Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
The Nation, v259, n21, p760(5)
Dec 19, 1994
ABSTRACT: The elections of 1994, with their sweeping Republican victories, are seen by some as a overwhelming defeat for the environmental movement. But many environmentalists felt betrayed by the Clinton administration and by the giant corporate-funded lobbies, and hope for a new grassroots beginning.
Three days after the election Representative Mike Synar faced a group of grass-roots greens in Missoula, Montana, and delivered a grim review of the Democrats' defeat. Synar, a leading neoliberal Democrat who himself had crashed to defeat in Oklahoma, lashed out at his audience as being responsible for at least part of the November 8 debacle. Why had they not set aside their differences and rallied to the Democratic standard in its hour of need?
Rebukes from Synar's audience swiftly followed. They pointed out that the Clinton-led Democrats abandoned their core constituencies of labor and greens early, with appropriately lethal consequences. "Two years ago your party held all the cards," said Michael Donnelly, an environmental organizer from Salem, Oregon. "But the 103rd Congress began by pushing NAFTA on a fast track and ends with hysterical pleas for quick approval of GATT," both with dire environmental consequences.
"Many of us feel like we've reached the limits of the legislative system," said another. "Even with Democrats in total control, we still got steamrollered. You ask us to compromise once again. But compromise is what brings us down." "I thought I was your friend, yet I feel like your enemy," was Synar's somewhat startled rejoinder, and he warned that the new Republican Congress would set the environmental movement back at least a decade.
The first faxes from the bunkers of the shellshocked national environmental groups forecast the menacing contours of the new Hill: more than a dozen "heroes" vanquished, including promising newcomers (such as Dan Hamburg, Karan English, Karen Shepherd) and old faithfuls (Dan Glickman, Jim Sasser, Tom Andrews); key oversight committees now in the hostile hands of industry bagmen such as Representative Don Young and Senator Mark Hatfield, other, once-friendly ones such as the House Merchant Marine Committee slated for termination; the formation of new committees with ominous titles like the House Committee on Property Rights; Democratic staffers reduced by two-thirds; looming assaults on cherished environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act; open season on federal environmental regulations; state primacy for implementation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act and toxics legislation; possible defunding of regulatory agencies, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.
But although national green leaders would sooner perish than admit it, they see a silver lining to the sable clouds. Already, the vast direct-mail machinery of the national groups is cranking out the dark litany of changes in the political landscape. The precedent here is James Watt, Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior. The venal but entirely harmless Watt was a bankbook bonanza to the mainstream environmental groups, who sold him as Genghis Incarnate. Memberships doubled, budgets tripled. Everyone packed up, hired CEOs at six-figure salaries and moved to spacious quarters in D.C. However, there was a terrible price to pay. The Watt effect" quickly neutered the environmental movement as a political force. Throughout the 1980s it became soft, corporate and politically ductile. What it gained in techno-analysis, lawyerly clout and legislative access it lost in vision, common sense and, in the end, effectiveness.
Meanwhile, corporate America, economically bruised by the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, found a better path to mastery. Buy them. Contributions from corporate foundations to national environmental organizations soared during the late 1980s.
The key foundation players, Rockefeller, Pew and W. Alton Jones, are the philanthropies funded by major US-owned oil companies and advocate conservative social agendas. One of the biggest environmental funders is The Pew Charitable Trusts, which packs a $4 billion endowment and distributes millions across the spectrum from right-wing causes like the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and the Hudson Institute to more mainstream projects. The Pew family itself was a lavish early backer of the Democratic Leadership Council.
Like the oil monopolies of old, the big Eastern foundations that now run the environmental movement don't act separately. Instead, they pool resources under the auspices of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a powerful conclave of 183 organizations that provide most of the $350 million issued annually in environmental grants. At the heart of this operation is Donald Ross, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund. In a 1992 meeting of the Grantmakers, Ross boasted that "funders have a major role to play" in dictating the strategy and tactics of big environmental campaigns.
Ross's "condescending philanthropy," to use Foucault's phrase, has its price. The Wise Use movement, led by former Sierra Clubber Ron Arnold (and staked, like the big greens, by oil companies), has been able to score many hits and rally populist opposition to environmentalism precisely because many of the charges ring true [see David Helvarg, "The War on Greens," November 28!. The mainstream high brass is elitist, highly paid, detached from the people, indifferent to the working class and a firm ally of big government.
Precisely the reasons the Democrats were overwhelmed in general also bear on the parlous straits of the national greens. It is now almost twenty-five years since the tremendous victories of the late sixties and early seventies, when the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act were won.
When Synar railed at treachery by the grass-roots greens at that conference in Montana, he probably had no idea - maybe he still doesn't get the picture - of how deep runs the alienation from the big green/Democratic Party coalition, and how, from this perspective, November 8 was not Armageddon but the harbinger of a new dawn.
Nowhere to Go But Up
The overall map of the environmental movement can be deceiving, in the same way as Steinberg's famous perspective of America from Manhattan. From inside the Washington Beltway the perspective is dominated by the big green outfits, the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, The Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation. Flanking these are the baldly neoliberal litigation shops, lawyer-driven groups with no popular base whatsoever, like the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Then, "out there" are the grass-roots groups and militant operations, ranging from Earth First!ers at the Cove/Mallard Coalition in Idaho to community-based organizations like Labor/Community Watchdog in Los Angeles, to Save America's Forests inside the Beltway, to Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly in Annapolis, Maryland.
The "out there" sector may appear to be diminutive next to the corporate/lawyer-driven behemoths, but it is where the future of environmentalism in America is to be found.
"I've got to hand it to the Republicans for tapping into the latent anger in the American electorate," says Michael Colby, an organizer with Food & Water in Marshfield, Vermont. "For me, this election was about people trying to take back their government. What they will soon find out, however, is that we don't live in an individual democracy, but a corporate republic. Grass-roots environmental campaigns will be able to capitalize on that realization."
Colby points to the fact that for decades the mainstream environmental groups have acted as an obedient appendage of the Democratic Party, with few positive results for the environment. The major groups invested heavily in the Clinton/Gore Gore campaign. For a year and a half, the national groups remained silent as the Administration methodically undercut their key issues.
Only in July 1994 was the full catastrophe of the Clinton Administration's environmental performance admitted by the mainstreamers. The leaders of fifteen major environmental groups sent out an alarum to their 7 million members. "Even during the Reagan/Watt/Gorsuch years, we have never faced such a serious threat to our environmental laws in Congress. Polluters have blocked virtually all of our efforts. . . . Now they are mounting an all-out effort to weaken our most important environmental laws."
Now that their roof has fallen in even further, are the national greens poised to return to their roots and begin organizing a national resistance?
Hardly. The first indications are that they plan to snuggle deeper into their death embrace with the Clinton Administration and Congressional "moderates." In a post-election huddle hosted by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's old employer, the League of Conservation Voters, the big greens met to assess the new political landscape and plot strategy for the next Congress. They emerged with an agreement to limit their agenda to a few headline issues, including the reauthorization of symbolic laws such as the Endangered Species Act, Superfund and the Clean Water Act. In other words, less of the same. The most "radical" option entertained by the eco-policy wonks is expansion of their efforts on international issues, such as the ever-popular subject of overpopulation, where the neo-Malthusian Malthusian tenets of modern environmentalism couple with those of the right-wing nativists who birthed Proposition 187.
Foley Gone
But does an environmental Armageddon truly menace the Republic? Even from a Washington perspective, the new dispensation is hardly as bleak as that painted by the big environmental groups. Tom Foley has fallen! No battlefield graced by his corpse can be termed entirely drear. Foley was the principal architect of the anti-environment policies that came out of the House over the past ten to fifteen years. First as chairman of the powerful Agriculture Committee and later as Speaker of the House, Foley and his advocacy of the Northwest timber, mining, aluminum and defense industries leave behind devastation written across the face of the landscape: radioactive contamination at Hanford, destroyed public wildlands in Idaho and Montana, and numerous endangered species, headlined by the northern spotted owl, Pacific salmon and grizzly bear.
Foley supported the practice of sufficiency legislation. amendments to spending bills that permit federal agencies and corporations to violate federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act. As Speaker, he assigned key committee chairs and controlled the entire legislative agenda of the House, determining which bills received hearings and floor votes and which bills languished despite broad popular support. With his demise, a new cohort of Democrats will have greater freedom to operate on environmental issues. There are even some Republicans who might surprise, given the low expectations for their party. For example, John Chafee and James Jeffords have the best environmental records in the Senate.
The consequences of reduced staff and an emasculated research arm of Congress, loudly bemoaned by leaders of national environmental groups, is hardly a negative for grassroots organizers. In the past, the lordly Congressional and committee staffers have served as a nearly impenetrable buffer between activists and Congressional decision makers. Now overworked Congressmen are likely to turn to progressive environmentalists like Mike Bader, Lois Gibbs and Carl Ross for research, ideas, strategy and advice.
Moreover, it will be hard to take some of these Republicans seriously. Take, for example, Idaho's current contribution to the legislative branch. In September, Senator Larry Craig complained that the only endangered species there isn't a law protecting today is the white Anglo-Saxon human being," while Representative-to-be Helen Chenoweth, who defeated the despicable Democrat Larry LaRocco (a man repeatedly coddled by the Sierra Club despite his aggressive support of big timber companies like Boise Cascade) said she doesn't believe the sockeye salmon is endangered because you can buy a can of salmon off the shelf in Albertson's."
With all the bipartisan commotion about cutting government spending, the greatest near-term threat to the environment may come from the ascent of neoliberal environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund (creators of pollution credits, a k a the cancer bond), the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Wildlife Fund, which subscribe to the notion that unrestricted market forces" can be harnessed to protect the environment. These groups, which led the push for NAFTA and which together act as the environmental equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council, already enjoy easy access to Administration policy-makers, including Office of Management and Budget director Alice Rivlin, a former adviser to The Wilderness Society and other mainstream organizations.
These notions will be seized by the new sagebrush rebels in Congress, who've traded their Stetsons for Armani suits and who no longer propose selling off public lands, but simply "marketizing" them. (In New Zealand, where this experiment is well under way, they call it what it is: corporatization.) The marketization theory is simplistically seductive, and lethal for the land. It argues that the highest public benefit from public lands will naturally be determined by the highest bidder. Thus leases for the use (not ownership) of the national forests are likely to be placed on the auction block, pitting scrawny environmental groups against transnational corporations like Louisiana-Pacific.
These market currents may also merge smoothly with a top priority of the Republican leadership (though first developed by Democratic neoliberals): the embedding of risk assessments and cost/benefit "analysis" into nearly every regulatory and legislative decision. Under this corporate-friendly equation, the costs of pollution control are weighed against the heavily discounted benefits of human health and environmental quality - a certain recipe for more hazardous-waste landfills, dioxin-belching incinerators and, of course, higher cancer rates.
Name the System: Corporate Power
The old legislative strategy of the mainstream greens has been doomed for a long time. "Anyone who still clings to the notion of legislative solutions to environmental problems should be locked up as either deluded or a charlatan," says Michael Colby of Food & Water. "This election frees us to move beyond the same failed legislative strategies. Activists need to find the energy to pursue more creative and effective strategies that inspire the public."
Food & Water, for example, is leading the effort to ban the use of bovine growth hormone, food irradiation and dangerous food pesticides. But instead of targeted regulatory agencies or Congressional action, Colby initiated a methodical corporate campaign designed to generate public outrage at companies like Land O Lakes and industry giants like the American Meat Institute.
As a recent example consider the campaign that defeated Disney's lurid tourist trap/historical center/real estate development planned for the gentrified horse country of northern Virginia's civil war battlefields. The thrashing of Disney was the big environmental victory of the past year. The corporate giant threw everything into its campaign. Disney bought up Virginia politicians from local commissioners to Governor George Allen. The Washington Post editorialized on Disney's behalf. But it was still beaten off by a determined coalition of (1) very rich people, in the form of hunt-country billionaires like the Mellons (Disney, by the way, quite liked them as the main protesters because they could be assailed with populist war cries); (2) a string of well-known writers pointing out that Disney would destroy a key part of the national heritage, an argument that won general agreement; (3) imaginative public-relations work; (4) popular dislike of the Disney behemoth. The same basic model can be used to attack most environmental problems.
"Until we've made a head-on attack against the corporations that are running this show, environmentalists won't have an issue they can trust," says Peter Montague of Rachel's. "By going after the corporations we open many new possible alliances with workers, people of color, and poor communities. We build a broad movement for radical change."
However, the anti-immigrant tilt of many environmental groups like the Sierra Club (half of whose members probably voted for Proposition 187) and the awful Carrying Capacity Network may preclude the formation of coalitions with civil rights and social justice groups. "There's not a lot of trust between people of color and the national environmental groups" says Richard Moore, director of the southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. "Frankly, their positions on issues like population and immigration are counterproductive and highly offensive."
The blindness of the national greens' political strategy is also illustrated by their insensitivity to working people, generating a popular backlash that has killed important legislation and sent workers running to Republican candidates. "The weakness of Representative Dan Hamburg's Headwaters Forest Bill is its apparent lack of concern for loggers and mill-workers who will be tossed out of their jobs if the 44,000 acres of forest proposed to be put aside in a large addition to the national park system is removed from the chainsaw," Bruce Anderson, editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, wrote, before the elections. "The weakness of the Headwaters bill is also the fatal weakness of the Democratic Party. If the Democrats stood for something, the preservation of Headwaters would be a lot more palatable to many more people. But the Democrats don't offer anything to soften the blow as rampaging corporations sock community after community across the country."
The predictable postscript for this scenario. The Headwaters bill moribund in the Senate, and Hamburg was defeated in the election.
Off the High Horse, Among the People
The future of the environmental movement must be found in its past, in a return to its roots. This green revival has been building for several years, and is grounded in the belief that successful campaigns can be waged and won from the hinterlands of America, whether in forests, rivers or ghettos.
The evolving new conservation movement is a loose confederation of groups, across a vigorous spectrum of individual and collective acts of resistance. Increasingly, this movement finds its most principled expression in the formation of independent political parties, such as the incipient Green Parties in New Mexico, Arizona and Alaska.
But it can also be found in the recent growth of regional grass-roots groups. The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, for example, has built a powerful five-state coalition of small environmental and watershed groups, local businesses, students and activists to support the protection of 20 million acres of wildlands in the Northern Rocky Mountains. They have attacked, and largely routed, the corporate timber industry in its own backyard. In Albuquerque, the Southwest Network helps organize poor neighborhoods to fight urban polluters such as Intel and agitates for the return of lands stolen form rural Hispanics and Native Americans in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas and the border regions of Mexico.
The optimism of these groups makes an invigorating contrast to the tepid bureaucratism of the mainstreams. From Eugene, Oregon, for example, the irrepressible Native Forest Council continues to assault received wisdom with its Zero Cut campaign to end all logging on public lands. Battered for years as too radical by major environmental group and blackballed by major foundations, the Native Forest Council has nevertheless built a powerful nationwide network of activists who have changed fundamentally the terms of the debate on the management of the national forests. The question is no longer how, or how much timber should be cut but whether the national forests should be logged at all.
The Council's executive director, Tim Hermach, eschews premature legislative solutions. Instead, he is targeting corporate control over public lands. "Were primed to do combat with the Republican right on an of their cherished shiboleths: cost/benefit, property rights, family values," Hermach says. "The fact is, there is no economic or moral justification for the commercial exploitation The people are responding to that uncompromising message." A crucial element of any progressive movement is a press that does not seek to mute its anger or conceal its passion for justice. The mainstream environmental press is a glossy wasteland of sentimentality and self-promotion clotted with advertisements for Chevron and Jeep Grand Cherokee.
On the ground floor of the environmental movement" the art of radical reporting and political pamphleteering is alive and well, naming corporate names, calling the bluff of environmental sellouts, providing cutting-edge analysis that is useful to activists - in short, a call to arms. The best examples include The Northern Forest Forum, edited by Jamie Sayen; the sedate, but often provoking, Wild Earth; the infuriating, much-improved Earth First! Journal; the fiery Anderson Valley Advertiser; and the indispensable Rachel's Environment. and Health Weekly.
The 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. Local fights - whether they be about bus fares in downtown Los Angeles (an environmental issue, to be sure or an incinerator in the poor part of town or cancer clusters associated with poisoned waters and soils - recruit "unpolitical" people to struggles against corporate power in ways they can understand and relate to. The whole story was told in a recent poll conducted by American Forests magazine. Timber industry scientists are now more trusted by people in the Northwest than environmentalists. But 48 percent of the same people also support an end to all logging in public forests.
Conclusion: The message needs a new messenger
The challenge was thrown down on November 8. Most Americans will continue to honor local fights and local zeal against waste dumps, filth and corporate depredations of public lands and resources. But they won't honor big-time green lobbies, swollen with corporate slush, hand in glove with arrogant federal agencies, stuffing down their throats the edicts of central power.
Copyright © 1994 The Nation Company Inc.