The Roosevelt Institution
STANFORD, California, Mar. 29 — The Roosevelt Institution’s Center on the Environment and Energy at Stanford University will host leading environmentalists Adam Werbach and Michael Shellenberger at an event entitled “The Shape of Environmentalism to Come” on April 11.
“‘The Shape of Environmentalism to Come’ marks a much-needed step in reevaluating the goals, methods, and future of the environmental movement. We are thrilled that Adam Werbach and Michael Shellenberger are coming to speak with us,” said Steve Posner, Fellow at the Roosevelt Institution’s Center on the Environment and Energy.
Werbach, former president of the Sierra Club, and Shellenberger, founder of the Apollo Alliance and co-author of the controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” have been at the center of a drive to integrate environmentalism into a broader progressive framework, an idea that has set off a debate within the progressive and environmental communities.
“The signs of environmentalism’s death are all around us: we speak in terms of technical policies, not vision and values; we propose 20th century solutions to 21st century problems...we are failing to attract the disenfranchised, the disempowered, the dispossessed and the disengaged...Imagine our strength coming not from our separate movements, but from our interconnections,” Werbach said in his speech, “Is Environmentalism Dead?” to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
The Roosevelt Institution’s Center on the Environment and Energy at Stanford University has recently been involved in the debate over environmentalism’s future. The New York Times recently published a letter to the editor from three fellows on the Center in response to a column on the stir that Shellenberger and pollster Ted Nordhaus have generated with their essay.
“The discussion of the future of environmentalism is very relevant to the Roosevelt Institution’s mission of promoting progressive policy solutions,” said Center Director Benjamin Grant. “The next generation of environmental policy-makers will be students; it seems only natural that we should chart its course.”
The Roosevelt Institution is a think tank devoted to bringing the policy research of college students to the attention of academia, media, and government