Tree Huggers Finally Branch Out

Some environmentalists are ready to pronounce their movement dead. As evidence they point to the relentless confidence with which President Bush and Republican majorities in Congress attack long-standing environmental goals, such as protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drillers.

In truth, though, the environmental movement’s vitality depends on how we define the movement. This is more than a linguistic exercise.

Take global warming. The “environmentalism is dead” crowd contends that the big environmental groups have failed to get new federal laws passed limiting global-warming gases. The reason, they say, is the green groups’ inability to link with labor and social movements and develop a broad coalition to take on such multifaceted issues as global warming. The environmentalists counter they have partners in their quest for energy efficiency.

Both sides overlook a new dynamic that is revitalizing and redefining environmentalism: the development of locally and regionally based quality-of-life movements.

Transportation gridlock, the loss of open space to land-gobbling auto-dependent transportation and parking systems, and the disconnect between workplace and residency are all now environmental issues. And all these concerns have significant implications for global warming.

Local quality-of-life movements have dramatically brought their issues into public view in the last two years.

In June 2003, dozens of community and neighborhood organizations secured a permit to close the Pasadena Freeway between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles for one morning. Walkers and bicyclists filled the freeway’s lanes. A community festival climaxed what some participants called “a magical moment” for Los Angeles. The groups called for new transportation, watershed, housing and community-development strategies to make the corridor between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles friendlier for pedestrians, bikers, transit riders and residents.

Food is at the center of other quality-of-life movements. Traditional environmentalism focused on pesticides and their effects on air and water quality. The food movements spotlight the link between how and where food is grown (and processed) and how it’s consumed.

This emphasis enables the raising of such issues as low-income communities’ lack of access to fresh food and the reach of fast-food restaurants and their super-sized portions, which have fed an obesity crisis.

The movement’s healthy food/healthy communities approach inspired the idea of a farmers’ market salad bar as a school lunch option, one increasingly adopted by school districts. By calling for greater access to fresh, locally produced food, these groups have shown that local and regional farms are important community assets and that eating healthy is a justice issue.

The rise of the environmental justice movement in poor neighborhoods and among blacks and Latinos showed that these aren’t just middle-class white concerns. The growth of quality-of-life movements will further reveal so-called environmental issues as immediate, daily concerns shared by everyone.

Environmentalism is not dead. People have redefined it.