Robert Gottlieb knows he has the ultimate New Left credential. In a footnote near the end of his latest book he lets us in on it: he was there in June 1967 when his German compatriot Rudi Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions.”
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Oddly enough, with such large ambitions and 413 print-heavy pages, Forcing the Spring leaves out big chunks of the movement it purports to describe. Not one word about the struggle to save mass transit (an urban environmental issue if there ever was one). Nothing about the bicoastal grass-roots and state-level movements to curb suburban sprawl through growth management. Gottlieb has room to mention Job Harriman and the Los Angeles Socialist Party of 1912, but no space for the Nature Conservancy or the burgeoning midwest-based environmental-restoration movement it has nurtured.
Finally, and terminally, the New Left never figured out how to win without calling it “selling out.” We were all tactics and no strategy. Gottlieb tells how grass-roots protest by the “McToxics Campaign” made it possible for the Environmental Defense Fund to sign a deal with McDonald’s in 1990 doing away with polystyrene burger holders. The grass-roots people felt EDF hogged the credit. Maybe so–but Gottlieb doesn’t suggest how the deal should have been worked out.
What should environmentalists be aiming for? Sometimes Gottlieb drops hints about socialism, without using the word. “The end of the Cold War,” he writes, “exposed a [U.S.] production system toxic at its core and an environmental politics that continually limited the possibilities for change.” Now, he says, we have an opportunity to convert that production. “The conversion of production to what? Controlled by whom? These have become the central questions.”
Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement by Robert Gottlieb, Island Press, $27.50.
