Hearts & Minds - Information for ChangeSM What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement?

There is much in our environment worth preserving.
Views in Grand Teton National Park

       Sometimes, volunteering for the environment can be an exercise in frustration. I remember, for example, the anger I felt after donating time to a campaign to collect household hazardous waste. This 1994 event was organized with high hopes by a nonprofit organization in cooperation with New York City’s Department of Sanitation.

       It was soon clear that the NYC government shared little of the volunteers’ enthusiasm for this campaign. The city provided woefully inadequate publicity and funding. The collection sites -- only one per borough -- were all inconvenient places for people to bring bulky paint cans and sprays.

The Result: In a city of more than seven million people, only a few thousand brought hazardous waste for collection. A year later, city officials canceled the campaign, citing (not surprisingly) inadequate public participation. In July 1997, there was still only one poorly publicized location for all of New York City -- in a remote part of Staten Island -- and even this one does not accept many common hazardous materials. (For details, see note* at very end of this article.)

Why We Failed: We certainly did not fail because of the volunteers. Many of them put in long hours to organize the campaign. But where was the media? Our political friends? Assistance from other environmental organizations? The public support that would have pried loose adequate funding and collection sites from City Hall?

       Why did we not have hundreds of thousands of school children urging parents to clean out those dangerous household items from under the sink? Why did we not seek the involvement of community boards, neighborhood associations, and children’s protection organizations? Evidently, the campaign’s failure lay in strategy, or lack thereof.

Moving Beyond Good Intentions
       Good intentions alone will not save the environment. Decades of hard work by the green movement has not stopped serious deterioration of our world’s ecosystems. There have been major successes, yet there is still cause for concern.
(See "What's Happening to Our Environment?" below.)

       Many environmental leaders from a decade ago are still guiding policy today. This is not always a bad thing, but one can question their ability to respond to changing times, particularly when strategies that were ineffective in the 1980s continue to be used in the 2000s.

       Volunteers do not usually make strategy -- leaders do. Unfortunately, stale strategies of stale leadership can frustrate the efforts of even the most hardworking volunteers.

       In nature, as environmentalist Rachel Carson continually pointed out, the terrain keeps changing and life must adapt or perish. The environmental movement needs to heed this observation as well.

Increasing Our Effectiveness
       We can learn from past experience that:

• The major green organizations often lack significant political influence outside their environmentally sound headquarters and celebrity-studded fundraisers. They have done important work, but it is simply not enough to reverse the alarming slide in worldwide environmental quality.

• There is room for improvement in how some of these organizations spend money for green education. Recycling and waste reduction concepts have yet to become major policy-shaping priorities, even after decades of environmental campaigns and Earth Days.

• The environmental movement has not made itself fully relevant to most people’s everyday concerns. In fact, it has often allowed itself to be painted as a cause of those concerns. (It is still ridiculously easy for our opponents to claim that environmentalism hurts jobs and the economy.)

• Various environmental organizations have been competing with each other for limited financial and human resources rather than pooling resources for greater effectiveness. The money that these organizations do have is not always spent in the most efficient or imaginative manner.

• They have failed to reach out effectively to other movements that share the same interests, such as those involved in neighborhood protection, civil rights, labor and children’s welfare.

• Leaders of environmental organizations not only continue to put excessive faith in alliances with politicians whose environmental words are not matched by deeds, but they also pass up opportunities for single-issue alliances with anyone else.

• There is little opportunity for volunteers to have a say in major environmental policies and almost none in choosing their leadership.

       Some readers may consider my assertions exaggerated and alarmist and demand that I supply statistics and examples with which they can take issue. I suggest to these people that rather than argue with the facts in this article, they should talk to people outside their circles of environmentalist friends. They would see just how insignificant these green issues are regarded, compared with citizens’ worries such as getting (or keeping) a job, recovering from flood or hurricane damage, and paying for expensive medical problems.

Nature is a gift from god; it gives us water and air

      Maybe the more enlightened among us do not believe claims that environmentalism worsens these problems, but it is perhaps the green movement’s biggest failure that environmentalism is not widely regarded as part of the solution. What new strategies will convince citizens, politicians, and businesses that the environment also address other major concerns?

Creating More Effective Strategies
       The freshest ideas are often those that have been with us for years, but were somehow overlooked or forgotten.

       For example, the concepts in Rachel Carson’s 1962 masterpiece, Silent Spring, motivated millions of people from all social and political strata to become environmental activists. Carson was successful because she linked concern for our own well-being with that of the natural world around us. This helped create broad-based support for the environment, and in the process, shook complacent government and industrial bureaucracies to their foundations.

Unenlightened Opponents and Defenders of the Environment
      Back then, many corporations opposed environmental legislation, claiming it would be disastrous for their businesses. But much of the legislation passed and most of those businesses are still thriving, and the public saved billions of dollars in pollution-related health care costs, among other benefits.

       Nevertheless, corporate opponents of environmentalism still use the same arguments utilized decades ago. Worse, green organizations seem less able than ever to refute those claims in the minds of the general public and the media.

       Many businesses also oppose legislation that encourages reduced energy and resource use, which would further reduce pollution. At first glance, it seems strange that they do not associate reduction of energy and resource usage with increased efficiency and greater profitability. However, the companies believe that the net financial benefits derived from complying with environmental legislation are less than the benefits of lobbying to weaken that legislation.

The Power of Lobbying
       Political contributions and lobbying by well-funded business interests have never been more potent in policy influence than they are now. It is senseless for environmental groups to spend much of their precious cash in trying to oppose this power head-on. Yet that is exactly what many of the wealthiest environmental organizations have been doing for years with ever-diminishing results.        

       Piles of money are not the only way business interests stack the card deck in their favor. In 1963, Congress passed an income tax-bill that permitted corporate lobbying costs to be considered a tax-deductible business expense. Rachel Carson herself attacked this bill, declaring that industry could now "work at bargain rates to thwart future attempts at regulation." She further noted that, ironically, nonprofits could lose their tax-exempt status trying to fight legislation supported by taxpayer-subsidized business lobbyists.

       Carson’s observation is as true today as it was thirty years ago. Therefore, it would seem obvious that instead of continuing to play a rigged game head-on against an overwhelming opponent, green organizations should concentrate on leveling the playing field.

An Instructive Victory
       When the apartheid regime of South Africa rigged the political game against Nelson Mandela’s campaign for black majority control, he refused to play according to the rules that gave the government its overwhelming advantage. Instead, he worked to undercut the props of his opponents, which made the game so uneven. Thanks to his unwavering persistence, the campaign succeeded.

       Environmental groups can emulate two of his most powerful tactics:

     1. cutting the subsidies that gave his opponents their financial advantage.

     2. forming one-issue alliances with groups that did not necessarily share all of his other goals.

Confronting Special-Interest Welfare
       Arguments against subsidies apply in many areas. For instance, direct government support to the lumber industry costs taxpayers $274 million a year. It also encourages logging in areas that would otherwise have been unprofitable and gives virgin paper an unfair price advantage over recycled paper.

       Other examples: Federally-sponsored shoreline property insurance, covering erosion-prone areas private insurers won’t touch, frustrates environmental efforts to protect fragile wetlands. Agricultural subsidies encourage overproduction of crops and livestock, which in turn lead to increased risk to drinking water by fertilizer, pesticide, and animal waste run-off.

       Studies have also shown that insurance and agricultural subsidies encourage excessive agricultural and residential development of river flood plains, which require the building of dikes by the taxpayer-subsidized Army Corp of Engineers to protect such development. When the rivers, deprived of their flood plain safety valves, rise and finally burst their banks, the taxpayer pays for the resulting damage as well.

Forging Innovative Alliances
       Taking away such special-interest welfare can be an important tool to reduce the power of business interests and reduce destruction of our ecosystem. It is an idea that's time has come. Environmentalists who oppose big-business subsidies now find they share common ground with conservative think-tanks like the Cato Institute and business publications like The Wall Street Journal.

       Of course, the reasons for opposing subsidies may not be the same: environmentalists do not want taxpayers to subsidize destruction of natural resources. Conservatives believe corporate welfare distorts the free market, encourages wastefulness and discriminates against more efficient companies. Yet on this single issue, both groups have the same goal and should therefore work together toward its realization.

New Ideas
       The ever-changing world of politics requires fresh strategies to keep up with those changes. In this respect, environmental organizations can learn from recent successes in other social movements.

       Organized labor, for example, was widely considered ineffective in the 1980s. In the last few years, however, new leadership and strategies that address society-wide issues are helping labor become a major political force again.

       Union leadership reached out to involve new audiences. By conducting effective educational and media campaigns in schools, businesses, and the community at large, labor formed vibrant new alliances and discarded ineffective traditional ones. The result was a boost in labor morale, an increase in political power, and a feeling among the general public that organized labor had found an effective role to play in bettering society. Among labor’s volunteer workers, there was renewed pride that their efforts were truly making a difference. Similar changes of leadership, strategies and morale are now evident in civil rights organizations like the NAACP.

What Can YOU Do?

Promote Better Leadership
       You can help bring such changes to the environmental movement. In organizations that have elections, you can become a member, nominate, vote and even run for leadership that adapts to today’s political landscape. In organizations that do not have open elections, you can contact the leadership, suggesting changes you think will help them be more effective. The more that leaders pay attention to changing realities, the more effectively volunteers’ time and money will work for the common good.

Coordinate with Other Organizations
       You can encourage the pooling of efforts and resources with like-minded organizations. The overwhelming scale of work to be done calls for stronger alliances, not just among environmental groups, but also with other social movements with which environmentalism shares a wide variety of goals.

       We can also form one-issue alliances with those who are not always sympathetic to environmental causes. A publicity specialist working to help end environmentally harmful corporate welfare may get better results from a press release sent to the conservative Wall Street Journal rather than a more "liberal" newspaper. Why? Because, for their own reasons, conservatives want to end corporate hand-outs as well. Even some corporations, particularly competitors of those organizations that receive the biggest subsidies, can be persuaded to join in.

       If we have specific goals that are the same, why should we not work together? In China, an old saying goes, "Who cares what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice?"Certainly the environmental movement can never have too many effective allies.

       With the limited financial resources available to most environmental organizations, logic cries out for more coordination in raising money. Volunteers in the fund-raising departments can help this trend by suggesting pooling their campaigns with those of other organizations to improve fundraising efficiency.

Encourage Innovation
       We volunteers can encourage new ways to make policy in our organizations. For instance, instead of merely repeating old policy statements that tree-cutting should be restricted, why not also advocate alternatives that reduce the need for lumber? How about legalizing industrial grade, non-drug hemp? (This has already been accomplished in Germany.) What about calling on manufacturers to design photocopiers with double-sided copying as the default setting?                

       Volunteers can urge their organizations to enlist interns not only from environmental study programs, but also from business and MBA programs. Thus, we can better encourage environmental consciousness in the corporate leaders of tomorrow.

Work More Closely with Schools
       These days, grade schools often struggle financially to get all the textbooks they need. This crisis offers a major opportunity for environmental organizations to help fill the gap. Volunteers in these organizations can, for example, encourage their groups to subsidize the purchase of geology textbooks that place heavy emphasis on environmental awareness. Parents can join advisory committees that help choose the textbooks and other educational materials their children use. Environmental volunteers can work to recruit as many schoolchildren as possible, as frequently as possible, for environmental events year-round, not just on Earth Day.        

Conclusion

       Not everyone will agree with the points I have made, but approval is not my goal. Rather, I aim to help kindle sorely-needed discussion on revitalizing a stagnant green movement, one which has failed to stay attuned to the everyday needs of our fellow citizens.

       Time is not on our side to preserve our earth’s environment. To be more effective as volunteers, we must not be shy about raising our voices now for more effective strategies by organizations for which we have chosen to work. We must also support leadership committed to putting those new strategies in practice. Our planet and our dignity as volunteers hangs in the balance.

__________________________________

Mark Schleisner is director of the Green Economics Research Institute, an organization dedicated to improving the environmental movement's impact on U.S. business and politics. He is currently writing a book, The Earth Betrayed, detailing many of the points laid out in this article.

E-mail: editor@heartsandminds.org
To: EnvironmentLinks

*In NYC, for info on disposal of hazardous materials, you can call the Dept. of Sanitation at 1-212-219-8090 or the Dept. of Environmental Protection at 1-718-337-4357.

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