Contrary to recent rumors and reports in the New York Times, environmentalism is not dead. An essay declaring it so, “The Death of Environmentalism,” has sparked an intense debate. Environmentalism is in trouble -- but not for the reasons claimed.

Modern environmentalism evolved from the radical social movements of the late 1960s. As a social change movement it has been remarkably successful; it changed the way Americans think about the environment. For example, "swamps" are now understood as "critical wetlands." Once demonized predators such as wolves adorn our books and calendars. Water conservation means tearing down, not building dams.

But just like a biological organism, successful social movements must evolve as their environment changes. As science advances and our understanding improves, they will be threatened with extinction as once reasonable-sounding ideologies become ethically and intellectually bankrupt.

Sociologist Dan Chirot described the process in his book How Societies Change. “The collapse of communism ... proves that no matter how powerful the modern state, in the long run it must rest on a certain degree of ideological legitimacy.... Communism based its legitimacy on the predictions of Marx. When these turned out to be empty, the system rotted from within....”

Modern environmentalism was motivated by claims of pending eco-catastrophes. Greens called for immediate, dramatic political action. But these predictions of doom have a terrible track record. Here’s a sample: "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," claimed Paul Ehrlich in his 1969 article "Eco-Catastrophe!" "By ... [1975] food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. The ‘optimists’ ... think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."

Think this is old news? Here’s a more recent comment from New Scientist magazine: “The damage we do is increasing. In the next 20 years, the population will increase by 1.5 billion.... We are heading for a cataclysm.”

Given the alarmists’ sorry record, of course people are skeptical about global warming!

And herein lies the real threat to the modern environmental movement. Like the Roman Catholic Church in the time of Galileo, environmentalism has become insular and intolerant. It demands absolute fealty. Challengers are heretics.

But here’s their problem: it’s ever easier to check the claims of prophets. The 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg did just that. The reaction was immediate and brutal.

I was fortunate to hear Salman Rushdie speak at MSU. Rushdie is still under a death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini for his 1988 book The Satanic Verses. His battle with Islamic fundamentalists is a battle over the freedom to speak. Those in power always want to control the flow of information.

“Speaking truth to power” is a rallying cry for so-called “progressives.” Lomborg did. Here’s a sample of how they responded.

- Cambridge University Press was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that “all right-thinking scientists should shun the press.” The past president of the AAAS wondered how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." (The manuscript did pass peer review. The reviewers unanimously recommended publication.)

- Scientific American asserted the book was "rife with careless mistakes." In eleven pages of vicious ad hominem attacks (e.g., comparing Lomborg to a Holocaust denier) it came up with nine factual errors. When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered in detail, Scientific American threatened him with copyright infringement.

The former Washington editor of the journal Nature noted that the attacks on Lomborg revealed a standard ploy of some environmental activists. When challenged with scientific objections to their alarmist claims, they respond with diversionary tactics.

Restricting scientific debate to the “anointed” has a sorry history. Science is a discipline that prizes the discovery of truth. The message is more important than the messenger.

Any social movement that believes the ends justify the means, and that stifles dissent, ultimately loses credibility. If environmentalism is under deadly threat, this is likely the cause.