As spring nears, let's renew our enthusiasm for environmentalism

Spring arrives this week, and the world feels alive again.

Trees fill out. Birds return. The air softens. It is the season when nature tells us life is coming back.

But this spring also arrives with a number most Americans have barely heard.

This winter, scientists counted just 12,260 western monarch butterflies along the California coast. In 1997, the first formal count found roughly 1.2 million. In 2022, the count was 335,479. That means the western monarch population today is about 1% of what it was a generation ago — and only about 4% of what it was four years ago.

You do not need advanced science to understand that.

You only need subtraction. And yet most Americans have heard almost nothing about it.

That silence says something important about how environmentalism changed.

There was a time when the country knew these stories.

When bald eagles were disappearing, the news was everywhere. Environmentalists shouted it from the rooftops until the whole country knew. People rallied. Laws changed. The birds came back.

When whales were being hunted toward extinction, the world knew. Environmentalists raised the alarm again. People rallied. Hunting slowed. Many whale populations began to recover.

For years, environmentalism asked people to protect what they loved.

It was a movement built less on fear than on love — on the simple belief that some things were worth saving before they were gone.

Thirty-five years ago, 78% of Americans said they considered themselves environmentalists. Around that same time, western monarchs still numbered in the low millions.

Then the movement began speaking more and more about climate change. The science behind that shift was necessary and important. But the public language changed too.

Instead of simple subtraction, we asked people to think more and more in terms of carbon concentrations, atmospheric models and long-range projections built from advanced physics.

At the same time, we talked less about habitat loss, species decline and the wild things people could still see disappearing.

We thought we could make the conversation more complex and still hold everyone.

We did not.

Today, the share of Americans who identify as environmentalists has fallen to 41%. Meanwhile, the losses keep growing.

Scientists say species are now disappearing at more than 100 times the normal rate. That is why many believe we are entering the early stage of a sixth mass extinction.

What makes this one different from the five before it is simple: nature caused the others. This one is being driven by us, mostly through habitat destruction, along with overuse, pollution, invasive species and climate change.

We still need to talk about climate change. It is real and urgent.

But if we want to build a stronger movement, we also need to talk again in the language that has always moved people most.

Environmentalism first became powerful by appealing to people’s love for wild things and wild places.

People still care deeply about wild things and wild places. People are still moved more by love than fear.

And subtraction is still the math most people understand best.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.