Nordhaus and Shellenberger's essay is focused on an ongoing, contemporary campaign to reverse global warming. Yet their criticism of the environmentalist establishment's record with the issue rings true for other battles at other points in time. There is at least some historical evidence to suggest that the pair's diagnosis of the environmental movement's ills is not only cogent on global warming but also broadly applicable. American environmentalism has long been plagued by an ideology of liberal reform, dedicated to regulatory and technical solutions. The campaign to abolish surface coal mining--"stripping" -- in the United States is a case in point.

Opposition to stripping began early in the twentieth century, although much of this sentiment was directed toward passage of state-level control laws. During the 1950s and 1960s, those laws proved inadequate to the task and some critics began to call for outlawing surface coal mining altogether. Most of the abolition proponents were common people, and many of them lived in the Appalachian coalfields. They shared a basic concern with what stripping was doing to their communities, including homesteads, farmland, water supplies, and employment. They coupled these worries with the complaint that large coal companies and energy conglomerates benefiting a few should not be able to make great profits at the expense of "the public."

By the late 1960s, some of the advocates of outlawing stripping were using civil disobedience and calculated acts of violence against property to make their voices heard. They had become convinced that state legislatures, courts, and regulatory agencies were too corrupted to be of any more use. They felt justified in bypassing these institutions by what they read in the Declaration of Independence, and by the popular consciousness of natural rights that seems to be a common inheritance of Americans. Their militancy did, in fact, finally get the attention of people previously reluctant to listen and act ­ legislators and governors, members of Congress, coal company executives, and the corrupt leadership of the UMW.

In the end, however, the opposition failed. The United States Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), in 1977. Ironically, most leaders of national environmental groups saw the legislation as a significant step forward. They were, in fact, very much responsible for the outcome. They were not the only reason why the campaign for abolishing strip mining failed and a state-federal control program prevailed, but they played an important role. And this still haunts us, because the regulatory and technical solution they backed was inferior to the program being voiced from below. Outlawing strip mining would have stopped one part of coal operators' drive to reduce labor costs by finding ways to mine coal with fewer workers, one of the reasons they were shifting away from deep mining. It also would have stopped a method of coal mining that was clearly devastating to the natural environment, and has become even more so with the spread of a new version called "mountaintop removal."

Here's what happened: When the movement to outlaw stripping shifted from the local to the national levels in the early 1970s, the influence of practical-minded leaders increased, the distance between the leadership and grassroots grew, and a space was opened for greater participation by long-established (and not-so-long established) national conservation and environmental groups. The rising leaders and national groups engaged in compromise well before any sort of decline in the movement required it, and lawmakers responded. Negotiations were a product of the militancy in the coalfields, but the movement's new leaders either failed to recognize or willingly ignored this fact, while lawmakers took advantage of the opportunity to address the issue with "reasonable" people.

So why did this happen? And why is it still happening? Part of the explanation, something to add to the critique of establishment environmentalism, has to do with the history of radicalism in this country. Again and again, radical voices have been silenced in the United States, sometimes with open belligerence and other times with a velvet-gloved iron fist. Most importantly here, we should acknowledge where liberals have stood when this was taking place. They were often either complicit through silence or integrally involved. It was perhaps more difficult to call them out because they were not wearing white sheets, talking about nuking Vietnam, or pleading for unregulated industry. They were more effective than true reactionaries because of that, however, and they still are.

Without regular victories for radical programs, and with a political system and media all but lacking radical alternatives, it becomes impossible to do anything more than support a reform agenda. In the end, SMCRA was bad for workers and the environment, yet it was treated as a victory by the Environmental Policy Institute, Sierra Club, and other mainstream, national environmental organizations. Now, from an historical perspective, we can also see that adding up all the SMCRA-type losses over time means a long-term defeat for the people and nature as well. They make it nearly impossible to create the broad coalitions of people, to connect the seemingly disparate issues, and to build the organizations necessary for transforming rather than merely reforming society.