Jack Johnson caught our attention this week with the release of his latest album, Sleep Through the Static, and with some interesting thoughts on environmental philosophy. In an interview with the Santa Barbara Independent, he said:

“I read in a book recently by my friend Michael Shellenberger, a book called Break Through — he also wrote The Death of Environmentalism — but he wrote this book saying that if you consider humans to be part of nature, then the word environmental becomes a bad synonym for everything. It’s about the interconnectedness of all things…”

Jack points out an important question raised by Michael and Ted: is the category of the “the environment” any longer useful? As they wrote in Break Through:

If “the environment” includes humans, then everything is environmental and the concept has little use other than being a poor synonym for “everything.” If it excludes humans, then it is scientifically specious, not to mention politically suicidal.

The youth climate movement has transcended this outdated concept of traditional environmentalism by interpreting the meaning of global warming to be human-centric rather than nature-centric (rarely do I see any of us focusing on images of polar bears these days). The challenge for us now is to take this more holistic thinking to the next level.

The question facing us has become, which of the many human meanings of global warming do we place at the center of our movement’s politics? We’ve all recognized that global warming has multiple human meanings. As we move forward, one of our greatest challenges will be to make sure we’re being as intentional as possible in the way we construct our politics so that we can create the kind of powerful and transformational politics our movement needs to succeed. Right on, Jack!