Naturally Interesting

I wrote the other day a post criticizing the Big Green organizations for sacrificing environmental objectives in order to maintain their centrist appeal. While this essential point is true, perhaps Big Green deserves another look.

The Sierra Club’s endorsement of the Clorox Company is not an isolated event. The Big Green organizations have a long history of similarly dubious alliances and backing down on key environmental issues. While it is great in theory to stand firm for your environmental principles, the large environmental organizations over the last 20 years have evolved from radical, reactionary groups to pragmatic realists. Today they leave the radicalism and agitation to the smaller organizations and those on the fringe. They have recognized that strong environmental views don’t resonate with Joe Citizen, may alienate potential allies, and can inhibit environmental progress.

While your local environmental group may be an excellent choice to save the city park, they are usually going to be less effective working at the state or national level. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of different environmental groups in the U.S. alone. They are often just a few people, with limited funding, interested in a particular topic. This distributed nature, and lack of single leadership, often leads to various groups taking conflicting views on difficult environmental issues. It is on these state and federal campaigns that Big Green has achieved success, by speaking and acting with one voice. Big Green’s large membership, large budget, corporate structure, and centrist position allows it to mobilize effectively and exert influence on state and federal environmental issues. The catch is that the result achieved is usually less than hoped for. Big Green has realized that pushing for drastic change is often a fruitless endeavor, and may be counter-productive. Instead, they have opted for the baby steps approach, advocating for small changes, a little bit at a time. This allows them to maintain their centrist appeal, and business and political ties.

I have no problem with the pragmatic approach to environmental progress. What concerns me is when a supposed environmental organization, representing the people, abandons its transparency and begins to act like an oligarchy. In total 95% of what Big Green does is great, but when they do something not so great they need to recognize that and respond openly – not in the manner the Sierra Club has.