Almost 35 years after the first Earth Day, U.S. environmentalists are in a fix. Membership and donations are up for many organizations, but broad support for the movement appears to be stagnant, if not retreating.
In the last four years, membership in the Sierra Club increased by 22 percent. Revenues and membership in other environmental groups also grew, apparently mobilized in opposition to Bush administration environmental policies.
Yet there are not many recent accomplishments environmental organizations can claim for all that influx of money and members.
There may even be an erosion of public enthusiasm for environmental causes. The number of Americans willing to accept higher levels of pollution to preserve jobs increased to 26 percent in 2000, from 17 percent four years earlier, according to a survey by the Canada-based polling firm Environics Research Group. The number of people who perceived environmentalists as “extremists” rather than “reasonable” jumped to 41 percent from 32 percent. Americans by wide margins say they support environmental causes, but when pressed to pick their 10 highest concerns, the environment doesn’t make the cut.
The tactics of environmentalists aren’t working. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have a better idea.
“When you look at the string [of] global warming defeats under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement’s approach to problems and policies has not worked particularly well,” they wrote in a paper presented to an environmental donors conference last fall.
So, what’s their alternative? They argue that environmentalists should be working closely with business and political leaders to understand their views and jointly promote policies that will improve our air and water.
Shellenberger is a political strategist and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a self-styled progressive organization that seeks to learn from and adopt political strategies that have been successful for conservatives. Nordhaus is vice president of Evans/McDonough, an opinion research firm. They have played a central role in the Apollo Alliance, an organization that emphasizes the need for public-private participation rather than “command-and-control regulations” to promote environmental causes.
Mainline environmentalists should listen.
“Environmentalists find that their greatest audiences are themselves,” says Adam Werbach, executive director of the Common Assets Defense Fund. “At this point we are in fact moving backwards. The problems we saw in the 1970s have been largely fixed. There is a whole new set of problems that we have no capacity to affect because we don’t speak to the American people. Speaking to ourselves doesn’t work.”
Groups such as Greenpeace continue dramatic protests, like climbing on the stack of a coal-burning plant to hang a protest banner. According to the new environmental model, they should factor the concerns of, and negotiate with, stockholders, workers, electric ratepayers and coal miners who might be affected by a decision to shut down the plant or a mandate that it install expensive anti-pollution equipment.
Take the debate over corporate auto fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards. The first CAFE rules were adopted in 1975 at the behest of Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers, which were afraid that more fuel-efficient Japanese cars might erode market share of the Big Three. Environmentalists now want more stringent CAFE standards, but not much effort has been made to bring skittish labor unions and automakers to the table and hammer out a compromise, much less to take the cause to the public.
Fuel efficiency standards are at the center of the debate over global warming. But legislation pending in Congress to set more gradual and modest greenhouse gas reductions in the U.S. faces long odds of passage.
Environmental organizations need to realize the tactics of the 1970s do not work today. Just look at the results.
