ABSTRACT
With Reagan’s election in 1980 and the consolidation of a neoliberal ideological hegemony several large environmental organizations embraced partnerships with business and alternatives to command and control environmentalism. With the abandonment by corporate partners of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and failure to pass a cap-and-trade bill under Obama, the failure of this approach became apparent. Earlier grassroots environmental groups that grew out of toxic waste disasters created new forms of progressive eco-populism. Klein’s analysis of the climate movement’s use of blockades of fossil fuel infrastructure and divestment from fossil fuel companies illustrates the climate movement’s progressive eco-Populist strategy. Reid’s and Taylor’s discussion of enclosure and externalization as twin forms of domination driving crises of the ecological and civic commons serves as the theoretical lynchpin for an analysis of the threat of eco-fascism at the end of the chapter. They also clarify how the twin crises of the ecological and civic commons’ serves as a framework for understanding progressive eco-populism as an alternative ideology that can revive both the civic commons, by creating new forms of inclusive democratic politics, and the ecological commons, by restructuring societies based on practices of sustainability and regeneration.
