REFLECTIONS

...These tend to be neighborhood or community efforts whose principal concern is the urban and industrial environment, though they are not indifferent to the state of the natural environment, as well...

...They worry about the contamination of residential ground water as opposed to the traditional environmental concern about protecting in-stream flows...

...They have become organizations of active members rather than rosters of dues-payers on mailing lists...

...What is most striking about the grassroots efforts, however, is their democratic thrust, similar in some ways to the student, civil-rights, and women's movements that flourished a generation ago...

...and various advocates of "deep ecology" or "bio-regionalism...

...In essence, the militant^ criticize the establishment organizations for their conservative tactics, but not for their goals...

...At the same time, however, something different has begun to make< itself felt—a movement, or rather a number of movements, focusing on issues affecting their communities and the quality of their lives...

...In fact, the militants, with their rhetoric recalling the counterculture of the 1960s, have reinforced the notion of environmentalism as a movement that deals exclusively with nature, not with problems of industrialization and urbanization:1 Some of these "deep ecologists," moreover, totally divorce their concern about nature from any interest in easing the effects of human exploitation...

...The new movements have raised urgent questions about toxic substances and hazardous waste...

...And many have come to embrace an operational style that stresses management skills rather than organizing efforts, dictating opinion rather than soliciting it...

...Though some established groups were able to recruit hundreds of thousands of new members, internal divisions flared and new organizations sprang up, at first pursuing more adversarial tactics...

...Her books include "Water and Poverty in the Southwest" (with F. Lee Brown), published by the University of Arizona Press...

...When choices are made regarding new technologies or the introduction of new products, the new environmentalists see the "risk" analysis as grounded in political circumstances, not just technological considerations...

...Environmental leaders congratulated themselves on preventing the dismantling of the regulatory structure built in the 1970s...

...The production and review of environmental-impact statements became an industry in its own right...

...In fact, some environmental leaders now regard grass-roots movements as potential threats to their new-found respectability as reasonable negotiators...

...Some of these groups have also begun to link such apparently disparate concerns as environmentalism and feminism in a new kind of discourse that places the abuses of industrialization in the context of daily life...

...Helen Ingram is a professor of political science at the University of Arizona, Tucson...

...Therefore, they argue that these decisions should not be left to the judgment of experts...

...Often these efforts take the form of programs to make urban and industrial interests more "efficient," rationalizing rather than restructuring the production process...

...Building this sort of "populist" envi-ronmentalism entails enormous difficulties...

...Most of the Administration's attempts to cut back expenditures for environmental protection or to roll back regulatory legislation met with only limited success...

...Aside from its long-standing interest in scenic protection, conventional environmentalism has developed as a crisis-oriented, reactive form of politics, seeking to address questions of "clean-up" and regulation, pollution control more than pollution prevention...

...But in this area, at least, the Administration's hard-edged rhetoric boomeranged: Though many of the environmental organizations had been ready to proclaim the end of the Environmental Decade, they found the public embraced environmental values to a much greater extent than the Administration—or the environmentalist's—had suspected...

...It includes the organization Earth First...

...Grass-roots environmentalism, on the other hand, promotes the concept that the needs of the community and, in its more radical form, of the workplace come first...

...His most recent book is "A Life of Its Own: The Politics and Power of Water," to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich this October...

...Furthermore, during the Reagan years these conventional environmental organizations have become more dependent on funding from foundations and other private and governmental sources than on their membership bases...

...It is a grass-roots, community-based, democratic movement that differs radically from conventional, mainstream American environmentalism, which always had a strong nondemocratic strain...

...Competition for money and membership intensified...

...Instead of embracing expertise, they have developed self-taught experts...

...While the mainstream environmental organizations were becoming more bureaucratized (or, as some of their leaders like to say, "professionalized"), a more militant, direct-action wing of environmentalism began to take shape...

...The arena for these organizations tends to be the community, and their issues center on local democratic control rather than on national, bureaucratic resolutions...

...Instead of concentrating on lobbying and legislation, they have resorted to popular action and citizens' lawsuits...

...These divergent forms of environmentalism raise important questions...

...The explosion of public concern for the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s took the conventional environmentalists by surprise...

...Most significantly, they have begun to demand an accounting of how people's day-to-day lives are affected by the decisions made by industries and developers, by government agencies as well as private institutions, on a broad range of issues ranging from energy usage to economic dislocation and environmental destruction...

...This kind of environmentalism can be seen not just as an "interest group" that seeks a more effective regulatory apparatus or better protection of scenic resources, but as an essential component of a new kind of democratic politics—a politics that deals with questions of "risk" not just in terms of what kind of contaminant or hazard we are prepared to live with and at what cost, but also in terms of the perils posed by life in an unaccountable society, where the decisions that affect our lives are made elsewhere...

...Over the years, the mainstream environmentalists relied heavily on lobbying, litigation, and "science" to achieve their objectives, creating in the process a kind of cult of expertise...

...they must be subjected to public scrutiny, debate, and participation...

...Now a new environmental approach, emerging especially in the movement to curb generation of toxic substances, has begun to take a close look at the possibility of subjecting such development decisions to democratic control...

...To believe in science, not emotion, became a denning characteristic...

...As heirs to their conservationist forerunners' deference to expertise, establishment environmentalists are embarrassed by the lack of scientific sophistication in the grass-roots movements...

...Act, better known as Superfund...

...These organizations saw themselves as representing an elite grouping, interested in protecting or even saving the natural environment for the individual and from the masses...

...Ronald Reagan's election on a pledge of deregulation seemed, at first, to threaten that agenda...

...The existing nationally oriented environmental groups, though influenced to some extent by the new grass-roots organizations, still adhere to an organizational network that depends primarily on lobbying, litigation, and technical expertise...

...During the 1970s, the newly energized movement managed to establish what came to be called the "environmental agenda...

...This article is adapted from a chapter in "Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the '90s," edited by Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman, to be co-published this year by South End Press and the Institute for Policy Studies...

...At times, they even found areas of agreement with the Reagan Administration in attacking certain Government subsidies and exploring privatization measures...

...What both movements have lacked so far, however, is a coherent analysis of the ways in which community problems and environmental crises are rooted in the process by which decisions are made on basic questions of development and production...

...It was structured around such major pieces of legislation as the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Protection Act, the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Conservation, and Liabilities Robert Gottlieb teaches in the Urban Planning Program at the University of California, Los Angeles...

...They were congratulated by policymakers, furthermore, on their growing maturity, reasonableness, and sound management...

...They have brought up issues of housing, transportation, air quality, and even economic development—issues the traditional environmental agenda had largely ignored...

...The environmental organizations entered into complex relationships with a host of new administrative bureaucracies and helped fashion a new field of environmental law...

...Such happenings as Earth Day, which mobilized large numbers of Americans across the country, did not precisely fit the conventional movement's more genteel style...