By Remy Bargout. Environmentalists live under a growing and yet age-old illusion that the mainstream movement has gained a critical mass, or unstoppable momentum that ‘now, consumer society, world leaders, and the capitalist system must reckon with’. In reality, the mainstream movement does not speak to power, but actually exerts it. Elite environmentalism is a problem for many reasons but, perhaps most of all, for exclusionary factors of age, sex, and race.