW, the environmentalist movement that I’m most familiar with from Finland (which is somewhat partisan but much less so than the US one) is neither of these. There’s some element of “wants there to be a healthy environment for humans” but mostly it’s “wants to preserve the environment for its own sake”.
E.g. ecosystems being devastated is clearly depicted as being intrinsically bad, regardless of its effect on humans. When “this is how humans would be affected” arguments are brought in, they feel like they’re being used as a motte.
EDIT: I guess climate change stuff is much more human-focused; it being so big is a more recent development, so I didn’t happen to think of it when considering my prototypical sense of “environmentalism”. (It also feels like a more general concern, with “environmentalism” connoting a more narrowly-held concern to me.)
From the outside, Finnish environmentalism seems unusually good—my first check for this is whether or not environmentalist groups are pro-nuclear, since (until recently) it was a good check for numeracy.
Note that the ‘conservation’ sorts of environmentalism are less partisan in the US, or at least, are becoming partisan later. (Here’s an article in 2016 about a recent change of a handful of Republicans opposed to national parks, in the face of bipartisan popular support for them.) I think the thing where climate change is a global problem instead of a local problem, and a conflict between academia and the oil industry, make it particularly prone to partisanship in the US. [Norway also has significant oil revenues—how partisan is their environmentalism, and do they have a similar detachment between conservation and climate change concerns?]
FWIW, the environmentalist movement that I’m most familiar with from Finland (which is somewhat partisan but much less so than the US one) is neither of these. There’s some element of “wants there to be a healthy environment for humans” but mostly it’s “wants to preserve the environment for its own sake”.
E.g. ecosystems being devastated is clearly depicted as being intrinsically bad, regardless of its effect on humans. When “this is how humans would be affected” arguments are brought in, they feel like they’re being used as a motte.
EDIT: I guess climate change stuff is much more human-focused; it being so big is a more recent development, so I didn’t happen to think of it when considering my prototypical sense of “environmentalism”. (It also feels like a more general concern, with “environmentalism” connoting a more narrowly-held concern to me.)
From the outside, Finnish environmentalism seems unusually good—my first check for this is whether or not environmentalist groups are pro-nuclear, since (until recently) it was a good check for numeracy.
Note that the ‘conservation’ sorts of environmentalism are less partisan in the US, or at least, are becoming partisan later. (Here’s an article in 2016 about a recent change of a handful of Republicans opposed to national parks, in the face of bipartisan popular support for them.) I think the thing where climate change is a global problem instead of a local problem, and a conflict between academia and the oil industry, make it particularly prone to partisanship in the US. [Norway also has significant oil revenues—how partisan is their environmentalism, and do they have a similar detachment between conservation and climate change concerns?]