Ever since it debuted at a conference of environmental funders in Hawaii shortly before the election, a report titled "The Death of Environmentalism" has been infuriating the legions of nonprofit professionals who make their living in the "green" world. And it is easy to see why. Starting with the report's cover, embossed with a Chinese ideogram that, according to a tiresome and incorrect management-consulting cliche, is composed of the symbols for danger and opportunity and means "crisis," it is pompous, contemptuous, vague, New Age-y, contradictory, incomplete, and sometimes obviously wrong.

And yet it may be the most powerful and lasting of the very many "What's wrong with the left?" documents of the George W. Bush era. Written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who have since earned the nickname "The Reapers," "The Death of Environmentalism" is a brilliant mess. It charges that "the environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded," and that "modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis."

Those who make their living or their avocation in the environmental movement have by now exhausted themselves in debating this premature death warrant. But the essay is still almost unknown outside the circle it was addressed to. And that's too bad, because its insights, along with its flaws, are just as relevant to other causes, if not more so. And we nonenvironmentalists can read it dispassionately; we have nothing to be defensive about.

"The Death of Environmentalism" is also compelling to those of us outside the green zone because, let's face it, all social movements aspire to the condition of environmentalism. If environmentalism is so deeply flawed, what is the fate of the rest of us who advocate for sane tax policy or labor rights or gun control or campaign-finance reform or media-policy reform? Although it's well-known that the environmental movement has too many chiefs who spend too much time squabbling with one another, we should all have such problems. The environmentalists have big money (the funder confab at which the paper was presented is made up of 250 foundations), they have organizations with millions of members, they have moral credibility, and they have real Republicans on their side. They have swing voters -- middle-class parents and hunters and fishermen who love their open spaces and clean water. They even have political scalps -- take it from former Senator Slade Gorton: You don't want to see your name on the League of Conservation Voters' "Dirty Dozen" list. Among progressive causes, perhaps only reproductive choice has such reach and similar political salience.

(And perhaps it is no accident that the choice movement is going through a similar tortured self-analysis at this moment. An essay by Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice titled "Is There Life After Roe?" which argues that the pro-choice movement needs to be more sensitive to women's complex feelings about the fetus, has raised almost exactly the same kind of reaction within that movement -- furor, followed by the acknowledgement that there is a kernel of truth to it, made easier by Kissling's tone, which is gentler than the Reapers, and the fact that she's earned her stripes in the movement. See also Sarah Blustain's contribution to this debate in The American Prospect.)

So while everyone else wants to make their cause more like the environmentalists', "Death" argues that environmentalists should want their cause to be more like everyone else's. Instead of looking at the issue of global warming as an "environmental" one, The Reapers ask, why not redefine the problem as "poverty," or "trade policies that undermine environmental protections," or "the influence of money in American politics"? They ask author Ross Gelbspan about how to advance his solution to global warming, and he replies, "I don't see an answer short of real campaign-finance reform."

Having spent some of my life working on campaign-finance reform, I'm tempted to offer Gelbspan a swap: He can take that tired, frustrating process issue -- which has little constituency, no direct effects on people's lives, and is full of paradoxes and unintended consequences -- and I'll take up the cause of saving the planet.

But that reaction misses Nordhaus and Schellenberger's big, big point, the one we all need to hear. It is summed up in the term "policy literalism." They write that "the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power. Environmentalists closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible." Elsewhere they write, "The three-part strategic framework hasn't changed in 40 years: First, define a problem (e.g., global warming) as