The Uses of Tradition

Extract

The environmental movement has produced a confusion in American politics stemming from the difficulties of classifying it according to conventional categories. Most of its warriors are young people who identify with the Counter-Culture, yet it is often denounced by hard-line radicals as diversionary. Its most substantial supporters are left-liberal suburbanites, but it also attracts individuals who have no truck with civil-rights or antiwar causes. It is future-oriented in image and rhetoric, yet its severer critics call its leaders “arch-Druids” and accuse them of trying to repeal progress.