Environmental Activism and Global Civil Society
Wapner, Paul
Earth Day 1970 marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Twenty million Americans gathered to demonstrate their distress over the state of the environment. Their message was...
...After weeks at sea, they returned with only still photographs to document instances of environmental harm...
...In short, environmentalism went global...
...It currently employs over a thousand full-time staff members, plus hundreds of part-timers, and thousands of volunteers...
...Solidarity and Charter 77 were successful, many believe, because they politicized civil society...
...This institution, mandated at the Earth Summit, disburses funds for development projects that directly address global environmental problems...
...They rely on familiar strategies of lobbying and pressuring governments...
...Whether or not such areas are officially designated as parks, the poor and hungry will (rightfully) seek resources to keep themselves alive...
...Unlike at Greenpeace, its individual offices enjoy much autonomy...
...and it was one of the first to define the threat of nuclear war as an environmental issue...
...The idea is to invite the public to bear witness as well, to enable people throughout the world to become informed about ecological dangers, pique their sense of outrage, and spur them to action...
...Today, Greenpeace ships use telephones, fax machines, satellite uplinks, and video cameras...
...FOE began the first serious study of alternative energy policies (pushing a soft-energy path relying on non-nuclear renewables...
...Recent years have seen concerted efforts to politicize civil society...
...What WWF had failed to realize was that individual species cannot be saved without ensuring their habitat...
...Many of their undertakings, such as dams and forest-to-farmland enterprises, actually end up wreaking environmental destruction in recipient countries...
...These changes reflect the efforts of environmental groups to act in global civil society...
...Since the late 1980s, for example, WWF has been working in Zambia to set up a game management system involving local residents in antipoaching and conservation efforts...
...Over the next two decades, environmental activists increasingly worked across national boundaries...
...For feminist activists, the public/private distinction, which identifies the political with the state, is an obfuscation of political reality...
...Instead, the aim is to instill a sense of outrage among the largest audience possible...
...It has canceled or revised a number of large-scale projects, financed a number of explicitly environmental programs, and assumed responsibility for the Global Environmental Facility...
...This code includes commitments to waste reduction, damage compensation, and disclosure of environmentally harmful practices...
...Feminist groups, for instance, argue that patriarchy pervades all levels of association...
...They foster global civil society...
...They protested the use of pesticides, the killing of whales, and the production of radioactive wastes...
...To establish a wilderness or forest preserve, pressuring governments is a logical approach...
...Many of these are in the developing world...
...Its "eco-navy" consists of eight ships, and it owns a helicopter and a hot-air balloon...
...Despite significant efforts to track, study and research these animals, however, WWF found that their numbers still diminished...
...Horizontal networks involving church activities, savings associations, literary ventures and the like thus became forums for political action...
...But they also invest themselves in the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of global life that lie outside the realm of governmental affairs...
...When David Brower founded Friends of the Earth in 1969, it had a single office in San Francisco and only a handful of staff working mostly as volunteers...
...Whether they disseminate an ecological sensibility by publicizing instances of environmental harm, rewrite the terms of good corporate conduct, challenge traditional understandings of development aid, or expand the notion of wildlife conservation to include sustainable life-styles, transnational environmental groups are reshaping environmental action...
...While there is a central administrative body coordinating FOE actions worldwide, each office is basically on its own to choose issue areas, devise strategies and carry out activities...
...In each of these cases, changes have taken place that are not driven by governmental policies and directives...
...Video footage may be sent almost immediately to media sources throughout the world...
...WWF works on a whole host of international and global environmental issues including desertification, climate change and ozone depletion...
...By the time the second ship arrived home, thousands of people had joined Greenpeace opposition to the tests...
...This has involved moving beyond governmentally targeted activities to ones focused on the dynamics of social life itself...
...Their message was historically distinct...
...Twenty-five years later an international effort costing five million dollars was mounted to save three whales trapped in ice in Alaska...
...SUMMER • 1994 • 393...
...Greenpeace can distribute edited, scripted, and narrated video news spots to television stations in eighty-eight countries within hours...
...They have to do with consumption patterns, reproductive practices, technological imperatives, life-style choices and widespread poverty—none of which are completely amenable to government directives...
...Since then it has focused on almost every environmental issue with transboundary implications— including oil spills, toxic dumping, deforestation, climate change, ozone depletion, and acid rain...
...It now staffs offices in thirty countries and a research base in Antarctica...
...This type of political action, originating with the Quakers, links moral sensitivities with political responsibility...
...They are discovering, or more accurately nurturing, a sphere of collective life that is, perhaps fortunately, resistant to government influence...
...Greenpeace's direct actions are based on the Global Civil Society notion of "bearing witness...
...Both voyages garnered extensive media coverage in Canada and the United States...
...Friends of the Earth publishes an international newsletter for all chapters and holds meetings throughout the year for its representatives from around the world...
...In the past, environmental concern revolved mainly around establishing and protecting wilderness areas for aesthetic and recreational prises...
...Their aim is to identify and manipulate levers of power, which, although not associated with governments per se, effectively shape, order, and direct collective behavior...
...When multilateral development banks and other aid institutions were formed after the Second World War, environmental impact assessments were unheard of...
...Greenpeace has close to six million members worldwide and an operating budget of over one hundred million dollars...
...They became genuinely transnational in character...
...Friends of the Earth, Conservation International, and Earth Island Institute, for example, devote significant amounts of time to politicizing realms of collective life lying outside the grip of nation-states...
...Activities range from the simple task of building fences around a forest preserve to the more complex one of creating opportunities for sustainable development in environmentally fragile areas...
...For years these institutions operated without recognizing the environmental impact of their projects...
...Over the next few months, the group managed to send two ships toward the test site...
...Through WWF's efforts, local people staff these areas and receive the revenues from permits and programs associated with the preserve...
...It aims to enable local people to be agriculturally productive without harming the ecological integrity of the area...
...WWF recognizes that wildlife protection depends foremost on local communities empowered to undertake their own sustainable development...
...The group had been meeting informally for over a year and saw itself as the only organization willing to object to the testing...
...Finally, WWF has been working in St...
...Twenty million Americans gathered to demonstrate their distress over the state of the environment...
...In each of these projects, WWF has been working with local people and, for the most part, bypassing governments...
...That's something everybody can understand...
...Millions of people now belong to transnational environmental groups...
...Greenpeace's actions rarely come with messages to call your congressperson or pressure local government officials...
...This is no easy task...
...Finally, in the 1960s few people gave thought to the idea of linking environment and development, or to pursuing what is now called sustainable development...
...None of these activities involves lobbying a government per se or calling for a particular policy change on the part of specific countries...
...The United States had already detonated one bomb and planned a number of future tests...
...Perhaps more remarkably, these organizations are fashioning a new type of politics...
...In the 1970s, Greenpeace ships had to use Morse code to communicate with their offices on land...
...Protecting a riverbed could not be separated from saving the planet...
...Recognizing this, WWF has expanded its conception of conservation to include human needs...
...It sought to establish wildlife preserves that would protect animals from ecologically detrimental human activity...
...This involves lending technical assistance for communal waste disposal, improving the ability of people to market their fish catch to reduce overfishing, and planting fast growing fuelwood trees to protect mangroves that have traditionally served as fire wood...
...Today it has local chapters in 51 countries...
...Rather, Greenpeace is attempting to inculcate and disseminate a sensitivity to environmental affairs and inspire people to take action in the service of environmental protection...
...As they attempt to identify and engage these opportunities, "saving the planet" becomes an exercise in world civic politics...
...Earth Day 1970 marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement...
...At one point, a member said, "Why the hell doesn't somebody just sail a boat up there and park right next to 390 • DISSENT the bomb...
...When Greenpeace confronts whalers on the high seas or blocks railway cars carrying toxic substances or plugs up discharge pipes, it bears witness, in the most public way possible, to ecological injustice...
...A group of people were sitting around trying to figure out how to stop the United States from testing nuclear weapons on Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands...
...People spoke out about oil spills, urban smog, toxic dumping and dwindling resources...
...The group's most important strength, however, has been and continues to be its global reach...
...FOE has been at the forefront of forcing these institutions to weigh the environmental implications of their activities...
...In 1989, FOE and thirteen other environmental organizations formed the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics (CERES...
...Although local inhabitants of biologically stressed areas may know little about ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect or worldwide deforestation, they know all too well the direct human 392 • DISSENT Global Civil Society consequences of ecological destruction...
...The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a host of other institutions, including the Inter-American, Asian, and African Development Banks, lend large sums for economic development...
...Throughout the 1970s it worked to protect marine mammals and became famous for its attempts to confront whalers on the high seas...
...In the 1960s, the U.S...
...These commitments have become known as the Valdez Principles, inspired by the Exxon Valdez oil spill...
...Navy and Air Force used whales for target practice...
...None of this means that the World Bank or any of the other financial institutions has become "green...
...The second ship, although better stocked and funded, was far from Amchitka at the time of the test...
...One must either take action to prevent further injustice or stand by and attest to its occurrence...
...Game management areas draw tourists and safari hunters...
...Today, these are almost household phrases...
...Greenpeace started in a Unitarian church in Vancouver in 1971...
...The existence of certain plants, access to water, a predictable climate, and the presence of other animals are all significant to preserving species...
...The largest of these organizations, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), operated throughout the world...
...The United States could not adequately protect its territory without encouraging others to do the same...
...Through its offices in fifty-one countries, the organization monitors developments worldwide...
...World Wildlife Fund has also been working in Cameroon to protect a biologically rich area that cannot be designated as a protected region...
...Greenpeace soon expanded its concerns...
...The World Bank, for instance, has increased its environmental staff from three in 1977 and five in the SUMMER • 1994 • 391 Global Civil Society mid-1980s to two hundred at present...
...The budgets of the largest organizations are greater than the amounts most countries spend on environmental issues and at least three times more than the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) spends annually for its work...
...Much of the earth's remaining biological wealth is located in parts of the world where the poorest peoples draw their livelihood from the land...
...Although Earth Day was a predominantly American experience, it spurred recognition that environmental problems were not limited to the United States...
...Lucia to protect the coastal region from environmental damage...
...Today, they are commonplace...
...Notwithstanding the failure of both ships to stop the detonations, what had appeared as failure actually proved to be a success of the very sort Greenpeace has enjoyed through subsequent years...
...With the inclusion of other concerns, however, the limitations of government efforts became clear...
...Having observed a morally objectionable act, one cannot turn away in avoidance...
...Since its establishment in 1961, World Wildlife Fund has grown from a small grant-making organization concerned merely with conservation to a full-fledged transnational environmental activist group with offices in twenty-three countries...
...World Wildlife Fund has over three million members and an annual budget of over one hundred and seventy million dollars...
...According to Robert Hunter, each ship was seen as a "mind bomb sailing across an electronic sea into the minds of the masses...
...Likewise, in their early years, Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia recognized that political life was not captured completely by state activities but rather extended into society itself...
...In 1972 it had only a single office in Vancouver...
...Greenpeace chiefly wages its campaigns in world civic politics through "direct actions...
...FOE exerts similar pressures on development banks...
...Friends of the Earth's initial contribution to environmental activism was to address a number of issues on which other organizations had yet to focus...
...Transnational environmental groups seek the same scrambling of state and society, only on a global level...
...CERES produced a ten-point environmental code of conduct for corporations...
...The first was forced to retreat after the test was postponed...
...Here WWF has been working with local residents to develop tree nurseries for reforestation, reintroduce indigenous crops into the area and share information on the long-term effects of ecologically insensitive practices...
...Two decades ago corporations produced products with little regard for their environmental impact...
...it was the first group to work against acid rain...
...Working directly with them rather than through governments is critical to protecting some of the most ecologically important regions in the world...
...These organizations are not puny...
...Initially, WWF, like other international conservation groups, saw its work as a matter of saving specific species...
...On Earth Day 1970, it involved safeguarding the biophysical quality of life...
...But it does suggest that each is being pressured to become more sensitive to ecological issues...
...It operates in the marketplace and bedroom as well as in congresses and parliaments...
...Over this same period of time, Greenpeace has grown enormously...
...Friends of the Earth has five hundred thousand members and spends roughly two million dollars a year...
...These include positioning activists between harpooners and whales, plugging up industrial discharge pipes, parachuting from smokestacks and floating a hot-air balloon into a nuclear test site...
...the 1970s, as environmental concern expanded beyond conservation and began to focus on the biophysical dimension of life, activist strategies broadened...
...Civil society is that domain of human affairs SUMMER • 1994 • 389 Global Civil Society lying between the individual and the state...
...It is the network of economic, social and cultural practices based on friendship, family, private property, and voluntary affiliation...
...In fact, in many of the countries in which Greenpeace operates, such political expression is not an option...
...They complained, in short, about the increasingly degraded quality of air, water, and soil, and worried out loud about its impact on human life...
...As with the British Empire of old, the sun never sets on Friends of the Earth...
...Toxic wastes, increased population pressures, overfishing, smog, and extinction of species are not solely matters of governmental regulation...
...It was concerned, for example, with protecting the great panda bear, the Bengal tiger and the African elephant, now known as "charismatic species...
...In 1989 and 1990, the World Bank alone lent roughly twenty-one billion dollars...
...It is proving successful because it links wildlife protection with the economic well-being of local residents...
...they represent powerful forces in world environmental affairs...
...Groups opened offices in many countries, directing their efforts to global environmental protection...
...With this understanding, WWF began to work for the protection of habitats...
...Today, it is incumbent upon corporations to reduce environmental impact at the production, packaging, and distribution phases of industry...
...One might call their work "world civic politics...
...Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmentalists emphasized that air, water, shifting soils and migratory animals—to say nothing of the stratospheric ozone layer or the global carbon cycle— transcend national boundaries...
...The idea caught on...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
