Selling Out : Are environmentalists...

Taken together, “Forcing the Spring” and “Not in Our Backyard” represent a policy junkie’s Whole Earth Catalogue: They offer a panoramic compilation of the environmental critique of contemporary American society.

It’s a critique of striking breadth. At any given moment, lobbyists, scientists and lawyers marching under the green banner are challenging how we grow and distribute food; heat our homes, power our factories and fuel our cars; use natural lands; dispose of wastes in water, air and land; treat other species; and manage new technologies, from nuclear power to genetic engineering. No other mainstream social movement--not the labor, civil rights, feminist or consumer movements--questions so many distinct aspects of American life.

For both Robert Gottlieb and the team of Marc Mowrey and Tim Redmond, however, that critique isn’t broad enough. At a time when environmentalism appears ascendant--with sympathetic ears in the White House and a public profile so unimpeachable that even Hollywood moguls who lumber to work in gas-guzzling limousines write checks for the cause--both of these books portray it as a faltering force. Both see the large environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council as elitist, insular, too quick to compromise, and insensitive to women, workers and “people of color.” Both put their sympathies with local organizations that mobilize grass-roots resistance.

Gottlieb, in particular, is frustrated by the course of contemporary green politics. In this perceptive and challenging book, he has chosen a fresh vantage point from which to view the history of environmentalism: its success at linking with other dissident groups, from consumer organizations to labor unions, to challenge what he terms “the dominant urban and industrial order.”

In arenas as diverse as urban planning, protection of the wilderness, and the safeguarding of clean drinking water, Gottlieb finds a constant tension between those who would manage specific environmental insults with regulation, and those who view such dangers as manifestations of a broader problem: an imbalance of power in society that gives business too much influence over workers, communities and resources.

Almost always, Gottlieb concludes, those who would narrow environmentalism’s prism have prevailed. So by 1914, early activists agitating against the industrial pollution of rivers and streams had lost control of the clean water debate to those promoting filtration and chlorination as the solution; in the 1920s the movement to create “Garden Cities” as planned communities with lands held in public trust shriveled into support for more parklands, and shrubs along the medians of highways.

In Gottlieb’s eyes, the same pattern persists today. With their extensive presence in Washington, their close relationships with regulatory and Congressional policy-makers, their reliance on technical experts and litigation, and their distance from grass-roots activists, Gottlieb sees the mainstream environmental organizations as isolated “interest groups” rather than elements of a social movement. By investing so heavily in managing the control of pollution through regulation, Gottlieb contends, the groups have effectively indentured themselves to the government as “the policy system’s managers and caretakers.” That regulatory approach, he concludes scornfully, represents “a containment strategy at best” that demonstrates “more the breadth, extent and costs of environmental hazards than any effective mechanism to reduce or eliminate them.”

What’s the alternative? Gottlieb finds inspiration in thinkers and activists such as Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, Barry Commoner and labor leader Tony Mazzocchi who situate environmental issues in the broader question of limiting corporate power. Even more, Gottlieb contends that environmentalism’s future is heralded by the grass-roots, anti-toxics groups that have emerged around the country, and formed loose networks like the National Toxics Campaign. In these militant neighborhood organizations--often led by women, frequently located in lower middle-income and minority neighborhoods and typically suspicious of government, business and the national conservation organizations--Gottlieb spies “the beginnings of a new social movement” distinct from the overwhelmingly white, upper-middle class constituency of traditional environmentalism.

Mowrey and Redmond share Gottlieb’s preferences, but not his analytic discipline. The energetic research they invested in this history of environmentalism over the past quarter century is largely defeated by deficiencies of style and structure. The book careens from character to character in short mock-cinematic chapters: It’s a bit like watching a green version of the movie “Short Cuts.” Just when someone becomes interesting (Amory Lovins, Dennis Hayes, Jerry Brown) they disappear, sometimes not to reappear for hundreds of pages, sometimes not at all. The authors compound their structural problems with a ham-handed pulpish writing style that relies heavily on portentous one-sentence paragraphs. As in: “And that’s when the mild-mannered soil scientist decided to write to Earth First!”

As a writer, it’s enough to make you swear off the stuff forever.

Still, almost in spite of itself, the book held my interest for long stretches. The case studies of ordinary people suddenly called to activism--typically by a local environmental crisis--reveals a process akin to religious conversion. But the authors’ own ardor limits their perspective: if they have interviewed anyone who doesn’t share their views on the environment, it’s not apparent. Almost all the characters in the book are monochromatic: good local activists arrayed against bad businessmen, government officials and mainstream environmentalists.

Both books, in fact, are overly critical of the mainstream environmental organizations. Like any institution attempting to influence public policy, environmental organizations have compromised innumerable times over the years. But those compromises have helped to create the legal framework that grass-roots organizations use to challenge toxic waste dumps or demand government action to clean them up. For these authors to deny the successes of environmental organizations because environmental degradation continues is a bit like conservatives arguing that the persistence of poverty demonstrates that government is incapable of alleviating it. In each case, to frame an either/or choice is to obscure the space in between, where public policy can slowly shift trends in a positive direction.

In both books, but especially Gottlieb’s, the dissatisfaction with the mainstream environmental groups seems to be a proxy for a much broader anxiety over the possibilities for left-of-liberal politics in the 1990s. In particular, Gottlieb--who identifies himself as an alumnus of the Students for a Democratic Society and takes inordinate pains to trace the links between alternative environmental groups and the counterculture of the 1960s--has written a plea for a new “New Left” that would use environmentalism as a base to design “new visions . . . about social transformation” and pursue what Barry Commoner called “the social governance of production decisions.”

Gottlieb never precisely defines such millennial terms, but it’s clear he envisions a far more reaching assault on the basic structure of power in society than anything now given credence in American politics. Probably the closest analogue to the movement Gottlieb hopes to summon might be Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition or the unwieldy anti-corporate coalition of labor unions, consumer groups, and some environmentalists that gathered to fight the North American Free Trade Agreement--though I suspect there wouldn’t be any room under his tent for conservative populists like Ross Perot and Patrick J. Buchanan.

What Gottlieb yearns for is a modern analogue to the old Industrial Workers of the World dream of One Big Union: he wants One Big Movement. It seems almost redundant to list the practical impediments--divergent interests between labor and environmentalists when the protection of resources threatens jobs (as in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest); the debilitating tendency of the modern left (unfortunately embodied by Gottlieb himself) to view Americans more as representatives of antagonistic racial and sexual constituencies than as citizens with common needs and responsibilities. Add to all that the worldwide retreat of socialist parties (even China, after all, is welcoming entrepreneurs), and you couldn’t find odds for a scenario under which a movement demanding greater “social governance” of corporate decisions emerges as a dominant political force.

But a schoolteacher who has discovered a toxic dump near her home doesn’t worry about the tides of history. Environmentalism may never become the transforming social movement Gottlieb calls for; but it will remain an ineradicable piece of our political equation because it has instilled in the culture the belief that environmental hazards need not be allowed to stand. The most valuable contribution of both these books is to reaffirm the stubborn capacity of ordinary Americans effectively to challenge unresponsive power. The history of environmentalism over the past quarter century testifies to a single overriding fact: With enough tenacity and purpose, it is possible for a relatively small number of committed people to move this society--imperfectly and unsteadily perhaps, but measurably and lastingly. Surely, as both these books assert, there is unfinished business in that history. But at a time when so many of our problems appear intractable, there is inspiration, too.