Flying High, Swooping Low

E: The Environmental Magazine, Jan, 2000 by Jim Motavalli

Assessing the Environmental Movement --at the Close of the `E Decade'

The second issue of E Magazine coincided with Earth Day 1990, the 20th anniversary celebration of the first event and, in its own way, a landmark in environmental history. With its huge turnouts around the world, Earth Day 1990 proved that in the two decades since that first small Washington gathering, the environmental movement had grown enormously and become united in common goals.

Speaking just before the April 22, 1990 event made world headlines, organizer Denis Hayes cautioned that if Earth Day turned out to be merely another one-day celebration, it would fail. "Unless we have an agenda," he said then, "we become just one more of those transient phenomena that have become so common: where, for example, nuclear winter is on the front pages of every publication, and a year later nobody can remember what it is ... The best way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to come out of it with a strengthened, broadened movement, with clear-cut plans for where it wants to go." That was 10 years ago, in a more optimistic time. That rising tide of optimism gave birth to E Magazine, and to two other independent environmental magazines that are no longer with us. We were clear about the historic moment. "Nineteen ninety marks tile dawn of a new decade during which we'll be working together to rescue our environment," wrote publisher Doug Moss in the inaugural issue.

Going for Broke

Now that the 1990s are over and a new millennium is ready to be born, it's fair to ask, did the Environmental Decade, born with momentum and enthusiasm, achieve its aims? Did the movement evolve into an effective coalition? Are we, as Ronald Reagan once asked, better off than we were 10 years ago?

The short answer is, well, not really. Nearly all the issues that loomed large ill 1990 loom larger now, with tile possible exception of holes in the ozone layer. Despite a leveling off of fertility rates, population has increased dramatically, topping six billion just days before I wrote this story. Despite some important victories by tile Rainforest Action Network and others, the logging and burning of our wild forest reserves continues apace--"a massive loss" according to tile World Commission on Forests. Despite good and important work preserving endangered plants and animals, Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard University estimates we are losing 100 species per day around tile world, four an hour. Despite the Clean Air Act and strong legislation around the world limiting emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that nearly half the American population, and more than two thirds of the people on Earth, breathe unhealthy air. Despite a global economy that grows by $1 trillion a year, 150 million would-be workers are unemployed around the world, and half the world's people are malnourished.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have concluded that humankind's "ecological footprint" is already 20 percent greater than the planet's land base. Writing for the online magazine Grist, Beyond the Limits author and Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows concludes that we're approaching the end of our ability to mortgage the future. "The only reason we can get away with our overbig impact [on the planet] is there are still stocks of forests, fish, soils and water to draw down. We can't go on drawing down forever, or even much longer ... If we don't reduce our load on the planet voluntarily, the planet will do it for us." Faced with massive global problems like these, is the environmental movement to blame for our achingly slow progress; forestalled by many steps backwards?

In that first issue of E, archdruid David Brower, who served as the Sierra Club's first director and founded both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, was critical of movement leaders for "trying to negotiate too much ... trying to compromise instead of standing up for things." Mark Dowie, author of the 1995 book Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, echoes Brower's words today.

"I think movement organizers are to blame both for what they did do and what they didn't do," he says. "They continue to take accommodating positions, and to put too much faith in the federal and state government to protect the environment. But if you look at the history, you'd see that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and others were created largely to force the federal government to enforce its own laws. The environmental movement built up a force of 100 registered lobbyists, who are still trying to convince legislators to enforce the law, because people care about the issues."

Dowie would like to see the movement get out of Washington and return to the grassroots, reigniting environmental passions. Even though the majority of Americans self-identify as green, exit polling shows they don't necessarily vote that way. A shrinking public commitment emboldens politicians to vote the way the campaign cash dictates, and that's almost always against the environment.