As many scholars, politicians and campaigners have outlined, the need for environmentalism to move from the margins to the mainstream is crucial for the maintenance of quality of life, if not life itself.

The importance of defining environmentalism as an empowering political position is vital. However, as White and Wilbert (2006, p. 96) proclaim, ‘environmentalism is in trouble’. Commentators such as Jonathan Porritt (2005) have denounced environmentalism for being ‘depressing and dowdy’, whilst others, such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2005) have gone further and announced its ‘death’. Even social theorists such as Bruno Latour have argued that ‘the politics of nature’ is increasingly marked by a degree of stagnation, citing that environmentalism ‘has lost much of its confidence, coherence and vigour’ (Latour 2004, cited in White and Wilbert 2006). Thus, as White and Wilbert (2006, p. 96) state, there is a ‘real need to open up the environmental debate in new ways’.

There are three problems facing environmentalism if it seeks to become more mainstream. First, the ‘environment’ as an intellectual concept has become disconnected from popular understandings and experiences, conceived as somewhere ‘out there’, rather than ‘around here’; the environment and our effects on it have become abstracted from our everyday, materialised and emotional lives. Second, environmentalism is in trouble as it is swimming against the tide of a pro-consumption, development-oriented culture of late-modern society that is the most conspicuous in the advanced economies, but increasingly prevalent in the advancing economies of the world. And third, environmentalism is popularly associated with a discourse and practice of ‘denial’ and this discourse, alongside prognostications of ‘doom’ for people and the planet, serves to limit its popular appeal. Environmentalism is therefore not dead, but endures the status of the living dead – environmentalism has, to use the terminology of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), become a ‘zombie’ category in the late-modern world.

We can ‘open up the environmental debate in new ways’ by drawing on the terminology of Haraway (1988). ‘Coyote environmentalism’ is a productive framing of environmental practice. A coyote environmentalism reclaims the betwixt and between positions that many of us inhabit – the middle ground between poles of ‘green’ and ‘not-green’ – and liberates us from the tightly bounded notions of environmentalist identity that hinder progress towards a more ecologically sound society. Regaining this sensitivity and reclaiming this ground shakes up the ‘stagnant’ position of conventional environmentalism and raises new opportunities to experiment with green practices for the mainstream.

You can read more about these ideas here, and also how they fit into real-life practices here.