The Changing Face of Environmentalism

Beyond Gang Green

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK

On May 3, 1969, after hours of bitter debate, the Sierra Club fired David Brower. The organization’s first paid staffer, Brower had transformed the Club from an exclusive, politically timid, white male hiking outfit of 2,000 members. But the old guard didn’t like the direction that Brower, its executive director, was taking the staid organization: toward political confrontation, grassroots organizing and attacks on industrial pollution, nuclear power and the Pentagon.

This kind of green aggressiveness in the face of entrenched power alienated funders, politicians and, eventually, the Internal Revenue Service, which, after Brower’s successful international campaign to halt the construction of two mega-dams in the Grand Canyon, moved to strip the group of its tax-deductible status. The IRS action proved to be the final straw and Brower was booted out.

Dave Brower was 56 when he was sacked by the Sierra Club. He could have retired to his home in the Berkeley Hills to write books, hike in the Sierras with his wife Anne (if anything, an even more uncompromising environmentalist), and travel the world doing what he loved most: running wild rivers.

But it turned out that Brower’s ouster from the Club was more of a beginning than an ending. In fact, many greens point to that frought moment as the start of what became known as the New Conservation Movement. Brower wasted no time. He went on to have a hand in forming Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, and the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and many other groups big and small. Brower was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.

When militant Earth First! Movment sprang up from the rubble of the Reagan era, many mainstream environmental leaders were quick to denounce them and their tactics of tree-sits and road blockades. Not Brower. “I thank God for the arrival of Earth First!,” Brower said. “They make me look moderate.”

It was, perhaps, this unflagging sense of optimism against all odds that defined Brower most. He was delighted at how the movement he helped to found and shape continued to grow in unpredictable and uncontrollable directions.

The evolution of environmentalism over the past fifty years has been spurred by any number of competing internal tensions: between national and grassroots, apolitical and partisan, international and domestic, lobbying strategies and direct action tactics. But more than anything else, the character of the American environmental movement has been forged by the unexpected threats it has had to confront: Three Mile Island, Love Canal, James Watt, the Exxon Valdez, strip mining, rainforest destruction, acid rain, the ozone hole, the decline of the spotted owl, oil drilling in the Arctic, global warming, globalization and the World Trade Organization.

Yet the environmental movement, by and large, has always been the most existential of social movements, willing to shift tactics on the fly, use what works and discard what doesn’t. “In our business, you’ve got to be fast on your feet,” said Brower, who died in November 2000. “When industry wins, they win forever. The most we can usually hope for is a stay of execution. It means we’ve got to stay eternally vigilant, be very creative and be willing to take risks.”

* * *

The modern grassroots environmental movement probably got its start in the citizen uprisings against nuclear power, beginning in the 1970s with the Clamshell Alliance, a decentralized coalition put together to fight the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire and its rowdier counterpart on the West Coast, the Abalone Alliance, which targeted the Diablo Canyon plant in California. Indeed, in her book Political Protest and Cultural Revolution, Barbara Epstein argues that, aside from the civil rights movement, these groups were the “first effort in American history to base a mass movement on nonviolent direct action.”

The contentious debate over nuclear power also exposed one of the first great schisms inside the green movement, a rift that exists to this day. Many environmental groups, fixated on the looming energy shortage and obsessing on global warming, seized on the dream of nuclear power as a safe, clean alternative to coal-fired power plants. Indeed, Brower lost his job at the Sierra Club partly because of his lonely and unflinching opposition to the Diablo Canyon reactor, which was built on a major faultline.

But public attitudes toward the use of “atoms for peace” changed decisively on March 28, 1979, when the Number Two reactor at Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown, emitting radioactive gasses into the air near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and leaking contaminated water into the Susquehanna River. Most Americans first learned of the meltdown from the unimpeachable voice of Walter Cronkite, who opened the CBS Evening News by saying: “It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare. As far as we know at this hour, no worse than that. But a government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear accident to date.” After four days of trying to keep details of the true extent of the accident under wraps, officials finally suggested that nearby schools should be closed and pregnant should evacuate the area. Public confidence in this supposedly safe and cheap form of power collapsed overnight.

But after the press left, people living near the TMI plant were left to deal with the aftermath. Within a few years, the inevitable respiratory illnesses, kidney ailments and cancers began to sprout up in the vicinity of the nuclear complex. Yet the media, wrapped up in the apocalyptic fervor of a meltdown scenario, seemed bored by these slow-motion tragedies and tended to side with the utilities and the nuclear industry in dismissing the link between the disease clusters and the release of radiation as the rantings of paranoids. (In fact, numerous scientific reports have revealed that merely living near a nuclear plant—where cancer clusters tend to occur and where there are higher rates of infant mortality, blood disorders and kidney problems—can be dangerous for your health.)

If the nuclear industry was hoping for a quick comeback in the United States once public anxiety over Three Mile Island calmed, those dreams were shattered on April 26, 1986 when the Chernobyl reactor, in Ukraine, blew its containment vessel during a test, bringing about the most serious industrial accident in history. The radiation released by the explosion wsa greater than from both the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs, contaminating farm and dairy lands, rivers and lakes and forcing the belated evacuation of more than 135,000 people from the city of Pripyat. Thirty-one people were killed in the initial blast and hundreds more fell ill to acute radiation sickness. Within five years of the blast there was a tenfold increase in thyroid cancers in the region.

After the accident, the Soviets delayed releasing any information to the public, grudgingly acting only after Sweden had revealed the disaster to the world. “The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant … has painfully affected the Soviet people and shocked the international community,” Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in a televised address.” For the first time, we confront the real force of nuclear energy, out of our control.” (Gorbachev would later claim that Chernobyl was a key event in giving momentum to glasnost and, along with the Afghan war, the fall of the Soviet Union itself.)

In the United States, the 1980 and 1990s saw numerous nuclear plants shuttered due to a combination of relentless citizen-organizing and their own financial extravagances: Marble Hill in Indiana, Columbia Generating Station in Washington, Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee, Shoreham in New York, Connecticut Yankee and Trojan in Oregon. In 1989, the Rancho Seco reactor in Herald, California became the first nuke plant shut down by popular vote.

There hasn’t been a nuclear plant opened in the United States since the Three Mile Island meltdown — though the Obama administration is pushing hard to build at least three new reactors in Georgia. This doesn’t mean that the nuclear industry went into a state of hibernation. Instead of focusing on the United States, Westinghouse, General Electric, ABB and Bechtel set their sights on the developing world: India, Indonesia and Brazil. Their forays were often gladly backed by the US government with financing through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

An even more pressing problem in the United States is the challenge of how to deal with the accumulating mounds of spent fuel from the nation’s 104 commercial nuclear reactors. The nuclear industry, backed by politicians with nuclear plants in their states, wants desperately to truck the radioactive waste to the Nevada desert outside of Las Vegas and entomb it inside vaults in Yucca Mountain, a site on the traditional lands of the Western Shoshone.

The Shoshone have tirelessly fought the plan for more than two decades, joined by anti-nuke groups such as the Snake River Alliance and the Nuclear Information Research Service. They nicknamed the entire scheme the “Mobile Chernobyl” plan. It calls for more than 30 years of continuous shipping by train and semi-truck of 60,000 casks filled with radioactive reactor fuel. A single rail cask would harbor nearly 200 times as much cesium as was released by the Hiroshima bomb. One study predicts that more than 300 “accidents” can be expected involving the shipment of this high-level nuclear waste.

And Yucca Mountain itself is far from safe. For one thing, geologists say the site leaks, posing the real risk of nuclear waste hemorrhaging into groundwater. For another, it’s on unstable terrain. This area of Nevada has been rocked by more than 650 earthquakes in the last twenty years. Of course, the nuclear industry doesn’t want to be left holding the bag when something inevitably goes wrong, so they pushed through Congress a bill transferring the liability for spent reactor fuel to the U.S. government.

But where there’s risk, there’s also opportunity. In 1997, a strange amalgam of former Pentagon officials, CIA officers, venture capitalists and a couple of neoliberal environmentalists hatched a scheme to ship commercial radioactive waste to Russia, for disposal at a site in the Ural Mountains. The plan was fiercely opposed by many American and Russian environmental groups. Indeed, Russian greens mounted the largest campaign in the nation’s history, staging spectacular protests and gathering 2 million signatures to put the matter on the ballot in a public referendum. But the Kremlin rejected the signatures and the powerful Russian nuclear agency Minatom, which stands to make as much as $20 billion on the deal, persuaded the Russian parliament to give the go-ahead.

It’s the same old story: privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

* * *

Back in the spring of 1978, residents of the working-class community of Love Canal, New York discovered that a chemical dump site had been leaking toxins into their neighborhood, saturating their schools, playgrounds and homes with a poisonous stew of more than 200 chemicals. The prime culprit was Hooker Chemical Company, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. One study showed that 56 percent of the children born in Love Canal between 1974 and 1978 had suffered some form of birth defect. Another study revealed that the rate of urinary-tract infections had increased by 300 percent over the same period. A disturbing spike in the rate of miscarriages was also reported.

The government was slow to react to protect the resident. This was, after all, a working class neighborhood with little perceived political clout. Then a group of mothers and housewives, led by Lois Gibbs and calling themselves the Love Canal Homeowners Association, sprang into action, filing petitions to close contaminated schools, pressuring New York Governor Hugh Carey to order an evacuation of the area and even commanding the attention of President Jimmy Carter, who signed a bill funding the permanent relocation of 660 families. The Love Canal campaign became a model for a new kind of citizen action: a blue-collar environmentalism that was uncompromising, tactically innovative and community-based. “The words ‘Love Canal’ are now burned in our country’s history and in the memory of the public as being synonymous with chemical exposures and their adverse human health effects,” Gibbs reflected. “The events at Love Canal brought about a new understanding among the American people of the correlation between low-level chemical exposures and birth defects, miscarriages and incidences of cancer. The citizens of Love Canal provided an example of how a blue-collar community with few resources can win against great odds, using the power of the people in our democratic system.”

Since Love Canal, Gibbs has been a leader of one of the most exciting and powerful strains of conservationism: the environmental justice movement. It springs from a single, glaring truth: people who are poor, disenfranchised and dark-skinned are the most likely to be victimized by chemical plants, hazardous waste dumps and myriad other industrial effluvia.

Hazardous waste facilities continue to be constructed with a chilling regularity in poor areas, largely inhabited by minorities. This is not a dry statistical phenomenon, but a deliberate business and political strategy. A leaked memo from the California Waste Management Board spelled out the gameplan in stunningly cynical language: “All socioeconomic groups tend to resent the nearby siting of major [hazardous waste] facilities, but middle and upper socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition. These neighborhoods should not fall within the one-mile and five-mile radius of proposed sites.”

An investigation by the National Law Journal unearthed another ugly dimension of environmental discrimination. From 1985 through 1992, the fines handed out by the Environmental Protection Agency for violations of federal environmental laws were 500 to 1,000 percent higher if the crimes were committed in white communities as opposed to black and Hispanic areas.

These incidents aren’t abstractions. They occur in real American communities: Navajo forcibly evicted from their homelands on Big Mountain to make way for the expansion of Peabody Coal’s strip mines, the largest on Earth; Mexican-American families in the southwestern Texas town of Sierra Blanca, who are forced to live next to a 70,000-acre ranch where New York City dumps its sewage sludge; the black community of Convent, Louisiana, in the heart of Cancer Alley, which is surrounded by three oil refineries, 17 chemical plants and eight hazardous waste facilities; the Appalachian hamlet of East Liverpool, Ohio, home to the world’s largest hazardous waste incinerator; Gary, Indiana, dumping ground for US Steel.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion, as long-time environmental justice campaigner Richard Moore says, that “people of color don’t have the complexion for protection.”

* * *

By the summer of 1992, the attention of the world was riveted on Rio de Janeiro, for the international confab known as the Earth Summit. The Rio affair was billed as the first major huddling of world leaders to grapple with some of the most intractable environmental crises: global warming, ozone depletion, species extinction, rainforest destruction, depleted fisheries and desertification. Representatives from more than 170 nations attended, but the US government almost didn’t show up. Eventually, President George H. W. Bush was embarrassed into sending a delegation, although Team America quickly left without signing the session’s most important protocols, including the International Convention on Biodiversity.

Much of the attention in Rio and in the press was focused on the fate of rainforests, the so-called lungs of the world. The Amazon was being plundered at an almost inconceivable rate: upward of 149 acres every minute, 214,000 acres each day. Much of the forest was simply going up in smoke, in a kind of modern slash-and-burn regime designed to rid the land of its forests and its indigenous tribes and clear the way for huge cattle ranches, mining operations and oil pipelines. The loss of primary forest cover has presaged a staggering loss of species. The extinction rate in tropical rainforests world-wide was compared by biologists at the Summit to that which jolted the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous Age. Biologist Edward O. Wilson estimated that 137 species were being extirpated every day—that’s 50,000 each year. Indigenous cultures too have been torn asunder, victims of forced dislocation, acculturation, government-sanctioned murder, enforced starvation and introduced diseases. The population of the Amazon basin prior to Western contact has been estimated to have been as high as 9 million. By 2000, less than 200,000 indigenous people remained. And the death rate seemed to be increasing. Take the Yanomani of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. In the late seventies, more than 20,000 Yanomani lived in Brazil. By 1997, fewer than 9,000 still existed.

All of this spawned the proliferation of hundreds of new green groups battling for the rainforests—or at least fundraising on the promise to protect the Amazon. Three stand out: Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Project Underground and the International Rivers Network. These three groups share some key features: they are international, aggressive, confront corporations directly, engage in direct action and work side-by-side with indigenous groups.

RAN set the model. Their actions ranged from global boycotts of Mitshubishi (a prime destroyer of rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia) to aiding the cause of the Penan of Borneo, the Kayapo of the Amazon and the Pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. RAN has worked with many of these tribes and rainforest ecologists to develop sustainable economic uses of intact rainforests.

In the popular imagination, the loss of tropical forests has mostly been linked to the rapacity of timber companies. But throughout much of the tropics the rainforests harbor other treasures the multinational corporations are eager to exploit: namely oil and gold. Project Underground was started as a way of helping local communities in the tropics and elsewhere fight off the depredations of the transnationals. Much of Project Underground’s early work focused on the Grasberg gold mine in Indonesia. One of the largest mines in world, with deposits of gold, silver and tin valued at more than $70 billion, Grasberg started as a joint venture between the New Orleans-based mining giant Freeport McMoRan and the regime of former Indonesian dictator Suharto.

The riches of that mine didn’t find their way to the Amungme tribe, who live next to the mining site and consider the it’s blasted out of sacred. Instead, the Amungme have been forcibly evicted from their homes and killed by Indonesian troops acting as security forces for the mining company. Over the past thirty years, more than 2,000 people have been murdered by security forces and Indonesian troops near the mine.

As horrifying as these acts are, the long-term environmental consequences from the mining operation may take an even greater toll. The mine generates 200,000 tons of contaminated mine waste every day, with much of this being dumped into the Aikwa River system, poisoning the Amungme’s drinking water and toxifying or killing the fish that are the staple of their diet. In 1996, the Amungme filed a $6 billion class action suit in US federal court against the company. “Freeport has killed us,” said Tom Beanal, an Amungme tribal leader. “They’ve taken our land and our grandparents’ land. They ruined the mountains. We can’t drink our water anymore.”

The Berkeley, California-based International Rivers Network was one of the first groups to confront the malign environmental role played by international finance institutions. IRN’s focus is on dams, which have proliferated across the developing world in the name of economic aid, too often destroying riverine ecosystems and indigenous communities for the sake of US corporations. IRN made its mark tackling the biggest dam of them all, China’s Three Gorges. This monstrosity rises 575 feet above the Yangtzee, the world’s third longest river, and created a reservoir more than 350 miles long, compelling the forced resettlement of nearly 1.9 million Chinese.

Construction on the $26 billion began in 1994, backed by financing from a myriad of Western institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, First Boston, Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, the largest financier of dams worldwide.

But IRN put together an international coalition of groups that targeted these funders and international construction firms. This was an entirely new kind of environmental campaign, which targeted and exposed the complex political economy of mega-construction projects. In 1996, IRN won a key opinion from the National Security Council, which determined that the US government should withdraw financial support for the project. A few months later, the Export-Import Bank announced it would not guarantee loans to US companies seeking contracts at the dam. Then, in the biggest victory of all, the World bank announced that it would not underwrite Three Gorges.

In the end, of course, the dam went up, the floodgates closed and the waters rose, flooding forests, marshes, shrines and villages. But a price had been exacted and the international funding agencies had been put on notice.

* * *

On a 1992 trip to NASA headquarters to examine the latest in geo-satellite technology, President George H. W. Bush was presented with two large satellite images. One depicted a million acres of forest in the Brazilian Amazon. The other samed the same amoung of acreage on the Olympic peninsula of Washington state. Bush shrugged his shoulders and wandered off. But the following day the photos landed on the front page of the New York Times. The contrasts in the images was striking. The Brazilians, so often the target of American condemnation, had logged off and burned about 10 percent of the Amazon’s primary forest. By contrast, the United States had logged off more than 95 percent of the Olympic rainforest. The ensuing battle over the fate of the remaining five percent of ancient forest in the United States would become one of the fiercest in the history of American environmentalism. The ecological symbol for this struggle became a diminutive and secretive bird that inhabited the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest: the northern spotted owl.

Traditionally, green groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society had tended to avoid battles over forest protection for easier targets: alpine wilderness or so called “rocks and ice” terrain. As consequence, through the 1960s and 1970s millions of acres of publicly-owned old-growth forest in Oregon, Washington, California and southeast Alaska were leveled with little organized opposition. All that began to change in the early 1980s, when a new, more militant generation of activists began blockading logging roads and hanging from giant trees slated for clearcutting.

Inspired by the writings of Edward Abbey and fed up with the timid and top-down nature of many big environmental groups, the Earth First!ers and their allies placed their bodies between big trees and chainsaws. The 1980s saw repeated confrontations between the Earth First!ers, the Forest Service and the timber giants: in the Siskiyou and Klamath Mountains, at Millennium Grove (where the oldest trees in Oregon were illegally logged on Easter Sunday), at Opal Creek and along the Brietenbush River. The battlegrounds evoke the same resonance for environmentalists that Shiloh, Vicksburg and Antietam do for the Civil War buff.

In the end, the fate of the spotted owl ended up in the hands of a Reagan-appointed federal judge named William Dwyer, who confounded his Republican allies by dealing the Bush administration a string of stinging setbacks, culminating in an injunction against any new timber sales in spotted owl habitat. In his landmark ruling, Judge Dwyer denounced the Forest Service for “a remarkable series of violations of environmental laws.”

The spotted owl injunctions, which effectively halted all new logging operations in old-growth forests, became a contested issue in the 1992 presidential election, with Bush pledgeing to over-turn the logging ban if re-elected. Bush lost, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore came to the timber industry’s rescue anyway. The betrayal was pure Clinton: convene a staged “town hall” meeting, put out a prefabricated plan and induce your liberal friends to swallow their principles and sign off on it. This shadow play was what happened at the April 1993 Forest Summit, a ridiculous display of consensus-mongering that saw some of the nation’s leading environmentalists play footsy with executives from Weyerhaeuser.

Shortly after the Portland summit, the political arm-twisting began. “The Clinton people told us that during the campaign they’d made commitments to the timber lobby that logging would be restarted before the end of 1993,” recalls Larry Tuttle, then executive director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, a plaintiff in the original spotted owl suit. “They said we had to agree to lift Judge Dwyer’s injunction or they’d get Congress to come up with something worse.”

Tuttle and many other grassroots greens objected, but the big national groups capitulated to the scare tactics of the Clinton crowd. By the fall of 1993, the ancient forests were once again being menaced by chainsaws. After five years of logging under the Clinton plan, the spotted owl’s population plunged more rapidly than the environmental impact statement for the plan predicted it would decline under a worst case scenario over a period of 40 years. But the owl was always just a symbol, an indicator for an entire ecosystem on the verge of collapse. Among the other species caught in a tailspin toward extinction: marbled murrelets, coho salmon, cutthroat trout, Pacific fisher, pine marten, red tree voles, bull trout, dozens of salamanders, mollusks and hundreds of wildflowers, vascular plants and fungi. In all more than 1,800 species of plants and animals in the Pacific Northwest are at risk from old-growth logging.

* * *

Eight years of Bill Clinton and Al Gore yielded few rewards and many more bitter disappointments. During the early days of the administration, Clinton and Gore played a shrewd game. They tapped more than 30 environmentalist for key positions inside the new government, from Carol Browner as head of the EPA to Bruce Babbitt as Interior Secretary. That gave the mainstream greens the kind of political access they hadn’t enjoyed in more than a decade. But as it turned out, a little face-time with high-ranking bureaucrats was about all the enviro establishment got of Clinton and Gore. The 1993-4 congressional session, when Democrats controlled all branches of the government for the first time in 12 years, ended up as one of the least productive environmental legislatures since the Truman era. And the Republican takeover of congress in 1995 put greens back on the defensive, having to battle both a hostile congress and an indifferent executive office.

The failures of the Clinton years are perhaps best illustrated by the issue that Gore had made his calling card: global warming. By the mid-1990s had gone from a theory to a harshly experience fact of life. A wave of searingly hot summers and droughts scorched the Midwest, accompanied by fierce storms and prolonged El Niño conditions in the Pacific. The 1990s would be the hottest decade on record. The stage was set for the Kyoto convention in 1997. The meeting was conceived as a follow-up to the Rio summit and was supposed to put the brakes on this perilous warming trend. But the event itself would prove emblematic of the shifting alliances and competing interests in global environmental policy.

Kyoto was doomed from the start. Before the meetings even opened, the US Senate had voted 97-0 to reject any agreement that emerged from the session. And the US negotiators, under Gore’s orders, started furiously backpedaling from previous commitments almost the as soon as they stepped off the plane. In the end, the Kyoto accord was a feeble one, requiring the signatories from 37 industrialized nations to only reduce their carbon emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 benchmark levels by 2012. And there was plenty of loopholes to excuse not meeting even these modest reductions.

But as the clock closed on the Clinton administration, Congress still had not moved to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and at a meeting in The Hague, the US outraged the European community by attempting to scuttle the accords by pushing for even more “flexibility” in evaluating emission reductions. The US representatives, now thoroughly marinated in the language of neo-liberal, or market-based, environmentalism, pushed for the use of credits for carbon “sinks”—forests and other lands that absorb carbon dioxide pollution—and for emissions trading to help nations meet their goals. This was a particularly galling position considering the fact that although the United States contains only 5 percent of the world’s population, it is responsible for more than 23 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

After eight years of Clintonism, American environmentalists found themselves in a paradoxical fix: popular support for their causes had never been higher, but their political influence was steadily eroding. The 2000 presidential election saw the movement sharply divided, in conflict with itself. Pragmatists sided with Al Gore, despite his ineffectual record; idealists and radicals threw themselves behind the Green Party run of Ralph Nader. In the end, both camps would be disappointed.

George W. Bush, however, turned out to be the unwitting savior of the environmental movement—even as he and his oil-drenched cabinet plotted the plunder of what was left of the natural world. That’s because of a simple truism: environmentalists are better on the defensive, when they’re on the outside, with their backs against the wall. Like James Watt, Bush and Cheney became a mobilizing force. The green fundraising machines cranked into action and millions poured into the coffers of the green establishment.

On the frontlines of the war on the environment, Bush brought clarity. There was no mistaking his intentions, as so many did under Clinton.

* * *

Over the course of the last 30 years, US environmentalism has become a big business. Nine of the biggest green groups enjoy budgets of more than $30 million a year, while four have budgets in excess of $50 million. This newfound wealth inevitably has made Gang Green more cautious and politically timid. Thus the divisions between inside-the-Beltway groups, national organizations and more militant and grassroots have become ever more fractious. Even Earth First! Has been out-radicalized by the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front, which has torched ski resorts, luxury homes built in the wilderness and biotech operations.

Meanwhile, a new internationalist environmentalism is taking root. On matters such as global warming, ozone depletion, and pesticides, the European Union has enacted more protective policies than the US government. Greens have come to political power in Germany, amassing seats in parliament and forming part of the cabinet in 2002. In France, José Bové and his band of militant farmers gained international headlines for challenging corporations such as McDonald’s and Monsanto. Similar movements are taking hold in India, Russia, South Africa and across Latin America. When Subcomandante Marcos led his Zapatista army of Mayan rebels into Mexico City in 2001, the 150,000 people who packed Zocalo Plaza heard Marcos deliver a fiery speech that linked indigenous rights, economic justice and environmental protection.

All of these disparate strains of environmentalism converge on the streets of Seattle on November 30, 1999 protesting the World Trade Organization. Organic farmers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Earth First!ers and human rights campaigners, trade unionists and animal rights advocates—all united in a common desire to shut down this coven of global finance ministers. The WTO was viewed by the street marchers as the mouthpiece of a global economic system that tramples indigenous people, exploits workers, circumvents national laws and ravages nature. Ironically, the consolidation of the corporate world had served the function of consolidating the opposition to it. The movement assembled on the streets of Seattle was a snapshot of the new face of environmentalism: internationalist in perspective, anti-corporate in tone and unified by a desire for social and ecological justice.

Dave Brower was in Seattle that week. Though weakened by cancer, there was the old fire in his eyes. His 88-year-old heart was with the street protesters. The arc of Brower’s life parallels the course of the environmental movement itself: from elitist hiking clubs to political players to militant confrontations with corporate power. Through decades of bitter battles, Brower never relinquished his optimism. The archdruid always spoke of the possibility of radical change and of the ability of popular movements to take on and defeat entrenched power.

On that misty day in Seattle, Brower pointed to the clouds of tears and said, “Our future is out there on the streets. It’s alive and well and fighting harder than ever.”

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of sitka.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press.

(This article is excerpted from Green Scare: the New War on Environmentalism by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.)

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07092010.html

Jan Lundberg Attacks Sierra Club’s Support for “Clean Cars”

Our good friends The Sierra Club are at it again – this time with regards to motor transport. The Sierra Club believe you can have “clean cars” as demonstrated by this press release, emanating from the new radical Executive Director, Michael Brune (didn’t take long for him to become a member of the establishment, did it?):

New Global Warming and Fuel Economy Standards for Autos a Major Win for America

Washington, D.C.—The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation today finalized important new combined global warming emissions and fuel economy standards for autos for the years 2012-2016. The new standards will bring fuel economy to 35.5 miles per gallon and carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced to 250 grams per mile. The efficiency gains in the autos sold under these standards will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil. This is the first time the Clean Air Act has been used to directly tackle global warming emissions and is also the first significant increase in fuel economy standards since the original 1975 CAFE standards.

Statement of Michael Brune, Sierra Club Executive Director

“These standards are a grand slam: billions of dollars in consumer savings at the pump, a huge reduction in oil use, significant cuts in pollution, and they will help a more sustainable domestic auto industry thrive. Sierra Club pushed hard to pass the California law that set the stage for these standards, our members pushed for the Calfornia standards to be adopted in more than a dozen other states across the country, and we defended them all the way to the Supreme Court. The ambitious standards being finalized today were made possible by these years of hard work and we are delighted to see them become the law of the land.

“Today’s new national standards are the result of state leadership and the leadership of President Obama and his cabinet, including EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Driving vehicle standards forward to 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 is a result of President Obama’s work to bring together automakers, state leaders, environmentalists, and labor unions to secure a win for the nation.

“The new tailpipe standards, promulgated under the Clean Air Act, demonstrate the Act’s power to spur innovation, fuel economic growth, protect our air, make America more energy independent, and fight global warming. Instead of using this and other important tools in the Clean Air Act to accelerate our transition to a clean energy future, some in Congress want to slam on the brakes and actually shift the country into reverse by gutting the Clean Air Act. We cannot allow this happen. It would be bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for America. The only people it would be good for are Big Oil, big polluters, and America’s enemies overseas who continue to profit from our dangerous dependence on oil.”

Consumer savings? Helping the auto industry thrive? Fuel economic growth?

Not surprisingly, those people who have their hypocrisy detectors switched on, are furious at the double (triple) standards being shown by Sierra Club in this latest industrial-political love-in. Jan Lundberg, editor-in-chief at Culture Change, and expert on the oil industry wrote the following on a climate change forum which deserves to be published – with his permission – as widely as possible:

The Sierra Club is the quintessential “Liberals in Volvos with bumper stickers” imagining that reforming the system will fix inconvenient crises. I don’t mean to minimize good work, especially by Sierra Club chapters. But nationally the Club would not join our Alliance for a Paving Moratorium all through the 1990s because they thought that their anti-sprawl campaign could somehow be effective when more roads were allowed to be built or widened! And if the Club ever opposed a road project, the “solution” was to have the roadway plan relocated so as not to damage a sensitive ecosystem quite so much (as if a nearby ecosystem could be sacrificed instead).

What can you expect from a magazine, Sierra, that has had full page ads from Honda and Toyota for decades? That’s money in the pockets of nonprofit staffers who probably have cars too (and refrigerators, TVs, computers, etc., all of which trash the Earth when an overpopulated society is participating in consumerism).

You and I probably waste our time with these inquiries. In my experience the response is polite and gently defensive, as if the good an organization does makes any deficiencies insignificant.

The idea of 200,000,000 cars replaced in this country by slightly more efficient technology is the height of hypocritical idiocy, both on ecological grounds and from a peak oil standpoint. And as for the 1,000,000 animals smashed to death on U.S. roads every day by clunker and Prius alike — John Muir would not approve for one minute. David Brower did not either, which is one indication of why he was previously sacked as too aggressive for defending Mother Earth.

Jan

http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2010/04/08/jan-lundberg-attacks-sierra-clubs-support-for-clean-cars/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Sierra Club members call for Leadership

Sierra Club members call for Leadership:

Do not put special financial interests above

the sustainability of nature’s planetary life-support systems.

June 24, 2010

BACKGROUND:

We are alarmed by the current Sierra Club stance on the Kerry-Lieberman Federal energy-climate bill. Although a Clubhouse web site has been accepting comment about the topic, there has been no organized “pro and con” debate within the Club and it has seemed at least to many members within the Club that the Club’s leadership has been discounting or ignoring grassroots views and proposals. The proposed Resolution, if passed, seeks to place a moratorium on the Sierra Club’s stance until there is a full and democratic opportunity for robust discussion and debate at the grassroots level. The Resolution has been independently circulated to some Club members and chapters by Sierrans Gary Houser (Ohio Chapter) and Robert Jereski (New York Chapter).

STATEMENT:

1. The issue of climate disruption from carbon emissions is of such transcendent importance and irreversible tipping points are so close that the Sierra Club’s stance on Federal energy legislation deserves full and democratic discussion and debate within the Club involving grassroots Sierrans;

2. This Resolution is meant to express concern that tipping point dangers will not accommodate political deal-making and governments should not put special financial interests above young people and the sustainability of nature’s planetary life-support systems on which we all depend. It aims at persuading the Club’s leadership not to compromise Club principles to gain a piece of legislation so flawed that it may worsen, not lessen, carbon emissions – and create future barriers to real reductions;

3. The Resolution’s thrust is consistent with the views of NASA’s Dr. James Hansen, renowned climate scientist and the honored recipient of Sierra Club’s John Muir Award in 2008, that the climate situation is far more serious than most of the public understands and that half-measures won’t suffice;

4. The Resolution will help stop problematic statements by some Club officers that the proposed Kerry-Lieberman climate bill is a “strong foundation” and simply needs to be “finished”. Many within the grassroots disagree, and see it as dangerously riddled with emission reduction delays and giveaways to industry requiring serious amendments;

5. The Resolution supplements earlier, unsuccessful attempts to present these concerns to the Club’s leadership.

RESOLUTION:

We call upon the members of the national Board of Directors, the members of the Federal and International Climate Committee (FICC), the Executive Director Michael Brune and the national staff to affirm and implement a policy that the Sierra Club will only support climate legislation which conforms to Club principles and policies. We also call upon the national leadership of Sierra Club to institute an immediate moratorium on official statements to the media in regard to the Kerry-Lieberman bill until such time that the full membership has been allowed an opportunity to have a democratic discussion and debate.

This moratorium should be followed by these pro-active steps to facilitate an opportunity for full discussion and debate:

1) A one hour national Sierra conference call or webcast be organized for the purpose of facilitating a pro and con debate on the following questions as they relate to the Kerry-Lieberman bill:

A) Do the emission reduction targets adequately comply with the IPCC’s stated reductions of 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 to prevent irreversible climate change and added reductions required based on review of new empirical evidence and the inadequacy of the models used in the 2007 IPCC report which were based on 2005 science?

B) Can the structures employed by this legislation – including carbon trading and offsets – be depended upon to bring about the required deep cuts in emission levels?

C) Should the Sierra Club support legislation with serious deficiencies, such as corporate give-aways, gutting of EPA authority, subsidies to nuclear power, limits on state programs, and so forth, under the argument that a faulty bill is better than nothing?

2) An email be sent to the full national membership of the Sierra Club offering the opportunity for pro and con arguments on these same questions;

3) The pro and con arguments submitted be made public to members and analyzed by the FICC and Board of Directors, which report on how the input will be integrated into the official stance of the Sierra Club on the Kerry-Lieberman bill.

TO ADD YOUR SUPPORT, PLEASE INSERT YOUR NAME AND SIERRA CLUB AFFILIATION HERE:

* Edward A. Mainland, Co-Chair, Energy-Climate Committee, CNRCC Sierra Club California; SF Bay Chapter member;

Senior Conservation Fellow, Sierra Club.

* Ken Smokoska, member & past chair (2003-2008)

Energy/Climate Change Committee of CNRCC, Sierra Club of California

* Al Weinrub, Energy activist member, San Francisco Bay Chapter, Sierra Club of California

* Moisha K. Blechman, member, ExCom, Atlantic Chapter, Global Warming Chair, Communications Chair

*Jessica Helm, Conservation Chair for the Atlantic Chapter

* Anne Marie Garti, member, SC Atlantic Chapter (NYS)

* Joan Taylor, Chair of the California/Nevada Desert Energy Committee, Sierra Club of California

among other titles and member and Club activist for many decades

* Frank Morris, Executive Committee, Atlantic Chapter Sierra Club

Executive Committee, Long Island Sierra Club

* Mickey Moritz, Climate Change Activist for Tahquitz Group, San Gorgonio chapter (California)

* Linda A. DeStefano, active on the local and state level with the Atlantic Chapter (NYS)

* Terry Frewin, Los Padres Chapter, Sierra Club member

* Arthur R. Boone, Member, Northern Alameda Group

Member and Secretary, Zero Waste Committee, SF Bay Chapter

Chair, Conservation Committee, SF Bay Chapter

Co-Chair, Zero Waste Committee, California/Nevada Regional Conservation Committee

* Donna Tisdale, San Diego Chapter, California Sierra Club

* David G. Gray, Jr, San Francisco Bay Chapter, California Sierra Club

* Samuel Golding – Sierra Club California Energy-Climate Committee, Bay Area Chapter member, California Sierra Club

* Larry Martin, Washington DC Chapter Energy Committee Chair

* Rachel Treichler, Atlantic Chapter Gas Drilling Task Force (New York State)

To add your name and affiliation please contact us at:contact@climatesos.org

Sierra Club Chooses Corporate Sponsorship Over Grassroots Activists

Sierra Club Chooses Corporate Sponsorship Over Grassroots Activists

June 16, 2010

There is no shortage of worthy targets in the gulf cleanup effort that the Sierra Club could be aiming for right now: the Center for Biological Diversity exposed Ken Salazar for granting new drilling permits after he said there was a moratorium. Food & Water Watch filed suit against Salazar to force the shutdown BP’s Atlantis, the second largest deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico, after a former BP employee warned that it was not fit for operation. Even the National Resources Defense Council joined Jerry Nadler and Jim Oberstar to demand OSHA stop acting as a front for BP and require appropriate protective gear for cleanup workers.

So where is the Sierra Club focusing its attention? Last Tuesday, the Obama administration said that they will proceed with offshore drilling after a temporary ban. The Sierra Club issued a press release saying “It’s encouraging to see the Obama administration taking steps to improve safety regulations for offshore drilling.” On that same day, they took out a full page ad in the Washington Post, thanking Obama for putting a hold on an Alaska drilling project (no press release).

How this furthers the interests of environmentalism I’m not sure, but it sure helps a White House nervous about Obama’s poll numbers in the wake of the BP oil crisis.

Sierra Club loyalists were quick to defend the club, saying that the Sierra Club is a “grassroots organization” and that the article “insults those very volunteers and every Sierra Club member who has ever volunteered to help with an environmental cause.”

There was absolutely no insult meant towards those that donate their time and money to the Sierra Club’s efforts. Quite the opposite. I respect the work that committed grassroots environmentalists do, and believe it’s important to ask if there are other organizations out there more deserving of their support. I do not believe that the Sierra Club, which has aligned itself so tightly with political and corporate interests, is providing leadership worthy of those efforts.

The Sierra Club’s alliance with elite interests has turned it into the antithesis of a “grassroots” organization.

According to the Associated Press, in 2002 Sierra Club head Carl Pope threatened to dissolve the southern Utah chapter for “speaking out against the Bush administration’s push toward war with Iraq.” The Sierra Club’s Board of Directors had passed a resolution “supporting efforts to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction” (i.e., supporting the war), and at the same time warned that Sierra Club policy “does not authorize individual members, leaders or club entities to take public positions on military conflicts as they arise.”

While I understand the need for the national organization to impose some kind of order on local chapters, it’s quite something to demand that 700,000 environmentalists toe the line and support the Iraq war, especially after the Sierra Club board made the unilateral decision to pull down “all television, radio and print ads, shut down phone banks and removed internet material seen as critical of Bush.”

In an email, Pope said “I would leave dissolving the group as a means of last resort if acting against individuals who won’t adhere to club policy fails to resolve the situation.” It was only after the email was published by the LA Times that the Sierra Club changed its position and opposed the war.

Then in 2007, the Sierra Club board took the unusual step of selling the club’s brand name to a greenwashing campaign by Clorox:

This is the first time in Sierra Club’s 116-year history that it has endorsed a product and even Club executive director Carl Pope, who’s been a driving force in the partnership, admitted that the decision by a well-known environmental group to endorse a company known for its bleach, plastics, and chemical products is “controversial.”

Well, yes, “controversial” is one word. The very same month the partnership was announced, Clorox was fined $95,000 by the EPA for “donating illegal, mislabeled, Chinese versions of its disinfecting bleach to a Los Angeles charity.”

The Sierra Club Board of Directors overrode the Club’s own Corporate Relations Committee to approve the Clorox deal.

Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation, said that the Chemical Industry of California “was using the Sierra Club/Clorox deal to try to deflect attention away from a new report [PDF] showing that the chemical industry sickens and kills thousands of Californians each year, costing the state an estimated $2.6 billion in medical expenses and lost wages.”

On March 1 of this year, Clorox proudly announced that they have paid $1.1 million to the Sierra Club to date under the deal.

The Sierra Club should have expected that many of their members would have a problem with a deal to greenwash a company that US PIRG had named “one of America’s most chemically dangerous companies” (PDF).

Instead, the Sierra Club Board of Directors voted to suspend the 35,000-member Florida chapter for four years and remove its leadership after they spoke out in opposition to the Clorox deal.

Michael Donnelly has been writing about the problem of the “Democratic/Green revolving door,” and how organizations that add their support to corporate-friendly legislation are routinely rewarded with big foundation grants (and will somebody please do an expose of the role foundations play in laundering money to buy progressive validators for corporatist legislation?). It has led to the corruption of progressive groups across the board.

The Sierra Club is now fiercely advocating for the passage of Kerry-Lieberman. But as James Handley says:

In exchange for an energy-giveaway bill masquerading as a climate bill, they’re in effect lobbying for dirty energy subsidies and for undercutting much of EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases — an authority that these same groups once vigorously defended, and which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court.

Carbon cap and trade was a scheme cooked up by BP and Enron lobbyists in the mid nineties. BP has subsequently dropped millions of dollars into the coffers of green groups to pave the way for it. Obama’s cry to pass Kerry-Lieberman as punishment for BP is not only highly ironic, it’s also illustrative of just how broken our national discourse around environmental issues has become.

Until progressive groups successfully address the challenge of funding themselves independent of the elite individuals and institutions that act as enforcers of a corporate agenda, they will not be able to successfully advocate for progressive causes. Any success they might have will mean that their funding dries up, and they will cease to exist.

The Sierra Club is a marquee name that has indeed gone for the green: cash. Environmental activists should carefully examine the way in which the organization is operating, and whether its agenda is worthy of continued support.

Follow Jane Hamsher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/janehamsher

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/sierra-club-pro-corporate_b_614457.html

Read More: Bp , Carl Pope , Clorox , Iraq War , Kerry Lieberman Climate Bill , Sierra Club , Green News

Why The Sierra Club No Longer Deserves Your Trust

Why The Sierra Club No Longer Deserves Your Trust

Jane Hamsher

Founder, FireDogLake.com

Posted: June 14, 2010 01:52 PM

There has been a massive silence on the part of the major environmental groups in the wake of the BP oil catastrophe, ever since the rig collapsed.

But it went into overdrive last week when many of those groups took out an ad in the Washington Post, not to criticize the government’s response, but to praise the president for putting a hold on a drilling project in Alaska…

The Sierra Club has one of the most well-known progressive brands, and their membership is both deep and broad. Their ability to successfully advocate for environmental causes doesn’t depend on access to politicians. It appears that they have opted for an “inside” game, and have completely dropped the ball on pressuring elected officials from the outside — right when their efforts could have the most impact….

More at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/why-the-sierra-club-no-lo_b_611447.html

Background (from the same author) on how the Obama admin. silences opposition from progressives at http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/09/06/van-jones-a-moment-of-truth-for-liberal-institutions-in-the-veal-pen/

Nature Conservancy’s ties to BP (+ Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Etc.)

Nature Conservancy faces potential backlash from ties with BP

By Joe Stephens

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, May 23, 2010; 12:30 PM

In the days after the immensity of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico

became clear, some Nature Conservancy supporters took to the

organization’s web site to vent their anger.

“The first thing I did was sell my shares in BP, not wanting anything to

do with a company that is so careless,” wrote one. Another added: “I

would like to force all the BP executives, the secretaries and the

shareholders out to the shore to mop up oil and wash the birds.” Reagan

De Leon of Hawaii called for a boycott of “everything BP has their hands

in.”

What De Leon didn’t know was that the Nature Conservancy lists BP as one

of its business partners. The organization also has given BP a seat on

its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million

in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over

the years.

“Oh, wow,” De Leon said when told of the depth of the relationship

between the nonprofit she loves and the company she hates. “That’s kind

of disturbing.”

The Conservancy, already scrambling to shield oyster beds in the region

from the spill, now faces a different problem: a potential backlash as

its supporters learn that the giant oil company and the world’s largest

environmental organization long ago forged a relationship that has lent

BP an Earth-friendly image and helped the Conservancy pursue causes it

holds dear.

Indeed, the crude emanating from BP’s well threatens to befoul a number

of such alliances that have formed between energy conglomerates and

environmental non-profits. At least one conservation group acknowledges

that it is reassessing its ties to the oil company, with an eye toward

protecting its reputation.

“This is going to be a real test for charities such as the Nature

Conservancy,” said Dean Zerbe, a lawyer who investigated the

Conservancy’s relations with its donors when he worked for the Senate

Finance Committee. “This not only stains BP but, if they don’t respond

properly, it also stains those who have been benefiting from their money

and their support.”

Some purists believe environmental organizations should keep a healthy

distance from certain kinds of corporations, particularly those such as

BP, whose core mission poses risks to the environment. They argue that

the BP spill shows the downside to what they view as deals with the devil.

On the other side are self-described pragmatists, such as the

Conservancy, who see partnering with global corporations as the best way

to bring about large-scale change.

“Anyone serious about doing conservation in this region must engage

these companies, so they are not just part of the problem but so they

can be part of the effort to restore this incredible ecosystem,”

Conservancy Chief Executive Mark Tercek wrote on his group’s web site

after criticism from a Conservancy supporter

The Arlington-based Conservancy has made no secret of its relationship

with BP, just one of many it has forged with multi-national

corporations. The Conservancy’s web site identifies BP as a member of

its Leadership Council.

BP has been a major contributor to a Conservancy project aimed at

protecting Bolivian forests. In 2006, BP gave the organization 655 acres

in York County, Va., where a state wildlife management area is planned.

In Colorado and Wyoming, the Conservancy has worked with BP to limit

environmental damage from natural gas drilling.

Until recently, the Conservancy and other environmental groups worked

alongside BP in a coalition that lobbied Congress on climate change

issues. And an employee of BP Exploration serves as an unpaid

Conservancy trustee in Alaska.

“We are getting some important and very tangible outcomes as a result of

our work with the company,” said Conservancy spokesman Jim Petterson.

Reassessing Relationships

The Conservancy has long positioned itself as the leader of a

non-confrontational arm of the environmental movement, and that position

has helped the charity attract tens of millions of dollars a year in

contributions. A number have come from companies whose work takes a toll

on the environment, including those engaged in logging, homebuilding and

power generation.

Conservancy officials say their approach has allowed them to change

company practices from within, leverage the influence of the companies

and protect ecosystems that are under the companies’ control. They

stress that contributions from BP and other large corporations

constitute only a portion of the organization’s total revenue, which now

exceeds a half billion dollars a year.

And the Conservancy is far from the only environmental nonprofit with

ties to BP.

Conservation International has accepted $2 million in donations from BP

over the years and partnered with the company on a number of projects,

including one examining oil extraction methods. From 2000 to 2006, John

Browne, who was then BP’s chief executive, sat on the board of

Conservation International.

In response to the spill, executives at the nonprofit said they plan to

review the organization’s relationship with the company, said Justin

Ward, a Conservation International vice president.

“Reputational risk is on our minds,” Ward acknowledged.

The Environmental Defense Fund, which has a policy of not accepting

corporate donations, joined with BP, Shell International and other major

corporations to form the Partnership for Climate Action, which promotes

“market-based mechanisms” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And about 20 energy and environmental groups, including the Conservancy,

the Sierra Club and Audubon, joined with BP Wind Energy to form the

American Wind and Wildlife Institute, which works to protect wildlife

through “responsible” development of wind farms.

A Rude Awakening

On May 1, Tercek posted a statement on the Conservancy’s site, writing

that it was “difficult to fathom the tragedy” that was unfolding but

adding that “now is not the time for ranting.” He didn’t make any

mention of BP.

Nate Swick, a blogger and dedicated bird watcher from Chapel Hill,

chastised Tercek on the site for not adequately disclosing the

Conservancy’s connections to BP and not working to hold the company

accountable. Swick said in an interview that he considered BP’s payments

to the organization to be an obvious attempt at “greenwashing” its image.

“You have to wonder whether the higher-ups in the Nature Conservancy are

pulling their punches,” said Swick, who admires the work the Conservancy

does in the field.

A Conservancy official quickly responded to Swick’s accusations, laying

out the organization’s ties with BP. A subsequent post by Tercek named

BP and said the spill demonstrated the need for a new energy policy that

would move the United States “away from our dependence on oil.”

“The oil industry is a major player in the Gulf,” he explained. “It

would be na?ve to ignore them.”

There may be a sense of d?j? vu among longtimers at the Conservancy.

Years ago, worried officials there quietly assembled focus groups and

found that most members saw a partnership with BP as “inappropriate.”

The 2001 study, obtained by The Washington Post, found that many

Conservancy members felt a relationship with an oil company was

“inherently incompatible.” And to a minority of members, accepting cash

from these types of companies was viewed as “the equivalent of a payoff.”

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052302164.html

Why Big Green Must Die

May 17, 2010

Why Big Green Must Die

Salazar Unleashed

By JOHN HALLE

Following the announcement of the right wing rogues’ gallery which would serve as Obama’s cabinet, the appointment of Ken Salazar, a well known shill for the oil and gas industry, elicited comparatively little comment.

Among the few who managed to express their outrage was Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity who described Salazar as “a right-of-center Democrat who often favors industry and big agricultural interests in battles over global warming, fuel efficiency and endangered species.” (See also Jeffrey St. Clair’s “Ken Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground” and Obama’s Used Green Team and Phillip Doe’s “The Man in the Hat“.)

Those recalling the narcotized climate of the early Obama administration won’t be surprised that these other warnings were never heard underneath the waving of pom-poms and the mindless chanting of the mantra “It’s not the personnel, it’s the policy.”

That this phrase has now become a sick joke is the essential lesson of last Friday’s New York Times which reports that under Salazar’s stewardship “(t)he federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico.”

These were issued “without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.”

In the weeks to come, as the true extent of the catastrophe emerges, more fingers will be pointed at Salazar, possibly even leading to his resignation.

But Salazar shouldn’t take the hit.

Who deserves the blame for Salazar are those who unleashed him on us.

These include Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke who “welcome(d) the news” of Salazar’s appointment, noting that “Salazar’s own connection to the land gives me hope.”

No less effusive was Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said, “Senator Ken Salazar as been “a champion for America’s public lands.”

The League of Conservation Voters Gene Karpinsky weighed in, praising Obama for “Filling his cabinet and administration with environmental stewards, dedicated staff, scientists and experts.”

Not to be outdone, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club described President Obama as “the Greenest President in history” specifically singling out Salazar for having “act(ed) on the scientific evidence that a disrupted climate means that federal land managers must take into account the need for connecting ecosystems to preserve their natural values.”

And so rather than turning him back, Salazar was provided with the Green stamp of approval with completely predictable consequences.

Those who deserve the blame are those whose silence mattered and who could have made a difference if they spoke. And whose complicity equalled death for the Gulf of Mexico.

If we didn’t know it by now, the lesson for us is patent:

For the environment to live, the big green groups, the enablers of Salazar, this and other environmental atrocities to come, must die.

John Halle is Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College. He can be reached at: halle

http://counterpunch.org/halle05172010.html

COMMON DREAMS | Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate

Note – This article has been endorsed by James Hansen.

Published on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Mainstream Green Groups Cave In on Climate

Dangerously Allow Industry to Set Agenda

by Gary Houser and Cory Morningstar

“Governments will not put young people and nature above special financial interests without great public pressure. Such pressure is not possible as long as big environmental organizations provide cover. So the best hope is this — individuals must demand that the leaders change course or they will lose support.” – Dr. James Hansen

With climate scientists warning that we are in a global emergency and tipping points leading to runaway catastrophe will be crossed unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, one would expect groups identified as environmental defenders to be shifting into high gear. Instead, we are witnessing the unspeakably tragic spectacle of a mainstream environmental movement allowing itself to be seduced and co-opted by the very forces it should be vehemently opposing. At the very moment when moral leadership and courage are needed the most, what we see is a colossal failure of both – with potentially irreversible consequences for our civilization. If Congress chooses an inadequate response to the crisis, policies can get “locked in” which virtually guarantee that these tipping points are crossed. These organizations are using their significant financial resources to create a public impression that the “environmental community” has given its “stamp of approval” to this policy and to marginalize the voices of the genuine grassroots activists who represent the heart and soul of the climate movement. With nothing less than the future of the planet at stake, these groups must now be publicly challenged and held accountable for their actions.

The stage has been set for this necessary debate by publication of Johann Hari’s excellent commentary entitled “The Wrong Kind of Green“. In this piece, Hari provides important insight into some of the relevant history. He describes how in the 1980s and 1990s some of the larger environmental groups began to adopt a policy often called “corporate engagement”. The basic idea was that by participating in “partnerships” with corporations – some involving receipt of monetary contributions – there would be opportunity to exert positive influence.

It is not possible to look into the minds of those who promoted this shift. Perhaps there was a sincere hope that corporations would be moved toward more responsible behavior. Whatever the case, the critically important task at this time is not to evaluate possible motives but rather the real life consequences. To do so honestly, all self-interested blinders must be set aside.

The truth is that this policy has created a “slippery slope” leading to severely compromised stances – nowhere more apparent than in regard to the over-arching issue of climate. In 2007, a coalition was formed between corporations and environmental organizations called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or USCAP – whose purpose was to influence U.S. climate legislation. Some of the large groups that joined were Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Nature Conservancy, and National Wildlife Foundation. In January 2009, USCAP presented its proposals and these became the framework of the Waxman-Markey bill.

The physical context is that previously projected worst case scenarios are already being surpassed and humanity is running out of time. Ice is melting far more rapidly than expected, releasing the “albedo effect” where open water absorbs more heat and accelerates further melting. The normally quite cautious National Science Foundation is ringing alarm bells about the methane – a greenhouse gas over 30 times as powerful as CO2 – now venting from the Siberian seabeds. According to the NSF statement: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” These are only two examples of “reinforcing feedbacks” that can significantly move the process closer to tipping points.

Within a context so dire that in reality a war-time level of mobilization is needed, what kind of legislation is being offered? First of all, the emission reduction targets themselves – apart from the theoretical strategies for achieving them – categorically ignore the science. The goals do not even aim at stabilization at 350 ppm (let alone the lower figures more likely to be necessary) and the time frame for enacting meaningful reductions is not even remotely close to the speed needed to prevent disaster.

Beyond the issue of targets is that of reduction strategies. USCAP would like to see a trillion dollar carbon market put into place, where traders can claim “pollution rights” to the sky and seek profits from the exchange of such “rights”. Such a system – which would determine whether life-supporting ecosystems survive or collapse – would be placed into the same manipulative hands on Wall Street that brought on the financial meltdown. As this commentary goes to press, several traders in the European carbon market (the world’s prototype) have been arrested in connection with a

), NRDC and EDF are sending their own people to promote it at carbon trade conferences.

The next immoral concession is to allow the industry to “buy” its way out of actually reducing emissions by supporting so-called “offsets” – such as forest preservation projects in the developing world. Sounding plausible in theory, offsets are actually riddled with verification issues and defects such as loggers simply moving elsewhere. But the bottomline “wrong” here is that any form of offsetting should never be looked at as an alternative to reducing emissions. It should only be seen as an additional action to take.

Then there is the unbelievable capitulation represented by the removal of EPA authority to regulate coal-burning. Now that the EPA has finally been empowered by the Supreme Court to act against a carbon-fueled ecocide, this ability has been effectively stripped from the House bill without a murmur from the USCAP “greens”. The result of all these concessions is a pathetically weak bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will not even begin to reduce emissions until 2018. Other studies indicate that if all available offsets are used, reductions could actually be postponed an astonishing 19 years until 2029.

The USCAP “greens” proclaim that their positions are being driven by “political expediency”. But there is a stunning “disconnect” which these groups have been reticent to address. How does one negotiate with a melting iceberg? Can the inexorable laws of physics be placed “on hold” while emission reductions are scuttled in a process of political “horse-trading”? What is the meaning of “expediency” when it leads to the collapse of society as we know it? John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseach, stated at the “4 Degrees and Beyond” conference at Oxford that “political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it is completely useless”.

The Sierra Club is experiencing what may be a positive change in leadership and to its credit has not adopted the policy of “corporate engagement” described, yet it has failed to truly mobilize its base against the dangerous shortcomings of the USCAP endorsed legislation. In 2008, the Sierra Club bestowed its highest honor – the John Muir Award – to climate scientist Dr. James Hansen. In presenting the award, Sierra Club President Allison Chin said: “He is truly a hero for preserving the environment”. How does the Sierra Club reconcile the honoring of this man for warning the world and then essentially ignore his core message that present climate legislation is based on false solutions that will waste precious time?

NRDC and EDF, on the other hand, have gone far beyond mere silence. While their websites claim a dedication to public service ( NRDC’s motto is “The Earth’s Best Defense”), they have been actively promoting the USCAP accomodation. If they had not lost sight of their original missions, they would have sought out members of Congress willing to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and used their resources (in 2008, NRDC had an operational budget of 87 million dollars) to throw weight behind them. Instead of emboldening this kind of voice, they have done the exact opposite by allowing industry to define what is “feasible”.

The real climate movement – the one with its backbone intact and composed of grassroots activists and principled groups like Friends of the Earth and Center for Biological Diversity – is already in a “David versus Goliath” situation as it tries to confront the most powerful lobby in the country. But that task has been made infinitely more difficult by these big budget groups using their money to isolate and “box in” the smaller ones.

We close this commentary with the following direct appeal to both the leadership and the members of these groups that have chosen the path of accommodation:

The verdict is in. Your experiment in “corporate engagement” has resulted in a disastrous failure that now threatens the planet. We fully expected the massive campaign from the fossil fuel industry to strip any substance from this legislation. But you have blindsided those of us who are fighting with all our hearts for the future of the earth. Your coffers have grown and now you are using this money to drown us out.

Your stance does not represent those in the grassroots movement, many of whom are young and see the disasters that are looming within their own lifetimes. In your comfortable offices, you do not speak for those willing to put themselves on the line and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against the very forces you seek to accomodate. The rationale for your corporate “partnerships” was the issue of exerting influence. But the question begging to be asked is who influenced whom? Though your treasury is more full, what truly has been gained and what has been lost?

Your intentions may have been honorable, but the agenda of “defending earth” has been hijacked. Along the way, your vision became blurred and you lost sight of this mission. In this “experiment’, you are the ones who have been “had”. It now appears to have been a terrible Faustian bargain, and we are all paying the price. At the very moment of greatest need for an empowered public advocacy in the face of the most overwhelming threat in human history, your leadership is not to be found.

Your accommodation and your defense of abominably weak Congressional legislation has already had a destructive global impact. It was this legislation that set the bar intolerably low in Copenhagen and instigated a “race to the bottom”. The entire world-wide movement for climate sanity has become blocked by the denial, blindness, and paralysis embodied in U.S. climate policy. When you take this stance in the name of “defending the earth”, you are actually creating an insidious and dangerous deception.

For the sake of the planet, we appeal to your organizations to reclaim the integrity of your original visions. The position you presently advocate will squander the precious little time we have to implement true reductions before the irreversible tipping points are crossed. The stakes could not be higher. We ask that you join hands with the grassroots activists and groups and support the following eight points:

1) Officially recognize that we are truly in a global emergency and that irreversible tipping points are likely to be crossed if humanity does not act in time;

2) Officially recognize that this emergency is of such a magnitude that a war time level of mobilization is needed in order to effectively deal with it;

3) Stand squarely for the necessity that climate legislation be based on the setting of emission reduction targets and a time frame which are defined by the science;

4) Due to the severe ecosystem damage that will ensue in response to a 2 degree (celsius) rise, an overall goal of no more than one degree (celsius) rise must be sought;

5) Clearly renounce cap and trade and offsets as false solutions that will squander precious time;

6) Stand squarely against any attempt in Congress to strip EPA of its authority to regulate carbon;

7) Support a comprehensive approach to the crisis that combines elements of legislation, regulation, and public investment;

8) Support a legislative component based on a continually rising carbon fee with a 100% distribution of the proceeds to U.S. citizens, with the amount of the fee determined by an emission reduction schedule driven by science.

We also ask the members of these groups to withhold their organizational support until their leadership recognizes the necessity of these changes. On this defining issue of our time, may we strive to remove the barriers that divide us and work together.

Gary Houser is a public interest writer, documentary producer, and activist with Climate SOS seeking to raise awareness within the religious community (here) about the moral issues at stake and working to create a more empowered climate movement.

Cory Morningstar, in addition to being a mom, is an activist with Canadians for Action on Climate Change and has collated latest scientific findings here.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/20-1

Conservation Groups & Corporate Cash: An Exchange

Johann Hari’s piece “The Wrong Kind of Green” takes mainstream environmental groups to task for selling out their principles, often in exchange for money from the worst polluters. Posing the question, “How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we have left?” Hari argues that we have no choice but to confront the movement’s addiction to corporate cash and its penchant for environmentally destructive political deal-making–even if doing so requires having a “difficult and ugly fight.” We invited a range of green groups mentioned in the article to respond to Hari’s arguments in this special online forum, which concludes with Hari’s reply. Readers may also be interested in the web letters written about the piece.   –The Editors

Christine Dorsey, National Wildlife Federation Leah Hair, National Wildlife Federation Phil Radford, Greenpeace John Adams, Natural Resources Defense Council Kieran Suckling, Center for Biological Diversity Carl Pope, Sierra Club Bill McKibben, 350.org Karen Foerstel, The Nature Conservancy Johann Hari, The Nation

National Wildlife Federation

Christine Dorsey

The Nation‘s cover story “The Wrong Kind of Green” is an irresponsible and toxic mixture of inaccurate information and uninformed analysis. The author, who did not contact the National Wildlife Federation for this story, has written a work of fiction that hardly merits a response, except that it stoops to a new low by attacking the reputation of the late Jay Hair, a former CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, whose powerful legacy of conservation achievement speaks for itself.

In case The Nation is interested in publishing facts, the National Wildlife Federation is funded primarily by the generous donations of 4 million members and supporters. Corporate partnerships for our educational work account for less than 1/2 of 1 percent of our funding. Our dedicated staff, volunteers and state affiliates fight tirelessly to take on polluters, protect wildlife habitat, promote clean energy and educate families about wildlife and the importance of spending time outdoors in nature.

What will The Nation do next, blame polar bears for global warming?

National Wildlife Federation

Leah Hair

In “The Wrong Kind of Green” Johann Hari made outrageous and entirely false statements about my late husband, Dr. Jay Hair.

Jay died in 2002 after a five-year battle with an incurable bone marrow cancer. He devoted his life, with all his considerable passion, courage and intelligence, to protecting this planet. Jay never betrayed that mission in order to “suck millions,” as the article claimed, from oil and gas companies. During Jay’s tenure as president of the National Wildlife Federation, corporate contributions never exceeded 1 percent of NWF’s budget.

In 1982 Jay established NWF’s Corporate Conservation Council to create a forum for dialogue with Fortune 500 leaders. Prior to this controversial initiative, almost the only place business and environmental leaders met was in court. Jay took considerable heat, but he understood that the enormity of our environmental challenges required that all sectors–private, governmental, NGO, religious–be involved and talking to one another.

The Council was funded solely by its members; NWF’s budget was not drawn upon to create the Council, nor did corporate money from the Council seep into NWF’s regular budget.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez spilled 10 million gallons of Prudhoe crude. Jay was the first national environmental leader to go to Prince William Sound to draw attention to the social and environmental devastation. Under Jay’s leadership, NWF initiated the class action lawsuit against Exxon for punitive damages. He protested on the floor of the Exxon stockholders meeting. If Exxon or anyone else thought that Corporate Conservation Council membership bought them “reputation insurance,” per Mr. Hari, for “an oil spill that had caused irreparable damage,” they clearly were mistaken.

Jay was only 56 when he died. Had he lived, he would have continued to be a passionate and courageous voice on behalf of our imperiled planet.

Your sloppy reporting smeared the reputation of a fine man. You owe an apology.

Greenpeace

Phil Radford, Executive Director

“The Wrong Kind of Green” points to three principles that could make environmental advocacy groups stronger and the world a safer place for our children. First, avoid the perceived or real conflicts of interest created by taking corporate money. Second, start with what must be done to save the environment, not with what we think we can eke out of an unfriendly Congress. Third, the way forward will be bottom-up, shutting and stopping coal plants. I couldn’t agree more.

For forty years, Greenpeace has maintained our financial independence, refusing money from corporations.

A few years ago, Greenpeace and our allies decided to stop deforestation in the Amazon by “convincing” the major industries driving the problem to cease and desist. We would then permanently lock up the forests by securing financing from rich countries. When we discovered that cattle ranching was one of the primary drivers of deforestation, Greenpeace activists throughout the United States and Europe nudged Nike and Timberland to cancel their contracts with leather company causing deforestation. A few cancelled contracts later; the major ranching companies agreed with Greenpeace Brazil to a moratorium on any ranching that causes deforestation.

It doesn’t matter if you work with companies or governments, as long as you are independent, start with the ecological goal, work globally with governments or companies to change the game, and ultimately bring your opponents to a place where they’ll lobby for your law or can’t withstand it.

It is difficult to imagine a way forward on global warming that gets at the root of the problem–coal, the number one cause of global warming pollution–without a plant-by-plant fight to shut down coal. Some have approached coal with an attitude of “if you cant beat them, join them.” The Sierra Club and Greenpeace have a different approach: “beat coal until they join us.”

Natural Resources Defense Council

John Adams, professor of political science, University of Pennsylvania

I read your article “The Wrong Kind of Green” and was disappointed with your comments about Jay Hair, now dead eight years. I have no knowledge of any contributions made from oil and gas to NWF, but what I do know is, Jay was a dedicated environmentalist, and to the best of my knowledge, he did not sell out on any issues. I find it very troubling that someone who cannot defend himself is made the center of this article without many facts backing up the charges.

Center for Biological Diversity

Kieran Suckling, Executive Director

Johann Hari’s article follows upon stories in the Washington Post and E&E which ask similar questions: Why do so many of the large U.S. environmental groups appear to take their lead on climate policy from Congress and the White House? Why do they appear to lack a bottom line on climate policy? He is puzzled by the quick endorsement of weak climate bills, lauding of the Obama administration’s regressive position at Copenhagen, and claims that Copenhagen was a success.

What motivates such positions is unclear. But this much is very clear: as a political strategy, such positioning has been a failure. Congress and the White House have taken progressively weaker positions since early drafts of Markey-Waxman. They are giving ground in the face of corporate opposition and see little reason to move towards environmental groups who have already endorsed weak positions and signaled that they will endorse even weaker positions.

Similarly, it was a strategic mistake to press Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation by pitting it as the alternative to Clean Air Act regulation. The result of that strategy could be (and was) predicted from the outset: climate deniers would latch onto the sense that Clean Air Act regulation is a bad idea and climate supporters (such as Kerry) would feel they have cover to use the Clean Air Act as a bargaining chip to win conservative votes. We would not be looking at such vehement opposition to Clean Air Act and such confusion about its working in the media, had the larger environmental groups been clear from that the outset that the Clean Air Act is effective, should be used to its fullest to combat global warming, and that any new legislation must be additive to the Clean Air Act, not in opposition to it.

Climate and wildlife scientists have convincingly shown that we must reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 350 parts per million from our current level of 387 ppm if we are to avoid runaway global warming and the extinction of polar bears, corals and thousand of other species. The Center for Biological Diversity has joined with groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and 350.org to establish this as a bright line criteria for endorsement of any climate legislation, policy, or international agreement. It is not a negotiable position because the conditions which support life on Earth are not negotiable.

While pushing for new, comprehensive legislation, the Center believes it is imperative that we simultaneously use existing environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act to begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions now and updating land and wildlife management plans to ensure imperiled species are able to survive the level of global warming that is already locked in. We’ve had many successes in this arena and, as Hari describes, recently petitioned the EPA to scientifically determine the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases), just as it does for other criteria air pollutants. We believe that level is 350 parts per million or less.

Hari correctly describes the aggressive, public opposition to having EPA determine this safe level by a faction within the Sierra Club. Even worse, this faction tried to convince other environmental groups to support a congressional vote to prevent the EPA from determining the safe level of greenhouse gas pollution. The scientific determination of a clear greenhouse gas emission target is not in the interest of those who have endorsed vastly weaker targets.

The good news, however, is that the Sierra Club is a diverse and dynamic organization. Many of its leaders (including board members and chapters) are strongly in favor the Center and the 350.org’s petition to cap greenhouse gas emissions. I agree with Hari that recent changes in Sierra Club management are promising and look forward to working with the organization to fully use the power of science, the Clean Air Act, and new legislation to reduce carbon dioxide to 350 part per million. That is unquestionably the task of our generation.

The questions asked by Hari will continue to be posed by astute reporters, and will be asked with increasing urgency as endorsement are lined up for a very weak Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill which will seek to increase oil drilling, continue coal burning and allow greenhouse gas emissions to increase past irrevocable tipping points. Whether one agrees with Hari’s answers or not, his questions are critical for our time. As environmental leaders, we would do well to take them as opportunities for self-reflection rather than defensive dismissal.

You can find more information on the Center for Biological Diversity’s efforts to combat global warming here.

Sierra Club

Carl Pope, executive director

While thin on solutions Hari’s story was so plump with distortions of reality that it might have been written by Lewis Carroll.

Hari’s silliest innuendo is that the Sierra Club is somehow less than aggressive in the fight against coal power. Sierra Club members have blocked no less than 119 coal-fired power plants in recent years and the organization is regarded by friend and foe as the most successful force in the critical effort to scrap coal power. On February 10, even climate scientist James Hansen pulled on a Sierra Club T-shirt and participated in Sierra Student Coalition anticoal rally at the University of North Carolina–one of dozens of such rallies our young activists have held in support of Hansen’s number one anti-climate disruption goal–to move America beyond coal.

The author also offered the false and offensive analogy that Sierra Club’s cause-related marketing partnership with Clorox’s environmentally friendly cleaning products was like Amnesty International being funded by genocidal war criminals. The Sierra Club had ensured that these products met the Environmental Protection Agency’s most stringent standard, “Design for the Environment,” spending four months reviewing Green Works to ensure that it deserved this designation. In the two years since the partnership began, no one has cited any evidence that Green Works products do not meet the environmental claims made for them. They are, rather, helping to increase demand for green products in the marketplace.

Finally, while there are legitimate disagreements between lawyers about the best legal strategies for cutting carbon emissions, we have always supported the deepest emissions cuts in line with the science and need to convert to a new clean energy economy. This includes cuts endorsed by the Center for Biological Diversity, with whom we often join in litigation. Indeed, it was the Sierra Club that helped bring the original suit which led to the Supreme Court Decision that spurred EPA to begin regulating global warming pollution.

350.org

Bill McKibben, founder

Many thanks to Johann Hari for an interesting piece, and for the very kind words about our work. Those of us at 350.org aren’t so much an organization as a campaign, and as such we’ve always looked for allies everywhere. And we’ve managed to find them not only across the environmental spectrum but, just as importantly, from less likely places–churches and synagogues and mosques and temples, sports teams and theater troupes. When we organized our global day of action last October–which CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history”–it involved 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries. Around the world we worked easily and cooperatively with lots of big green groups as well as thousands of organizers from tiny local campaigns, and people who’d never done anything at all.

We were, sometimes, a little surprised at how hard it was to get buy-in to our campaign from some of the big American environmental groups. This piece might explain some of the reasons, but we’re not privy to their councils in those ways. Our guess is that history had something to do with it too–it’s worth remembering, as Hari points out, that these groups were set up and scaled to fight much smaller battles, doing the noble work of saving particular canyons or passing remediating laws. It’s a whole ‘nother level to try and take on fossil fuel, the center of the economy. Using the Sierra Club as an example, it should be noted that even if the front office didn’t like what we were doing, chapters all across America and around the world engaged with the 350 campaign in really great ways, helping pull off rallies and demonstrations. The same was true of many other groups. Which is good, because we’re a tiny outfit–a couple of dozen young people and one rapidly aging writer, spread out across a big planet. Immodestly speaking, we’re good at what we do, but not good enough to replace other organizations. Our real strength, of course, is the amazing volunteers who make the work happen everywhere–including places you’re not supposed to be able to do this work. If you check out the pictures at 350.org, one of the things you’ll be struck by is the fact that environmentalism is no longer something for rich white people. Most of our colleagues are black, brown, Asian, poor, young–because that’s who most of the world is.

One key battle that lies ahead for American groups is passing legislation to finally do something about our enormous contribution to the planet’s rapid warming: when we talk to our organizers in Addis Ababa or Beijing or Quito or pretty much everywhere in between, they say that American legislation is vital before anyone else will take real steps. Our movement-building history–beginning with the StepItUp campaign in 2007, which organized 1400 rallies in all fifty states–would indicate that it’s easier to try to rally people around bold and ambitious goals that would really safeguard our future. The lobbying in DC will go more easily if there’s a real movement around the country making senators feel at least a little inclined towards action, and that movement can only be built behind legislation that would truly change the system.

Copenhagen was a very serious drag–still, it was wonderful to see 117 nations endorsing the 350 target. True, they were the poorer and more vulnerable nations; we’ve still got persuade the real fossil fuel addicts. But the good news is everyone gets another chance to help out, all over the world. Working in collaboration with our UK friends at the 10:10 movement, we’ve set October 10 as the date for a global-scale Work Party, with people across the planet putting up solar panels and insulating houses, all with a 350 theme. The point is not that we’re going to solve climate change one house or solar panel at a time–unfortunately, that’s not mathematically possible. But we can use the occasion to send a distinctly political message to our leaders: we’re doing our work, why aren’t you? If we can get up on the roof of the school with hammers, surely you can find the strength to do your work in the Senate, or the General Assembly. If leaders simply won’t lead, then we’ll have to lead for them. We hope everyone will join in, from big groups and small. Working together is fun and empowering, or so we’ve found.

The Nature Conservancy

Karen Foerstel, director, climate media relations

The article “The Wrong Kind of Green” offers readers in inaccurate and incomplete picture of the role deforestation plays in climate change and the way in which environmental and conservation organizations are fighting for policies to address global warming. For the full story, visit www.nature.org/climatechange.

The Nation

Johann Hari, reporter

It is simply a fact that Jay Hair kick-started the process of environmental groups partnering with and taking money from the world’s worst polluters. It is also a fact that this process has been taken much further by other groups like Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, and has ended with their missions becoming deeply corrupted, in ways I described in great detail in my article. This account of what has happened is not just my view–it’s the view of America’s most distinguished climate scientist, Professor James Hansen, the whistler-blower Christine MacDonald, and of virtually all the environmental groups that don’t take money from polluters.

I am perfectly prepared to accept that Hair was a fine person in his personal life and had some positive motives. Of course his early death is tragic. But many people who have made harmful misjudgments have also had some some admirable achievements in their lives. In public debate, we have to be able to expose the harm they did and show how it continues, or we cannot make sense of the world and prevent even more harm. Is John Adams seriously suggesting that since the dead cannot answer us, we should hold back in our criticism of their actions? How could any serious discussion of how the world came to be as it is take place under such an omertà?

The apology Leah Hair demands is in fact due from the “green” groups who have chosen to take polluter cash and have betrayed their own mission. If she wishes to preserve the best of her husband’s legacy rather than the worst, she should direct her anger at them–rather than at journalists honestly describing how this corruption began.

Rather than engage with the serious issues I raised, Carl Pope sadly plays the old politician’s trick of denying charges I did not make. Where did I say the Sierra Club doesn’t oppose coal? Nowhere. In fact, I did the opposite, writing that “there is an inspiring grassroots movement against coal power plants in the United States, supported by the Sierra Club.”

I went on to describe some plain facts–that under his leadership, the Sierra Club vehemently opposed a lawsuit to force the US government’s policies into line with climate science by returning us to 350ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Pope doesn’t even try to justify this in his response, even though it was the most serious criticism of the club in my article.

The Center for Biological Diversity describes this behavior accurately as throwing “climate science out the window,” and Jim Hansen–the very man Pope waves as a papal authority–describes it as “shocking” and “abominable.” So, yes, the Sierra Club opposes coal in many places and at many times–but it is a matter of record that when there was a lawsuit to ensure the dramatic scale- back we need to preserve a safe climate, they lined up with former Bush administration members to mock and condemn it. I would like to hear Pope offer a serious explanation, rather than name-calling about Lewis Carroll.

Pope also gives an account of the Clorox scandal that is contradicted by his own staff. As Christine MacDonald exposes in her book Green, Inc., the company approached Pope and said they would give the Sierra Club a cut of their profits if they could use the club’s logo and brand on their new range of cleaning products. MacDonald reports that Pope gave the go-ahead without making a rigorous effort to check they were genuinely more green than their competitors. The club’s own toxics committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, was very clear about this, saying: “We never approved the product line.”

It is a disturbing example of how corporate cash has perverted the behavior of even as admirable a green group as the Sierra Club–and may be the reason why Pope is being replaced with a leader from the more serious and science-based wing of the environmental movement. Its members certainly deserve better than this.

If there are so many “inaccuracies” in my description of TNC, why can’t they name a single one? Do they think the banal propaganda they link to is an answer?

Yet this is not the only glaring hole in these responses (apart, of course, from the arguments of Greenpeace, who refuses polluter cash). Do none of these people feel any concern that the leading environmental groups in America are hoovering up cash from the worst polluters and advocating policies that fall far short of what scientists say we need to safely survive the climate crisis? Do they really think there is nothing to discuss here?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/forum

· Slide Show: The Wrong Kind of Green

“Our objective is to save humanity and not just half of humanity. We are here to save mother earth. Our objective is to reduce climate change to [under] 1°C. [above this] many islands will disappear and Africa will suffer a holocaust. The real cause of climate change is the capitalist system. If we want to save the earth then we must end that economic model. Capitalism wants to address climate change with carbon markets. We denounce those markets and the countries which [promote them]. It’s time to stop making money from the disgrace that they have perpetrated.”

Evo Morales, December 16th, 2010, Copenhagen Climate Summit

POST COP15 | TIME TO BE BOLD | NO MORE COMPROMISE: http://timetobebold.wordpress.com/

Action Alert: Let Rainforest Action Network Know Global Ecological Sustainability Depends Upon Ending Old Forest Logging

Rainforest Action Network is a key supporter of failed Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) efforts to “sustainably” log tens of millions of hectares of primary and old-growth forests for lawn furniture, toilet paper and other throw-away consumer items. As RAN celebrates its 25th anniversary, let them know old forests will never be fully protected as long as they and others unquestioningly support “certified” yet ecologically unsustainable first-time industrial primary rainforest logging. Demand RAN vigorously defend their support for first-time primary forest logging over an area two times as large as Texas, or resign from FSC immediately. Encourage RAN to spend the next 25 years working to protect and expand old forests to maintain a habitable Earth.

By Rainforest Portal, a project of Ecological Internet – March 13, 2010

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