The corporatist nature of environmentalism

by Krystofer Penner | Published 13th April 2013 in Ways of Seeing

Credit: huskypup, http://www.flickr.com/photos/huskypup/61926478/

Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism, is interviewed by the website Truthout about his book and his views on U.S. environmentalism.

Zehner believes that the current environmental movement is not transformational. To possibly find that you must go back at least 50 years, to when activists lived modestly and challenged dominant economic assumptions. Zehner argues that the movement has become a social media platform for consumerism.

He argues that alternative energy sources are based in the fossil fuel industry, and that they always will rely on it.

Zehner’s answer to runaway climate change is not alternative energy sources, but “to greatly reduce both consumption and the number of people consuming over time.”