Environmental Organizations Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The Manchester Association for the Prevention of Smoke may be the earliest environmental organization on record. Yet the group’s establishment in 1843 precedes the modern application of the term environmental by much more than a century. Despite the lack of such an overarching category during that formative time, the United Kingdom would lay claim to a number of other local and national environmental groups in the subsequent decades of the 19th century, including the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society (1865) as well as the short-lived colonial Natal Game Protection Association (1883). The only other country to substantially contribute to this new phenomenon during this time period was the United States. There were some tentative initial steps, including an unsuccessful first attempt at establishing an Audubon Society (1886-89), as well as the 1887 establishment of the Boone and Crockett Club by Theodore Roosevelt and his patrician colleagues (more of a club than an environmental group). The “archetypal” environmental group would appear nearly a decade before the century ran out: the Sierra Club.

In 1890, conservationist John Muir celebrated the designation of Yosemite as the first national park. During the campaign, the idea of establishing a promotional organization had been considered, but the idea would not reach fruition until 1892. That year, with Muir at its helm, the Sierra Club was established with the tripartite mission of fostering enjoyment of the outdoors, providing information about the Pacific Coast’s mountain regions, and advocating for their protection. Over the course of the 20th century, the Sierra Club would come to be mostly associated with the latter conservation mission-albeit with a far greater geographic encompassment than the mountain ranges of California.

Since those early initiatives, the number of environmental organizations has expanded dramatically, particularly during and after the birth of the new environmentalism in the 1960s. One assessment found approximately 10,000 environmental organizations in 1990 in the United States alone. Extrapolating how many environmental organizations work at an international level is also daunting, and it is worthy of note that whereas approximately 1,400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were accredited to attend the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 20 years later over 3,200 organizations attended the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, these NGOs were not necessarily environmental organizations.

A Wide Variety

Environmental organizations range from small neighborhood groups with a handful of members and no budget, to international bureaucracies with membership in the millions and budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. One of the few well-known examples of a smaller environmental organization is the Love Canal Homeowners Association, created in 1978 by Lois Gibbs in response to health problems arising from a toxic waste dump that had been converted into a housing and school development in Niagara Falls, New York. The group’s efforts would lead to a federal home buyout of the area, as well as passage of one of the most significant U.S. environmental laws since the early 1970s. In regard to the larger environmental organizations, perhaps most emblematic were the members of the Group of Ten, a now defunct coalition of large and relatively wellfunded national environmental organizations-most of them based in Washington, D.C.-that ranged from the National Parks and Conservation Association and the Wilderness Society to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense).

Despite their tremendous diversity on so many fronts, environmental groups are typically separated into one of two camps in terms of their general focus. On the one hand are the “brown” organizations that focus primarily on human health issues; on the other are the “green” organizations that focus on issues relating to biodiversity conservation.

Many chafe at this distinction, and countless organizations explicitly emphasize the critical and inextricable ties between humanity and biodiversity. Nonetheless, the strategic focus of most groups can still be tied to one or the other of these two categories.

From Radical to Mainstream

Environmental organizations’ missions, goals, and strategies range from radical to mainstream. From a vantage point based on these polar opposites, social theorists have identified two divergent strategic approaches adopted by agenda-driven organizations emanating out of civil society. On the one hand, organizations can adopt a “fundamentalist, expressive” approach that directly protests the practices and ideology of the dominant authority-whether that authority consists of a particular government or, more broadly, generally held beliefs and values embedded throughout society. On the other hand, they can take a “pragmatic, instrumental” approach that attempts to change authoritative societal structures (including those widely held beliefs and values) from within the system.

But environmental groups use a wide variety of tactics that span the reality lying between these two nonexclusive strategies: Identifying, framing, advocating, and lobbying on particular environmental issues; building constituencies over environmental issues; mobilizing public opinion through the use of media and grassroots channels; influencing planning by government agencies and citizen groups; engaging in innovative problem solving; gathering information and consulting on scientific issues; conducting independent monitoring and reporting on environmental conditions and initiatives; seeking legal recourse for environmental protection through the judicial system; implementing new policies; organizing boycotts, public protests, and demonstrations, and conducting civil disobedience; and building coalitions with other environmental groups and with other sectors of civil society.

These tactics have been applied in domestic and international arenas. In the latter arena, environmental organizations have added a number of additional tactics that include: lobbying governments to enter into environmental conventions, monitoring the enforcement of conventions, democratizing international negotiations over environmental issues, directly protecting valuable habitats, and educating domestic public audiences on the need for international environmental protection.

Although such international approaches are often traced to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, environmental organizations have been working at an international level since at least the dawn of the 20th century. Many of them have been explicitly created for just such purposes. Two early examples are the North American Fish and Game Protective Association, which held its first meeting in 1900 in Montreal, and the 1903 establishment of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire in the United Kingdom (now Flora & Fauna International). In the United States, environmental organizations became more active in international issues during the 1970s when they started building alliances with groups from other countries, particularly as the links between international economic and political forces were becoming more obvious in light of environmental problems such as ozone depletion, climate change, and tropical deforestation. Two of the largest U.S. environmental organizations focusing on international work are Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund.

From a Dubious History

In reviewing the historical development of environmental organizations over the last few decades, the noted biologist Edward 0. Wilson recalled that the role of environmental organizations “was basically that of evangelists and beggars” when he joined the global conservation movement in the early 1970s. By the 1990s, however, “the major global NG0s had grown strong enough to initiate direct action on their own toward the salvaging of forests and other threatened natural environments.” With large memberships, articulate voices, and political acumen, environmental groups have attained an anticipated and well-respected voice in domestic and international debates over environmental policy. Environmental groups have created a “world civic politics” within which they act as the principal intermediary “agents of change” for individuals and governments.

Growth and Effect

This literature remains rife with debate over exactly how effective environmental organizations have been in changing the course of international environmental affairs. Yet the debate is largely over degree, and only a few observers from the realist camp of international relations would contend that environmental organizations have had a negligible effect. This is particularly the case in light of the growing number of environmental transnational advocacy networks (TANs) that address: broad global issues such as ozone depletion or climate change; project-specific environmental controversies, many of them associated with World Bank financing for large development projects such as dams; and environmental issues across transborder regions, such as ongoing deforestation in the nine-country Amazon Basin or the loss of large carnivores in the Yellowstone to Yukon region of Canada and the United States. Although some researchers have argued that participation of environmental organizations in such networks represent little more than extensions of domestic policy concerns, rather than a fundamental concern over international environmental protection per se, the number and size of these networks have blossomed in the past two decades.

At the same time that many credit environmental organizations for achieving environmental protection, there are many barriers that limit their effectiveness. Principal among these are a perpetual dearth of financial resources and a recurrent unwillingness to coordinate their efforts amongst each other (despite the existence of TANs).

Wavering public support for environmental organizations also remains a challenge; at least in the United States, membership in environmental organizations has fluctuated largely in response to broad governmental policies on the environment. For example, membership declined during the proenvironment years of the Carter administration, but grew substantially during the Reagan administration, which was widely seen as hostile to environmental policies.

In addition to these barriers, critics of environmental organizations have arisen on the political left and right. For different reasons, both ends of the political spectrum have expressed concern over the cooptation of environmental groups by either governments or corporate actors. And as with organizations rooted in other social movements, many environmental organizations have followed a classic pattern in which they originally coalesce as volunteer-driven assemblages of like-minded people, but over time inevitably transform into bureaucratic and professionally staffed interest groups. Given the rapid growth in this professionalization of the environmental movement, it is not surprising that some have criticized the large annual salaries that have been granted to many of the leaders of large environmental organizations. In addition, many environmental organizations spend large portions of their budgets on fundraising and either own or rent expensive office spaces-the costs of which, critics argue, do not justify their benefits.

Lack of Diversity

Lack of racial and gender diversity has also been seen as a problematic characteristic of most environmental organizations. It was not until 2005 that the first African American was hired as an executive director of a large U.S.-based environmental organization (the National Wildlife Foundation, est. 1936). This stereotype is somewhat belied by the growing number of groups under the aegis of the environmental justice movement, one count holding their number in the United States at over 7,000. Because of their roots in both the civil rights and environmental movements, these smaller organizations have arguably been more effective than the larger organizations in protecting urban and povertystricken populations from environmental threats. Yet despite the stated willingness of the larger U.S. environmental organizations to adopt an environmental justice agenda, critics still see a wide divide between these newer groups and the old guard.

No small number of friends and foe alike have denounced the practice of shrill doom and gloom mass mailings from environmental organizations – mailings that not only consume resources, but that allegedly rely on incomplete, exaggerated, and/or inaccurate information in an attempt to scare potential donors into writing checks. The focus on recruiting new members through mass mailings has also been associated with a decline in the social capita that only comes with engaged participation in environmental activities. As social critic Robert Putnam has put it, this type of approach provides “neither connectedness among members nor direct engagement in civic give-and-take, and they certainly do not represent ‘participatory democracy.”‘ Citizenship by proxy is an oxymoron.’

Although Putnam is careful to note that such practices are not necessarily immoral, other critics have expressed strong reservations about the growing influence of environmental organizations as a potentially antidemocratic form of institutional exclusivity. At the other end of the political spectrum, a number of critics more friendly to an environmental agenda believe that such antidemocratic tendencies are manifested in the lackluster performance of environmental organizations in drawing attention to electoral politics-or to be more exact, in getting out the vote for the environment. With a few exceptions such as the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the critics argue, most large U.S. environmental organizations have been overtly apolitical largely in order to maintain a noncontroversial reputation for purposes of fundraising appeal. Accordingly, some recent research has indicated that environmental legislation is more associated with grassroots protests than with the activities of environmental groups per se. Overall, a common refrain in the United States holds that the larger environmental organizations have lost touch with the grassroots-and that this loss of connection to a wider audience has dramatic consequences, including the purported death of environmentalism.

International Concerns

Many of these domestic concerns are reflected internationally, but with the added complexities of defining sovereign control over natural resources, and the role of foreign environmental organizations in exerting undue influence over domestic policy-making. Most notably, Western environmental organizations working in Africa have been accused of participating in the continent’s history of paternalistic European treatment of wildlife resources. Whereas the early colonial power structures simply marked off territory as game reserves and banned native peoples from subsistence hunting, but not wealthy Caucasians from trophy hunting, critics accuse contemporary environmental organizations of attempting to impose conservationist policies without full local input in how those policies are determined and implemented.

Similar claims have been made in regard to how international environmental organizations operate in Asia and Latin America, and Western green aid to eastern Europe has also had reportedly mixed effects. In Russia, for example, the number and visibility of environmental groups have been much strengthened through foreign aid since the demise of the Soviet Union, but apparently it has not been met with a concomitant rise in either public interest in environmental issues or, most importantly, in the actual protection of the environment.

The wide range of interests, capabilities, and perspectives between different environmental organizations makes it difficult to generalize about the phenomenon. At the most critical end of the spectrum, environmental organizations serve as mere institutional flourish draped over the power and influence of power-hungry individuals. This is an extreme point of view, but environmental organizations are nonetheless human institutions. From the other end of the spectrum, the critics can be reasonably accused of neglecting the broad practical implications of institutional persistence and legitimacy that has been achieved through the growth and maturity of environmental organizations worldwide. The rise of environmental groups over the course of the 20th century has mirrored and led the growing importance of civil society in domestic and world affairs-and so while numerous NGOs can be found in other issue arenas such as human rights and labor, their rise to influence has perhaps been most notable in the environmental sector.

Bibliography:

Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995);
E. Dunlap and A.G. Mertig, American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970-1990 (Taylor & Francis, 1992);
J.A. Fox and D. Brown, The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank, NGOs, and Grassroots Movements (MIT Press, 1998);
E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell University Press, 1998);
Thomas Princen and Matthias Finger, Environmental NGOs in World Politics (Routlege, 1994);
D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000);
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism (Grist, 2005);
O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).