On Earth Day, environmentalists debate future of movement
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By TERENCE CHEA
Associated Press Writer
Friday, April 22, 2005
San Francisco
As the world marks the 35th anniversary of Earth Day on Friday, environmentalists are debating the future of a movement that seems to be losing the battle for public opinion.
President Bush's re-election, the failure to slow global warming and the fact that large numbers of Americans seem to dismiss them as tree-hugging extremists has green leaders looking for new approaches.
Some think it's a message problem — that environmental groups simply need to improve their communication with the voting public. Others are calling for more fundamental changes in how the groups operate.
The "Green Group," a coalition of 30 national environmental organizations, is seeking help from an expert championed by Democratic Party insiders — George Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley linguistics professor with strong ideas about how language colors political discourse.
The challenge goes beyond the environmental movement, says Lakoff. He says the entire public agenda has been seized by a "right-wing ideological political movement that's extremely powerful and well-funded."
"This is part of an extremist right-wing attack on a full range of progressive issues. Environmentalism is just one of many," he said.
But environmentalists were particularly ineffective in the lead-up to Bush's re-election.
"He was re-elected in a campaign in which neither candidate talked much about the environment," said Buck Parker, executive director of Earthjustice, who is chairing the Green Group this year. Among environmental activists, "there was, not surprisingly, a sense of 'What's wrong here?'"
Polls show most Americans support clean air, clean water and wildlife protection, but "the environment" ranks low on their list of priorities, far behind jobs, health care, education and national security.
"There's this paradox where Americans hold these views, but when it comes time to take action, there are many, many issues that trump environmental concerns," said Peter Teague, the environmental programs director at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which is funding Lakoff's environmental research.
Citing polls showing the word "environmentalist" evokes images of left-wing radicals, some groups have started referring to themselves "conservationists," or tried to avoid labels altogether.
"Environmentalist" wasn't always an epithet.
In the decade after U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson started the first Earth Day with a series of teach-ins on April 22, 1970, environmental activists achieved some of their biggest victories — the passage of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and Environmental Policy Act.
Since then, action shifted to the regulatory agencies, which under the Reagan and Bush administrations have been increasingly led by people who came to prominence in think tanks backed by wealthy conservatives who believe environmental protections interfere with the free market.
Lately, while the Bush administration promotes "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" plans that environmentalists say actually reduce air pollution controls and increase timber harvests, green groups have been fighting legal battles to hold on to the gains of the 1970s and '80s.
And those battles simply aren't resonating with the voting public.
"We haven't done a good job communicating about the solutions," said Carl Pope, who heads the Sierra Club. "The issues are complicated and technical. We talk about them in a complicated and technical way, and their eyes start glazing over."
Today's most pressing issues are more difficult to explain than problems like air pollution and toxic contamination. To win public support, environmental leaders say they're trying to present the problems and potential solutions in language that connects to people's lives.
"The environmental movement is faced with issues that go beyond the old concept of environmentalism, and they're trying to approach the harder issues," said Lakoff, who runs the Rockridge Institute think tank. "We're there to look at the conceptual framework."
Many environmental groups are finding new allies outside their old political coalitions. For instance, the Sierra Club has paired up with ranchers and hunters against increased oil and gas development in Western states. The environmental law firm Earthjustice is working with Hispanic groups and public health advocates to fight air pollution in California's Central Valley; American Indians to restore salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest; and native Hawaiians to protect wildlife habitat in Hawaii.
"We're building bridges and finding how you can work with other organizations that don't define themselves as environmentalists," said Earthjustice's Parker.
Others believe more fundamental changes are necessary. Last fall, pollster Ted Nordhaus and public relations consultant Michael Shellenberger prompted a heated debate with their paper called "The Death of Environmentalism." They argued that the movement isn't adequate to deal with today's biggest global threats — species extinction, habitat destruction, destruction of the oceans and global warming — because environmentalists define problems too narrowly and advocate technical solutions that don't appeal to the public imagination.
"What the environmental movement has failed to do is give Americans a compelling sense of what's in a post-global warming world for them," Nordhaus said. "We live in an aspirational culture. Gloom and doom narratives don't work. We need to give Americans a vision of the world that is optimistic and hopeful."
Rather than focus on specific environmental problems, activists must address root political and economic causes and establish a new set of institutions to rival the right-wing's think-tanks and foundations, Nordhaus said. They also must promote overarching values such as global consciousness, ethical consumerism and ecological concern.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger's Strategic Values Project is working to develop a broader social vision based on such values. They have an ally in Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club president who now heads Common Assets, a San Francisco nonprofit.
"It's time to expand environmentalism," Werbach said. "The problems we face are greater than anything we've ever seen, but the solutions are nowhere near adequate."
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On the Net:
Rockridge Institute:
Strategic Values Project:
www.rockridgeinstitute.org/
thebreakthrough.org
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