This Changes Everything (33 page)

A great many progressives have
opted out of the climate change debate in part because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars, had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake. To understand why, it’s necessary to return, once again, to the epic case of bad historical timing that has plagued this crisis since the late eighties.

I. F. Stone
may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today’s standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals. Galvanized by the 1962 publication of
Silent Spring
and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (the Deepwater Horizon disaster of its day), they launched a new kind of North American environmentalism,
one far more confrontational than the gentlemen’s conservationism of the past.

In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson’s warnings. The group’s unofficial slogan was, “Sue
the bastards,” and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle.
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This was a time when intervening directly in the market to prevent harm was still regarded as a sensible policy option. Confronted with unassailable evidence of a grave collective problem,
politicians across the political spectrum still asked themselves: “What can we do to stop it?” (Not:
“How can we develop complex financial mechanisms to help the market fix it for us?”)

What followed was a wave of environmental victories unimaginable by today’s antigovernment standards. In the United States, the legislative legacy is particularly striking: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness
Act (1964), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Air Quality Act (1967), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the revised Clean Air Act (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances
Control Act (1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976). In all, twenty-three federal environmental acts became law over the course of the 1970s alone, culminating in the Superfund Act in 1980, which required industry, through a small levy, to pay the cost of cleaning up areas that had become toxic.

These victories spilled over into Canada, which was also experiencing a flurry of
environmental activism. The federal government passed its own Water Act (1970) and Clean Air Act (1971), and gave teeth to the nineteenth-century Fisheries Act a few years later, turning it into a powerful force for combating marine pollution and protecting habitats. Meanwhile, the European Community declared environmental protection a top priority as early as 1972, laying the groundwork for its
leadership in environmental law in the decades to follow. And in the wake of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm that same year, the 1970s became a foundational decade for international environmental law, producing such landmarks as the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973), and the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979).

Although robust environmental law would not begin to take hold in much of the developing world for another decade or so, direct environmental defense also intensified in the 1970s among peasant, fishing, and Indigenous communities across the Global South —the origins of what economist
Joan Martínez Alier and others have described as the “environmentalism of the poor.” This stretched from creative, women-led campaigns against deforestation in India and Kenya, to widespread resistance to nuclear power
plants, dams, and other forms of industrial development in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
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Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation: ban or severely
limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the polluter to pay for the cleanup. As journalist Mark Dowie outlines in his history of the U.S. environmental movement,
Losing Ground
, the real-world results of this approach were concrete and measurable. “Tens of millions of acres have been added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now required
for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living again. . . . Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere; DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in either
cows’ milk or mothers’ milk.” And Dowie stressed: “What all these facts have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or production of the substances in question.”
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These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work
of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then suing corporations for violating them, as well as challenging governments for failing to enforce them. In rapid fashion, what had been a rabble of hippies became a movement of lawyers, lobbyists, and U.N. summit hoppers. As a result, many of these newly professional environmentalists came
to pride themselves on being the ultimate insiders, able to wheel and deal across the political spectrum. And so long as the victories kept coming, their insider strategy seemed to be working.

Then came the 1980s. “A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?” With Reagan’s arrival in the White House,
and the ascendency of many think-tank ideologues to powerful positions in his adminis
tration, the goalposts were yanked to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political
practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.” Using messaging that would have fit right in at a Heartland conference three decades later, James Watt, Reagan’s much despised interior secretary, accused greens of using environmental fears “as a tool to achieve a greater objective,” which he claimed was “centralized planning and control of the society.” Watt also warned darkly
about where that could lead: “Look what happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the forces that this thing can evolve into.”
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For the Big Green groups, all this came as a rude surprise. Suddenly they were on the outside looking in, being red-baited by the kinds of people with whom
they used to have drinks. Worse, the movement’s core beliefs about the need to respond to environmental threats by firmly regulating corporations were being casually cast into the dustbin of history. What was an insider environmentalist to do?

There were options, as there always are. The greens could have joined coalitions of unions, civil rights groups, and pensioners
who were also facing attacks on hard-won gains, forming a united front against the public sector cutbacks and deregulation that was hurting them all. And they could have kept aggressively using the courts to sue the bastards. There was, throughout the 1980s, mounting public concern even among Republicans about Reagan’s environmental rollbacks (which is how Planet Earth ended up on the cover of
Time
in early 1989).
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And some did take up that fight. As Reagan launched a series of attacks on environmental regulations, there was resistance, especially at the local level, where African American communities in particular were facing an aggressive new wave of toxic dumping. These urgent, health-based struggles eventually coalesced into the environmental justice movement, which held the
First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991, a historic gathering that adopted a set of principles that remains a movement touchstone to this day.
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At the national and international levels, groups like Greenpeace continued to engage in direct action throughout the 1980s, though much of their energy was understandably focused on the perils of both nuclear energy
and weapons.

But many green groups chose a very different strategy. In the 1980s, extreme free market ideology became the discourse of power, the language that elites were speaking to one another, even if large parts of the general public remained un-persuaded. That meant that for the mainstream green movement, confronting the antigovernment logic of market triumphalism head-on would have meant
exiling themselves to the margins. And many of the big-budget green groups—having grown comfortable with their access to power and generous support from large, elite foundations—were unwilling to do that. Gus Speth, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and served as a top environmental advisor to Jimmy Carter during his presidency, described the problem like this: “We didn’t adjust
with Reagan. We kept working within a system but we should have tried to change the system and root causes.”
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(After years in high-level jobs inside the U.N. system and as a dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Speth has today thrown his lot in with the radicals, getting arrested to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and co-founding an organization questioning the logic
of economic growth.)

Part of what increased the pressure for ideological conformity in the 1980s was the arrival of several new groups on the environmental scene, competing for limited philanthropic dollars. These groups pitched themselves as modern environmentalists for the Reagan era: pro-business, nonconfrontational, and ready to help polish even the most tarnished corporate logos. “Our approach
is one of collaboration, rather than confrontation. We are creative, entrepreneurial, and partnership-driven. We don’t litigate,”
explains the Conservation Fund, founded in 1985. Two years later came Conservation International, which claims to have “single-handedly redefined conservation” thanks largely to a philosophy of working “with companies large and small to make conservation part of their
business model.”
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This open-for-business approach was so adept at attracting big donors and elite access that many older, more established green groups raced to get with the agreeable program, taking an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude to brazen extremes. It was in this period that the Nature Conservancy started loosening its definition of “preservation” so that conservation lands
would eventually accommodate such dissonant activities as mansion building and oil drilling (laying the foundation for the group to get in on the drilling action itself). “I used to say that the only things not allowed on Nature Conservancy reserves were mining and slavery, and I wasn’t sure about the latter,” said Kierán Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Now I may have to withdraw
the former as well.”
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Indeed the pro-corporate conversion of large parts of the green movement in the 1980s led to deep schisms inside the environmental movement. Some activists grew so disillusioned with the willingness of the big groups to partner with polluters that they broke away from the mainstream movement completely. Some formed more militant, confrontation-oriented groups like Earth
First!, whose members attempted to stop loggers with sabotage and direct action.

The debates, for the most part, took place behind the scenes but on April 23, 1990, they spilled into the headlines. It was the day after Earth Day—at that time an annual ritual of mass corporate greenwashing—and around one thousand demonstrators stormed the New York and the Pacific Stock Exchanges to draw attention
to the “institutions responsible for much of the ecological devastation which is destroying the planet.” Members of grassroots groups like the Love Canal Homeowners Association, the Bhopal Action Resource Group, and the National Toxics Campaign handed out pamphlets that read in part, “Who is destroying the earth—are we all equally to blame? No! We say go to the source. We say take it to Wall Street!”
The pamphlets went on: “The polluters would have us believe that we are all just common travelers on Spaceship Earth, when in fact a few of them are at the controls, and the rest of us are choking on their exhaust.”
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This confrontational rhetoric—a foreshadowing of Occupy Wall Street
two decades later, as well as the fossil fuel divestment movement—was an explicit critique of the corporate infiltration
of the green movement. Daniel Finkenthal, a spokesperson for the anticorporate protests, declared, “Real environmental groups are disgusted with the corporate buyout of Earth Day,” telling one journalist that sponsors are “spending more money on Earth Day promotion than they are on actual corporate reform and the environment.”
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Of all the big green groups
that underwent pro-business makeovers in the 1980s, none attracted more acrimony or disappointment than the Environmental Defense Fund, the once combative organization that had spent its early years translating Rachel Carson’s ideas into action. In the mid-1980s, a young lawyer named Fred Krupp took the reins of the organization and he was convinced that the group’s “sue the bastards” motto
was so out of step with the times that it belonged at a garage sale next to dog-eared copies of
The Limits to Growth
. Under Krupp’s leadership, which continues to this day, the EDF’s new goal became: “creating markets for the bastards,” as his colleague Eric Pooley would later characterize it.
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And it was this transformation, more than any other, that produced a mainstream climate movement that
ultimately found it entirely appropriate to have coal and oil companies sponsor their most important summits, while investing their own wealth with these same players.