Detroit Free Press (FP) - MONDAY November 28, 1994
By: ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Edition: METRO FINAL Section: EDP Page: 11A
From the perspective of the environmental movement, the shift to the Republicans has its positive side.
Although they would hotly deny it, at least some of the national organizations are breathing sighs of relief. Budget deficits have been forcing both National Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society to curtail their operations dramatically, with the latter on the verge of closing.
But now it seems that the era of James Watt, of blessed memory, has returned. When Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the Interior raised his ax against America's natural assets back in the early 1980s, membership in all major environmental organizations soared, leading paradoxically to many of the problems these groups now face.
In the next session of Congress, the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee will go to a Watt-style wild man, Rep. Don Young of Alaska, whose first concern will be to deliver Alaska's Tongass National Forest to corporate logging interests. The subsequent ambitions will be to legislate timber quotas, gut the Endangered Species Act and defund the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Lurid scenarios of impending disaster will be painted by the big environmental outfits, simultaneous with mass mailings for contributions to salvage America's national heritage.
But in the view of a grassroots activist such as Jeff St. Clair, editor of the Portland-based Wild Forest Review, the midterm shift to the Republicans "won't make that much difference on the ground." For one thing, St. Clair says, divisions and differences in the Republican congressional delegations will surface soon. John Chafee of Rhode Island, the incoming chairman of the Senate committee that has oversight of environmental and public works, is of a very different stripe from Young.
Upheavals on Capitol Hill, and an end to 40 years of majority Democratic committees, are seen by grassroots organizers as not being an entirely bad thing. For years, activists seeking a direct line to their representatives have found themselves talking to lordly staffers, at least two tiers below a powerful congressman such as George Miller, D-Calif., outgoing chair of House Natural Resources. With Democratic staffers now facing the boot, organizers such as Mike Bader of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies will be providing research for members of Congress.
From the environmental point of view, the 103rd Congress was one of the most disastrous in history, despite there being a Democrat in the White House, a supposedly "environmental" vice president, Al Gore, and Democratic majorities in both houses. The environmental movement has long been due for a major shake-up and spring cleaning, and this -- with proper leadership -- may be the moment.
St. Clair reckons that today's climate is the best opportunity for change in 30 years, to get beyond the unholy compact between the Democrats and the environmental leadership in Washington, where the best that could be hoped for was a bargain with business brokered by the Democratic fund-raisers.
Under such conditions, the credibility of the national environmental organizations plummeted. One Oregon poll showed 60 percent of respondents trusting industry scientists more than environmentalists -- who have come to be seen as acting as special interests, not working on behalf of the public interest.
The reason the "wise use" movement has made such headway is that many of its charges about elitist, inside-the-beltway greens are true.
The overall map of the environmental movement can be deceiving, in the same way as Steinberg's famous perspective of the United States from Manhattan. From inside the Washington beltway, the perspective is dominated by the big green outfits: the Sierra Club, Audubon, the Wilderness Society, World Wildlife, National Wildlife, the Nature Conservancy. Flanking these are the baldly neoliberal litigation shops, lawyer-driven groups with no popular base whatsoever, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resource Defense Council and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
Then, "out there" are the grass-roots groups and militant operations, ranging from Earth Firsters at Cove Mallard in Idaho, to community-based coalitions such as Labor-Community Watchdog in Los Angeles, to Save America's Forests inside the beltway, to Rachel's Hazardous Waste News in Annapolis, Md.
The "out there" sector may appear to be diminutive next to the corpor ate/lawyer-driven behemoths, but it is there that the future of environmentalism in America is to be found.
One all-important ingredient of many of these local or regional organizations is their engagement with the core factor that prompted the Democrats' collapse: the sense of alienation and powerlessness that people feel. But again and again, local fights -- whether they be about bus fares in Los Angeles (an environmental issue, to be sure) or an incinerator in the poor part of town, or cancer clusters associated with poisoned water and soils -- recruit "unpolitical" people to struggle against corporate power in ways they can understand and relate to.
Creators Syndicate