At Yale University, where I'm an undergraduate, some ten students live off campus in a cooperative home they call the Green House. They recycle cans, bottles and paper meticulously, sorting them into the bins collected by municipal trucks in American cities. They reuse "grey water", meaning that they plug the drain when they shower and then use buckets to flush the toilet with the old soapy water. To prevent food from going to waste, they even get most of their groceries out of the trash of an upscale grocery store. Late at night, they drive to the store and quietly jump into its car-sized dumpster, picking out unopened packages of still fresh food. They find milk, eggs, bread and cookies, chocolate, soup, vegetables, even frozen pizzas and soymilk. Not only are most Green House residents vegetarian, but they are also moderate freegans①, meaning that they eat mainly what they can get for free. These students, of course, are trying to leave as small an "ecological footprint" as possible.

　　At times, the moral conviction and worldview of the Green House appear as all-encompassing as a religious faith. Green House inmates live in the most environmentally "pious" way one could conceive of in the city. Across America other devout environmentalists live "off the grid", building shacks in the wilderness without running water or electricity. Frustrated with environmental destruction and waste, they have renounced the system that fosters and perpetuates it. Such ascetic anti-consumerism may be the most dramatic side of environmentalism, and it leads to cultural ferment that can set into motion political and economic change②. Its practitioners focus on personal sacrifice, hoping that their ideals and asceticism will spread like a religion.

　　But one drawback of focusing environmentalist energy on abstaining from personal consumption is that such an approach can distract people from the larger causes of environmental destruction, which cannot be affected by individual choices to consume or not to consume. Our political and economic systems are deeply immature. Environmentalists need to spend just as much energy organizing political and economic environmentalism. Also, old-fashioned environmentalism often assumes that business is opposed to environmental protection. In fact, thousands of US companies are discovering, often with the help of energy consultants, how much money they have to stand from becoming environmentally efficient: saving energy and recycling within industry. The recent book NaturalCapitalism:CreatingtheNextIndustrialRevolution by Paul Hawkenetal., now translated into Chinese, should get some of the credit for bringing about this transformation in attitudes.

　　Paradoxically, the US is both the birthplace of global environmentalism and the world's biggest environmental spender. Romanticism, the European and American literary and artistic movement that found God in the wilderness, had a strong long-term impact on American thinking, starting in the middle third③of the 19th century. In particular, renewed attention to the essays of Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) helped launch modern environmentalism a century after his death. Yet today America, with only 5% of the world's population, produces 24% of global carbon dioxide emissions. The US, like many other rich countries, has cleaned up its air and water, but it is still the biggest contributor to the greatest environmental threat ever -- global climate change. Why the discrepancy?

　　Most environmental damage cannot be boiled down to the choices made by individuals. Rather, individuals are locked into a system in which heavy industry commits the majority of ecological crimes, buttressed by an economic system that squanders natural resources. The government gives away mining rights and opens public forests to loggers practically for free -- and big business spends millions of dollars to make sure politicians keep on doing so. Other government subsidies support several filthy industries. While the government pays for new freeways, thus subsidizing automobiles, it ignores trains and bus networks. Polluters don't pay the real cost of externalities such as toxic waste and air and water pollution. For many environmental problems, the solution is organized political pressure and entrepreneurial innovation.

　　Most would agree that the PRC's new "green GDP" is an elegant nod to environmental economics. We should recall, however, that environmentalists have often been fobbed off with token gestures, idle talk and unimplemented treaties. Even President Bush, who has the worst environmental record of any American president so far, has mastered the art of (largely empty) environmentalist rhetoric. He knows that nowadays some aspect or other of environmentalism appeals to virtually all Americans. People tend to appreciate nature and want wilderness and clean air and water.

　　But effective environmentalism requires more than words, more than cultural change. It requires legal and economic reform. It demands historically unprecedented policies incorporating the value of cherished natural resources in market calculations. It calls for new organizations and entrepreneurial commitment. Anyone have any ideas?