A paper written by a pollster and a strategist with the beige-neutral title "Is environmentalism dead?" has unaccountably stirred up debate within the U.S. environmental movement, reports the NYT.

An excerpt:

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - The leaders of the environmental movement were livid last fall when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two little-known, earnest environmentalists in their 30's, presented a 12,000-word thesis arguing that environmentalism was dead.

It did not help that the pair first distributed their paper, "The Death of Environmentalism," at the annual meeting of deep-pocketed foundation executives who underwrite the environmental establishment. But few outside the movement's inner councils paid much attention at first.

Then came the November election, into which groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters poured at least $15 million, much of it to defeat President Bush, whose support for oil drilling and logging, and opposition to regulating greenhouse gases have made him anathema to environmental groups. Instead, Mr. Bush and Congressional champions of his agenda cemented their control in Washington at a time when battles loom over clean air and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Now a debate about the future of environmentalism is ricocheting around the Internet about the authors' notion of, in Mr. Shellenberger's words, "abolishing the category" of environmentalism and embracing a wider spectrum of liberal issues to "release the power of progressivism." Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, began things in the fall with a bristling 6,000-word denunciation of Mr. Shellenberger's and Mr. Nordhaus's paper. An online magazine, Grist.org, has started a forum to debate their ideas and their assertions that environmentalism has become "just another special interest."

One writer called the paper "ridiculous and self-serving." Another wrote simply, "I'm not dead."

Others have embraced the paper. "The article articulates exactly my feelings about the environmental movement," one enthusiast wrote.