The point that matters here is the review’s denunciation of one of the central points of the book, which is that those who want to change the world need to start by changing their own lives. According to Lloyd, we don’t have time for that, since the biosphere is in dire peril; what’s needed instead are the standard tools of contemporary activism—"direct action, community building, and outreach," in his convenient summary. His reasoning is logical enough, as far as it goes; if your house is on fire, after all, it’s a little late to install sprinklers and smoke alarms. If the situation is as urgent as Lloyd claims, all other considerations have to take a back seat to an all-out effort to deal with the immediate crisis with the most effective means available.

It’s a common enough claim in the contemporary activist community; Derrick Jensen had an article in Orion Magazine a few years back making essentially the same argument. Still, there’s a problem with that argument, because the responses Lloyd, Jensen, and other activists are promoting here have been standard across the spectrum of activist groups for more than three decades now, and that’s more than enough time to see how well they work. The answer? Well, let’s be charitable and say "not very well."

For years now, leading environmentalists have been bemoaning how much ground is being lost year after year, and how little the environmental movement has been able to do even to slow that down. They are quite correct in that assessment, of course. It’s standard these days to insist that this simply shows the power differential between the corporate interests that profit from environmental destruction and the citizen groups that are trying to fight them. That argument seems convincing, too, so long as you do what most people these days are taught to do, and ignore the lessons of history.

Glance back to a slightly earlier period and at least one of those lessons stands out in bold relief. In the 1970s, environmental activists facing equally powerful and well-funded corporate interests built a mass movement and forced through landmark legislation. In the United States, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a bevy of less famous but equally important environmental bills crashed through a wall of corporate opposition and became the law of the land. That sort of success is something that today’s environmental activists can only daydream about, and it was accomplished using the same tools that activists use today—with one important addition: the environmental activists of that time recognized that the most effective way to advocate any given change was to make that change in their own lives first. That awareness was not limited to the environmental movement; it was pioneered by the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, who turned it into a core principle of their movement—"the personal is political"—and leveraged it efficiently to bring about dramatic if still incomplete gains in women’s rights. They recognized, as did many other activists in those years, that if your lifestyle supports a system, and depends on that system, any efforts you may think you’re making to force significant change on that system will be wasted breath.

It will be wasted breath because most people, reasonably enough, want to see that there’s a life worth living on the other side of the changes your activist movement wants to make, and the best way to give them a glimpse of that life is to enact it yourself. It will also be wasted breath because most people have a tolerably good nose for hypocrisy, and are highly familiar with the kind of demagogy that calls on everybody else to make sacrifices and get by with less so the demagogue doesn’t have to do so. Talk to Americans who didn’t support either the climate change movement or its corporate opposition, and you’ll find that for a good many of them, it was when word of Al Gore’s air-conditioned mansion and frequent-flyer miles got around that they decided that global warming was yet another manufactured threat, meant to stampede people into acquiescing with somebody’s political agenda.