Shades of Green: Extreme, Lean, Supreme

By Jane Holtz Kay

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world," Margaret Mead said famously. For all the anthropologist's eminence, her classic call to commitment was of dubious persuasion. As the 21st century turned, activists looking at the world through green-colored glasses found the future bleak. The fervor of the sixties and seventies had sputtered into the expansive eighties and nineties, swallowing gains. Sprawl and consumption had undermined environmental labors, damaged eco-systems and contributed to climate change.

Wal-Mart fighter Al Norman looks over Greenfield, MA which, he contends, would have been devastated by the superstore. Photo courtesy of Frederica Matera

The opening months of the Bushcheney era of environmental hatchetry roused those idling activists. The White House assaults on the Arctic wilderness and the appointment of industry wolves to guard the environmental sheep energized the movement. Mounting distress with degradation of natural resources in tandem with global warming, radicalized activists and recruited passivists on every front.

When Robert Kennedy Jr. gets arrested for protesting the bombing of Puerto Rico's Vieques as target practice and Senators Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt take on Greenpeace's theatrical tactics to stand before a $4300 Lexus bearing a sign that says "Bush Tax Plan: New Lexus for Every Millionaire," the tools of environmentalism have become mainstream. With everyday consumers beginning to turn down the lights, buy shade grown coffee and add "zero-cow" to "zero nuke" as a cause, the times they are a changing.

Green-ness may not be next to godliness, then, but it has become more diffused and more complex. From Witness for the Earth religious to not-so-spiritual sorts staging "What would Jesus drive" at rallies against SUVs, the ranks of environmentalists have enlarged and diversified. "Together at Last: Cutting Pollution and Making Money," said a headline in The New York Times. And, why not when once unholy alliances from evergreen groups to businesses joining CERES (the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics) seem to push a market-oriented course?

The question then is: who is, truly, in the vanguard of the environmental movement? What is the front of the wave?

As the nation poured through the rubble of lives and landscape of the fiercest battering since the Civil War, edginess--extremism --of any sort might seem endangered. Radical elements like PETA, the pro-animal agitators, or ELF, the Earth Liberation Front eco-terrorists planting bombs to stop sprawling mega-buildings, provoked horror. Anti-globalization forces as well as mainstream organizations laid low instead of staging their Washington protest. Yet, the billboard declaring "Welcome to New Mexico, America's waste colony," sponsored by that state, us as radical on the governmental front.

Despite initial reactions that the terrorist attacks and a down-spiraling economy might make environmentalism a casualty of "patriotism" and "national security," environmentalists did not retreat. Watching the aftermath of the World Trade Center carnage, some continued to remind their constituencies of a planet in crisis --not only from terrorism but from environmental abuse. Early on, Transportation Alternatives was declaring that they were joining "all New Yorkers in mourning the victims of the World Trade Center attack" while championing "a more livable New York City and world." Many continue to express distress about more drilling in the Arctic and under the Great Lakes, to worry about urban flight and a 15 billion dollar bailout to fuel-hogging planes.

Within a week from the fateful day, the EPA was listing $60,000 Smart Growth awards to Rhode Island; within two, the agency was announcing money for energy-saving and clean building and the forward flanks of the environmental movement seemed to be advancing. Rhys Roth, co-director of Climate Solutions likened the destruction from terrorism to the obliteration from the rising waters of climate disruption." It's sort of like a slow-motion terrorism," he said in the wake of the bombing. "We're talking about millions of people in Bangladesh," he said, "millions in small island nations if we don't turn this around."

As the number, visibility and influence of the "leave nothing but footsteps" leaders continues to grow which of these groups are pushing the envelope? How do you score the players and their performances?

To Derek Haskew of MassPIRG, one of some two dozen Public Interest Research Groups around the country, the greenest troupers are those groups who won't say Œyes." By Œyes," the attorney means those organizations least prone to compromise in fighting for legislation, be it clean energy or toxic waste disposal. In this stand fast contest, PIRG stands high, he feels, battling the "Filthy Five," the coal burning furnaces, and taking on transportation alternatives or the mercury issue from state to state. That may account for the many environmentalists who cycle through this multi-city agency, using PIRG as a school and springboard. "It's a question of where you end up caving," Haskew puts it "and we all have a different calculus. We're also a little slower to call crumbs a victory."

Examples of crumb-collectors abound, and many of these vanguard activists think they abide along the Potomac. With the federal government lackadaisical, the work of Washington-based organizations strikes many as irrelevant. Many of a deeper shade of green have equally little tolerance for large national organizations. The Sierra Club, for one instance, was scored for backing off on Bush in the days after 9/ll. Earlier, it had earned opprobrium for focusing on better mileage from their cars (i.e. higher Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency standards), rather than taking on broader anti-auto goals, applauding Ford Motor Company's cutting down gas mileage in its SUVs just before the company backtracked on its pledge.

One environmental writer complains that Environmental Defense which was active in getting McDonald's to switch from styrofoam to less toxic containers, refused to let him say a bad world about the fast food chain in their publication. "Guilty bystanders," another environmentalist called the Certified Forest Products' international conference last September after they lauded Home Depot managers for using the "right" wood despite the chain's hyper-consumptive produce and sprawling Big Box locations.

Yet, others applaud large organizations like Sierra or Audubon for empowering a roster of members who ease from "hiking to raising issues about forest recreation," says transportation activist Preston Schiller; from bird-watching to fighting sprawl and supporting high speed rail. For all the sad Beltway bargaining, "it shows that their board is not necessarily in sync with member activists," he notes.

While some rightly say that funding sources feeding such broad-based or D.C.-dependent eco-groups make them too reliant on corporations, others observe that the multiplicity of organizations--letting many flowers blooming--makes for a fertile, forward movement. "There's all the diversity," says writer/researcher Seth Dunn of Worldwatch Institute, for Lester Brown's forward-minded Washington publishers of "The State of the World," "and that's the strength."

In April 2000, Greenpeace activists chained themselves to a hut on Seal Island north of Alaska.

Whoever stands at the peak of environmental progress, it is clear that, despite claims of "hollow media-hogging," Greenpeace waves the most visible stanchion Doing theater, direct confrontation and the edgier aspects of environmental face time, this press-savvy godfather organization for the younger generation has seen a revival. Planet Ark, Reuters' environmental website, charts 953 Greenpeace episodes in its database of 12,225. Greenpeace's lawsuits and protests from nuke shipments, logging and fishing around the globe to a 32-page position paper on China fill roughly 12 percent of the environmental newsmaking activity.

Occupying oil rigs across the world, boosting offshore wind projects in Britain, protesting genetically modified baby food by lining up baby dolls in Basel, or leading American students to build artificial dikes dramatizing global warming at the Kyoto conference, they are both expansive and eye-catching. "They love to keep up with changes in the world," says Dunn, "being more global, focusing on the consumer groups. It's not a new role but they're trying to be more visible." Unlike groups dependent on foundations, the organization "can keep to its roots and be more in your face," can do more direct action, he says.

Revived under John Pascatano, who went from spearheading Ozone Action to directing the Greenpeace staff, the organization housed in a squeaky-clean sustainable renovated historic building in Washington, D.C., won't change direction, he says, but people will see their international network "as a much tighter organization." Staff run and independent with access to funders, they can be very effective and non-violent, " says Pascantano, aggressively coming out and challenging global corporations and similarly, dismissive of help from bushwhacked Washington.

"That is how you can press," going after "the brands and the buyers," the way, say, Campaign MobileExxon tackles that fossil fuel giant, he says. "It all becomes more global," whether plutonium-moving around in a track or oil spills that damage the ocean. (CUT HERE IF YOU WANT)Actions have always spoken better than words in the Greenpeace liturgy and the staple tours of rainbow warriors dealing with coal fire plants and international battles appeal to yet another generation of young people signing on for a first start.

The Rain Forest Alliance is focused on saving the habitat of orangutans and other species.

Working closest to home, the Lois Gibbs and Erin Brochovich have become famous frontrunners at the grassroots level empowering the residents of polluted places. At first, the stepchildren of the environmental movement, these local cleanup activists, foremothers of the environmental justice movement, have moved from their outcast origins to media frontispieces through films like "A Civil Action," highlighting Woburn, Mass. Gibbs who launched the toxic cleanup movement at Love Canal in the eighties now operates the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church, Virginia, while Brochovich via Julia Roberts has taken her fight against PG&E all the way to the limelight of Oscar night, in this "most outgoing of all the activities."

This, at least is the way Matt Wilson, director of the Toxics Action Center, describes, such local pollution fighting in his neighborhood. Twenty years after the link between toxic environments and public health hit the headlines, the Center spread throughout New England has grown to ten political missionaries. Its virtual coaching team shows residents how to shutdown or control hazardous waste and dangerous facilities hard by their houses. A dozen years old, Toxics Action and its staff of political mentors and mediators has carved out a niche through literally "home work." When a caller phones, whether for a hazardous waste site in middle-class Stoughton or a nuclear metals manufacturer in affluent Concord, the first step is assembling citizens around the coffee table to tutor them in rooting out or around the local powers that be.

"Time and time again, we've seen when citizens are part of the process, the process moves best," he says. "Our belief is that residents can have control." Think global, act local--that old staple--is on the forward flag.. "I think with the new president, the idea of pushing things out of Washington, getting them back in the community is necessary. Instead of heavy centralizing, we should de-centralize." All of us should have the right to decide what goes on in our communities, he feels. "For planners, it shows that from our perspectives, things are better when the community is involved."

Researchers from Woods Hole Research Center encourage active monitoring to predict vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil to fire.

If you think we are carousing on our way to the Calvary of climate disruption and disaster as many do, then organizations dealing with the greenhouse gases that heat the planet are far ahead on that path to stopping Rhys Roth's "slow-motion terrorism." Even before California's energy angst, the movement to free us from fossil fuels towards renewable energy had begun to try to rid the world's dependence on the energy sources that produce the deadly co2 emissions. "We really need to revolutionize it," says Roth.

A graduate of more traditional environmental activism, Roth made the switch to this frontline cause three years ago, co-founding Climate Solutions. Lodged under solar panels that power their lights and computers, the energy-efficient Olympia, Washington headquarters holds six staffers trying, as he says, "to tackle the enormous problem," transforming their Northwest region, plus (some day) the Pacific Rim, to sustainable energy. The percentages set by the Kyoto Protocol are too small and slow, Washington a dead end, he says. "The traditional environmental pressure tactics don't seem like they're going to work," he says, galvanized by the fact that "it just doesn't seem feasible any more that the federal government is going to do anything."

So dedicated, the organization moved on and so did he, looking now for investors, sustainable energy techniques, and market tools for new ideas and new technology. So it is that Climate Solutions, like other of the forward moving green grassroots groups find themselves, ironically, beginning to take on the guise of corporate green-grabbers. "Coming from the environmental movement, I'm having to learn about Œdeal flow,'" Roth notes the skills of the marketplace before launching into the details of sustainable power. Not only conventional energy companies but rural farmers have signed on to place wind turbines on the fields with rural electric coops bringing a steady income, he says. "If we can get enough commercial markets in their behalf, it can tip the political scene so the dominant industry isn't fossil fuel," he says.

Straddling many concerns, the climate change cause has also enlarged and diversified the edges of the old-new environmental movement. Sometimes scientists, sometimes academics, sometimes city hall bureaucrats, a new breed of activist-environmentalist has signed on to the front line cause. Customarily cautious, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center jumped into the fray a generation ago. Conscious of climate change long before the Rio conference in 1992, Dr. George Woodwell, a premier member of the scientific establishment began to act, warning of the trauma ahead and advancing - and executing - action. In turn, the Center scientists' turned to its causes, trying to save the Amazon Forest. Raising money and prodding consciences, visiting and struggling on the scientific and political fronts, they have taken on saving this Brazilian "carbon sink" whose chopping down for cattle ranching is elevating the world's CO2 emissions.

Other would-be climate repair crews, combining new frontrunners and old activists, operate on many levels, many local. In Portland, Oregon, the Greenhouse Network trains speakers to spread the word while Minneapolis for Energy Efficiency (ME3) promotes sustainable energy. Entire states like New York and Maryland have passed legislation for conservation. Shareholder protests rallies organized by Campaign ExxonMobil hit on the fossil fuel corporate elite while Rainforest Action Network, veteran organizers of the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle, now concentrate on broader climate change curtailment.

Even workaday, once faceless officials, sign on to the cutting edge cause. From behind the nation's municipal desks, such civil servants have taken on the hands-on task of adopting local versions, percentages of the Kyoto Protocol rejected by the U.S. Senate. The Cities for Climate Protection (CCP), an arm of the International Coalition for Local Environmental Initiatives, has assembled some 350 international and local governments, cities, and towns to cut down individual emissions by trimming off their energy consumption.

"I think these local groups are way out in front of the national ones," says Ross Gelbspan, climate activist and journalist. Like others, the author of The Heat Is On, advises seekers for the environmental frontline to look beyond the Beltway, beyond the big name groups, to such grassroots activists. While the Washington crew is marginalized into a kind of apathy by their donors, the local ones are unaccountable to their funders and grounded in their community's support. "They can push the envelope further," he says.

Al Norman looks toward 61.5 acres of land rescued from Wal-Mart. Photo courtesy of Frederica Matera

Meanwhile, what of the classic environmentalists, toting backpack and sporting Birkenstocks who memorized Edward Abbey and thought cities were a pestilence? Awareness of the link between the built and natural environment and attention to cities followed all too slowly on the heels of such books as "Since Silent Spring" a half century ago. Planners, like architects and landscape architects have still to catch up with Ian McHarg's Design with Nature. Still, for all the lack of awareness, the notion of the need to revive brownfield cities with dense transit-oriented centers and preserve greenfield fringe farm and wetlands grows. The sprawlbusters expand and the "smart growth" voters take their cause to the ballot booth to fight rampant development.

From his Victorian house on a vintage street in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Al Norman has taken on one of the most visible roles in that battle to save Main Street from megastores. The author of Slam-dunking Wal-Mart, the activist works across the country, organizing and agitating to fight superstores. Norman's most local victory is the 61.5 acre swath of land rescued from the proposed Wal-Mart near his own home. But, on this day, the Big Box battler seems a bit more international, greeting us at the front door with a cell phone call from Puerto Rico under one ear, a visual symbol of the U.S.' global counterpart. At 55, the sprawlbuster might as well be talking to the world. "Every morning when you wake up one and a half more big box stores will have opened," he says. With these openings comes the death of main street and the gobbling of greenfields, the devastation of natural systems that has rallied environmentalists and secured anti-growth converts across the continent.

Wal-Mart fighter Al Norman looks over Greenfield, MA which, he conteds, would have been devastated by the superstore.

Our first stop is the Berkshire ridge he rallied to save. Today, the spot where Wal-Mart once set its stakes has become part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's 20-acre refuge joined now to some 6l.5 preserved acres once doomed to hold the asphalt wrapped chain. Rescuing the property overlooking the Connecticut River not only saved fine views, but rescued a four-state "special focus area" habitat for freshwater mussels and endangered short-nosed sturgeon.

Less visible than the land thus saved is the Main Street that wasn't wrecked and emptied out; the traffic that didn't bog down its streets. Not to mention, the camera store owner who can still chat sociably in mid-afternoon ...the brick buildings that still have the chance for a new life with residences...and the slightly weepy but still surviving storefronts. From his home to the tour of the small shops holding everything from the Tobacco Free Network to the bookstore and local coffee shop, to the site saved, we hear the saga of pressing forward: the meetings, the press conferences, the combating misstatements, the zoning after zoning procedure and voting that, in the end, does--or, alas, doesn't--sends such Big Boxers scuttling.

So, are such one-by-one forward fights sufficient? Norman seems of a mixed mind. Are environmentalists missing in action in their own neighborhoods? Yes, says Norman. Certainly planners are, he continues, as he describes their indifference to protecting the landscape from the invasion of the hardtoppers and booty snatchers. "Unfortunately," Bill Klein, head of APA's research half way across the country in Chicago concurs, planners have not played a big role in saving the national landscape. "In my practice," Klein recalls, "about half of what we did was land-saving, conserving but it was putting out brush fires. So many of us have put our eggs in the zoning basket," he continues.

Still, securing settlement patterns with police power remains slack and inefficient. For all the Portland, Oregons, the spreading Minneapolis' multiply. At the least, tries at land use control haven't shrunk the yearly loss of l.2 million acres of farmland and 60,000 of wetlands. For all their teaching in comprehensive planning and zoning to save the built environment, for all the activism, they were running in place, he feels. The alternative?

Without some land acquisition, says Klein, the states and the federal government fail. With conservation, they can do well, he insists citing the success of Nantucket in raising 10 million a year through the real estate transfer tax. "It's a race," he says, to preserve the hot little island's real estate where mega-mansions rise among once scenic dunes. "But by the time the dust settles, we will have saved half of the 50 square miles." Landbanking, land saving, the old tool of the old guard, is their forward edge.

From his post surveying green causes as environmental programmer for the Doris Duke Foundation in New York, former journalist Peter Howell agrees: the cutting edge lies in that old staple word: conservation, he says. Land conservation, the softer, even squishier edge of environmentalism has advanced. "It's tremendous," he says. "A land ethic has come to America measuring big money," Howell describes the alliance between ranchers and environmentalists working out easements at, say, Yellowstone Park. "You only get a few places that you can point to successes," he says of school-bred zoning practices. Land purchases, he feels, could be the true cutting edge, "if we can think of a way to use them in a more sustainable way."

"We've got to find a way to figure out how to balance preservation and aesthetics, Howell goes on. How one does it is complex. Stop sprawl. "Smart Growth." Improve alternative transportation. "I think Rails to Trails is on the edge," he says. "There's no way in the world we can buy up the country," he admits, but by inspiring regulatory schemes that pick off the prize places, much gets saved and conservation sets the standard of greenery.

David Burwell, head of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, begs to differ about the sharpest tool on the cutting edge. "That's an expression of defeat in being able to influence transportation outcomes," Burwell responds to the conservation impulse stressing more planning-based programs on hand: plans for transit-oriented development, plans for affordable housing, new weapons in the arsenal: New Jersey with "context sensitive design," Florida with "concurrency," California with "innovative bonuses," he goes on listing Safe Routes to School programs launched by WalkBoston and spreading. "Everyone says they're fighting a losing battle," he retorts to the planning skeptics "because history says that a higher GNP makes for more driving. It's our contention that you travel to access place," he emphasizes. And that making place conserves.

Burwell looks backwards to make his case: to the central role of the environmental movement in stopping the highway and shaping legislation in the late sixties and seventies. Today, through ISTEA and TEA-21, this vanguard ahs advanced the cause, Burwell says, spinning off the latest success figures: the drop in climbing vehicle miles for the first time in 30 years to zero percent...the rise of public transportation by four or five percent...the battles everywhere to stop sprawl and the "fly-drive" subsidies that have made the "brittle, sensitive transportation system" so apparent in the aftermath of 9/ll. "They're a lot of tools and we're right at the tipping point," says Burwell.

Another movement tiptoeing to triumph is the green building movement. The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) code aiming to create a common scorecard for sustainability has become a shared aspiration. The green building movement, despite its seeming inch-by-inch, row-by-row incrementalism is advancing. Through insulation, through proper siting and renewable energy, the cause stands high on many lists as the new, new (old) thing. Conservation and green building used to be just words, says Howell. Now "it's picking up. It's not just a fringe thing. They're committed." Builders, buyers, even architects and planners.

The fund programmer who surveys many activists in the field cites the panache and public activism of the Rainforest Network Alliance for getting the giant big boxers to sign on to that "clean consuming." For all the oxymoronic aspects of that phrase, they have dramatized their cause, he says, recounting the group grabbing the microphone in a Home Depot. "There, in aisle 5, you see wood from the Great Bear Rainforest," a voice boomed out to the assembled shoppers from one of their number. "This kind of agitprop has been very good when paired with activists pressing against logging," he says.

"The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss," Douglas Adams put it in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in the first wash of the sixties activism with its gang of monkey wrenchers and environmentalists. "There is so much money and activism," Howell describes today's environmentalism. Put them together and perhaps this vanguard will advance a larger community. For all the insufficiency of looking local not federal, or local not federal, for all the painfully slow labors of these oddlot vanguard environmentalists, their cutting edge knowledge and commitment have advanced in tandem with the globe's high stakes of not "throwing oneself on the ground."

An edited version of this story appeared in Planning magazine, December 2001 issue.

Back to Articles Index