Environmentalists Get Down to Earth
New York Times
17 December 2011
By Leslie Kaufman
At a fall retreat, board members of the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the environmental advocacy group, listened as a political
consultant gave a critique of the green movement.
Think of the public as a consumer in a grocery aisle passing a box
of brownie mix, the consultant said. The brownie on the front is
so delectable that she can imagine the taste and the smell. So
delicious, in fact, that she pays no attention to the back of the
box listing the ruinous fat and calorie content.
Environmentalists, the consultant said, were always yammering to
consumers about the back of the box. And, guess what? Nobody
wants to listen.
If there was a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a
leader in the American environmental movement, it would be hard to
put your finger on it.
The earth is warming, perhaps catastrophically, yet legislative
efforts to cap carbon emissions collapsed in 2010. Global carbon
limits have been equally elusive, as a conference in Durban, South
Africa, showed again last week.
Here at home, add to the list hostile Congressional Republicans
and some high-profile failures of green subsidies, all at a time
when a North American fossil-fuel energy boom beckons, undermining
the national will to curb emissions.
Or, as the consultant might put it, the willpower to resist the
brownies.
Faced with setbacks on top of declining and graying memberships,
the biggest conservation groups are reshaping their missions in a
time of generational transition. The last 15 months have included
executive changes at the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and
the Audubon Society, among others. The head of the Wilderness
Society will step down next year.
On the strategy front, some of these groups are becoming more
circumspect in campaigning against global warming, mindful of
mixed public sentiment. A three-prong approach is emerging: fight
global warming by focusing on immediate, local concerns;
reinvigorate the grass roots through social media and street
protests; and renew an emphasis on influencing elections.
Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House who
now advises businesses on green strategies, suggests that the
movement has grown impatient with coaxing incremental change by
engaging with policy makers and corporations. The old way was the
Sierra Club putting its seal on “green” Clorox products; the new
way is suggested by a Greenpeace Internet campaign that wrung a
promise from Facebook last week to use less coal for its data
centers.
“The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people
are justifiably outraged,” Mr. Ballentine said, pointing to the
next generation in the movement. “What we have now is an
antagonized grass roots calling for a radicalized approach.”
When new leaders talk of reinvigorating the grass roots, many
mention the most visible success the movement has had in years:
the suspension of the Keystone XL pipeline project earlier this
year. (Its supporters in Congress are currently rallying to push
it forward again.)
After the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the failure to
cap carbon, environmentalists latched on to the planned pipeline
from Canada as a symbol of fossil-fuel dependence run amok. Local
groups capitalized on landowner fears of oil leaks, while national
groups protested outside the White House. The hubbub prompted the
Obama administration, with a difficult election ahead, to put off
a decision until 2013.
MUCH of the credit for the success of the demonstrations has gone
to a man not quite of the traditional green establishment: Bill
McKibben, a journalist turned advocate. Mr. McKibben founded
350.org, a group that has attracted young people and propelled its
message online and through mass protest.
He observes that since young leaders in his organization have no
memory of the 1970s heyday of environmental victories, they are
more motivated.
“They’re more steeped in the losses of recent years, and eager to
fight on the ground and with the grass roots to turn things
around,” he said.
When Mr. McKibben praises new leaders of the big green groups, he
singles out Michael Brune as a prime example of environmentalism’s
new local focus.
Mr. Brune, who became the Sierra Club’s executive director in 2010
at age 38, has expanded its Beyond Coal Campaign to mobilize local
populations around closing aging coal plants in 46 states.
To win recruits, the campaign emphasizes not global warming but
more local concerns, like how emissions from a local plant
contribute to asthma in neighborhood children.
Mr. Brune says it’s more effective to organize over “a plant down
the road which has health impacts” than over “a fairly obscure,
complex climate bill.” And while the Sierra Club has slightly
fewer paying members than it did a few years ago, the group says
it has many new supporters willing to contribute over such focused
issues.
A trickier local concern is hydraulic fracturing, to extract the
natural gas found in shale rock. Natural gas is a cleaner (if not
pristinely green) fuel alternative, but its extraction is seen as
a danger to underground water supplies. So the Natural Resources
Defense Council focuses on worries about the aquifer, says its
president, Frances G. Beinecke; it is not opposed to hydraulic
fracturing per se, but to its being done improperly or without
protective regulations. “Our oil addiction is increasingly
affecting a much wider swath of Americans than in the past,
whether it is fracking in the Catskills or the oil spill off the
Gulf Coast,” she said. “And these are issues people will rally
around.”
The last piece of the puzzle for many conservationists is to hold
politicians more accountable for their anti-environmental votes,
which the big groups believe do not really reflect the desires of
the office-holders’ constituents. While environmentalists have
been clearly more aligned with Democrats for years — some groups
even have political action committees — many have shied away from
overtly partisan ads or politicking. But that is changing.
David Yarnold, president of the National Audubon Society since
last year, said one of his main priorities was to “reconnect” and
energize independent chapters of bird lovers over common political
goals. “People were so discouraged in the wake of climate
legislation and the general malaise around D.C., and they wanted
to take action into their own hands,” he said.
His hope is to leverage enthusiasm in the chapters for protecting
the local estuary into support, say, for the Clean Water Act.
Ms. Beinecke said her group and others would pool money for ads to
take on Congressional candidates deemed hostile to clean air laws.
The idea is to emphasize not only what her group is against, but
also what it is for: namely, protecting children’s health.
Sunshine, clear skies, clean water — she says these are pictures
for “the front of the box, and that is where we intend to be.”