NATURE'S BANNER

...The choices are plain enough...

...One way is for groups to set up speakers' bureaus, sending knowledgeable people out to address PTAs, garden clubs, union locals, taxpayer organizations, and other citizens' groups on such issues as environmentally caused birth defects, the dangers of pesticide abuse, organic gardening methods, the dangers and cost of nuclear power, alternative energy sources, toxic substances in the workplace, and the cost-benefit ratio of water projects...

...Buoyed by that success, the FOE PAC quickly began laying plans to expand its efforts for the November general election, soliciting FOE's 25,000 members for active campaign work, raising funds for the FOE PAC treasury, and organizing workshops in campaign techniques across the country...

...To understand the nature of the attack on environmentalists it is helpful to look back to Earth Day, 1970, which focused public attention on a series of problems that corporations were hard-pressed to deny or excuse...

...There is, unfortunately, every reason to expect that environmental catastrophes will begin to surface with increasing regularity...

...Mazzochi points out that if workers cannot be protected from toxic substances in the workplace, there is little hope that the public will be protected from poisons whose source is unknown and whose presence and characteristics are even more difficult to determine once they are released into the larger environment: The need for an alliance between environmentalists and labor is clear...

...Carefully targeted direct mailing campaigns, meanwhile, have been used as an effective tool for exploiting the anxieties and frustrations of middle-class taxpayers, blue-collar workers, the elderly, and the religious-minded...

...That path need not mean abandoning lobbying and litigation, but rather building a much more broadly based effort...

...Last spring, the newly formed Friends of the Earth PAC took its first plunge into electoral waters, joining Environmental Action and the League of Conservation Voters in some New Jersey primary battles...

...Environmentalists will never be able to compete with their enemies where money is required," Martin declares...

...concern over cancer rates, birth defects, the poisoning of workers and neighborhoods, healthy places for spending leisure, and the very capacity of the Earth to continue to support life are not elitist issues...

...With environmental sentiment riding high, Reagan found it politic to devote almost one-third of his legislative address to environmental issues...

...Even assuming overlapping memberships the totals are significant...

...Nowadays "environmental-ism" covers everything from industrial workplace health and appropriate technology to organic gardening and preservation of agricultural land...

...Citizens for a Better Environment, which depends entirely on door-to-door solicitation for its financial support, claims to have raised $200,000 this way over the last three years in the San Francisco Bay area alone...

...In the Hardin view the United States is a generous but foolish world benefactor, forever spending money to lift the global poor out of hunger and disease only to have them plunge inevitably back into misery when those efforts cause a population increase...

...Or so the corporations increasingly saw the matter...

...Says former Friends of the Earth lobbyist Mark Vander-velden, "Just being right on the issues didn't make a damn bit of difference...

...Relations between environmentalists and progressive unions such as the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW...

...Given the generally conservative nature of the American labor movement and the heavy streak of "business unionism...

...Reagan's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has rescinded a proposed rule that would have required companies to notify employes of the identities and perils of chemicals they work with...

...Business firms and wealthy individuals began to channel ever-larger sums of money to political candidates through political action committees, to conservative think tanks, to political advertising, and to ideological allies such as the conservative churches and the anti-abortion movement...

...Seeing overpopulation as the Earth's principal "environmental problem," Hardin therefore advocates an end to American food and development aid, along with stricter limits on U.S...

...the Sierra Club, 200,000...

...Barry Commoner...

...There is no reason environmentalism should be elitist...

...Ignored in the Hardin scenario is the control exercised by the United States over foreign resources as well as any causal links between exploitative development on the part of international business and poverty in developing nations...

...The trouble is that while union leaders know of these ideas and put some credence in them, no one has worked hard enough to get these ideas out to union members...

...These days, the environmental work of the national organizations is most often carried out by a few front-line activists in Washington, in state capitals, and in courtrooms across the country, while the public sits on the sidelines...

...In the Edgar campaign canvassers asked householders whether they would like to sign a petition to have their local representative vote for control of toxic substances and against wasteful water projects...

...But with James Watt determined to use all we can before the Second Coming, there is little evidence that Reagan has in mind restrained use of resources...

...Federal laws which prohibit tax-exempt organizations from participating in elections except through a separate, taxable entity have hampered many environmental groups...

...The Reagan Administration has hastened the arrival of the American environmental movement at a critical juncture, a strategic and philosophical moment of choice...

...Only 12 per cent of those polled favored making the Clean Air Act less strict than it is now, and only 4 per cent favored weakening the Clean Water Act...

...and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employes, have been especially productive and have worked both ways, as when the Sierra Club and others supported OCAW's strike against Shell over health and safety issues and when OCAW helped environmentalists challenge the construction of a Dow chemical plant...

...And nearly all groups report a rise in membership growth rates since the Reagan Administration took office...

...undercutting the Clean Air Act...

...All four candidates won...

...The opportunities in door-to-door canvassing are numerous—money-raising, building voter support, educating the public on local and global environmental issues, increasing memberships, creating a mailing list, and establishing a pool of people who will show up at public hearings, write letters to government officials, or carry out any other of the various tasks that arise in environmental battles...

...Some health experts predict that cancer will strike one out of every two people in the next generation...

...Anne Jackson is a free-lance writer in Sacramento...

...Beyond these basic techniques for building grass-roots support, however, there exists the need for a more far-reaching effort—the formulation of a vision joining environmental concerns with social needs...

...opening public lands and waters to expanded corporate exploitation...

...The bans forbid union workers to accept jobs on the projects...

...Such environmental groups as Friends of the Earth have consciously sought out causes involving the poor—the farmworker pesticide battle, for instance...

...That is not the story told by the numbers...

...What is happening to the environmental movement under Reagan is, in fact, much like what has happened to the movements for alleviation of poverty, for peace and disarmament, for equal rights for women and minorities, and for international human rights...

...A large portion of advertising in such magazines as Harper's and Atlantic no longer sells a product but rather a corporate image and a political line...

...As a result, instead of environmentalists taking the lead in building bridges between the movement and those outside, non-environmental organizations and single-issue citizens' groups have often been the ones to come forward to do environmental battle...

...And business became uncomfortably aware that environmentalism was beginning to touch all facets of American life and to involve large numbers of people who had never seen a backpack or hiked in the woods...

...Implementing the Clean Air Act began to complicate the business of manufacturing automobiles and meant added expense for pollution control equipment in numerous other industries...

...The Citizens' Party has represented an attempt by environmentalists and close allies to move toward such a vision, but many, including some environmentally aware figures within the labor movement, see that effort as tainted by a professional middle-class image and are calling for something different...

...NATURE'S BANNER BY ANNE JACKSON AND ANGUS WRIGHT There's no subject more on our minds than the preservation of our environment and the absolute necessity of > waging an all-out war against the debauching of that environment...

...Too often, in the eyes of rank-and-file union members, environmentalists are spoiled rich kids who only surface when they want to block a project that could mean jobs for workers...

...That strategy has paid off for conservatives, but an army of volunteer workers making one-to-one contact with voters could be even more effective for the cause of environmentalists and progressives...

...He argued that pricing deregulation and resultant higher energy costs would encourage conservation, and reducing Federal subsidies would discourage building wasteful flood control and irrigation projects...

...Any number of other strategies might be employed, from billboard campaigns to special school programs, with the object of educating people on specific issues and finding ways to bring them "into the action" in as many ways as possible...

...After viewing the voting records, residents were asked whether they would like to join the League of Conservation Voters or the Edgar campaign and whether they would like to contribute money...

...Now, in the White House, Reagan supports nuclear power rather than solar, wind, or geothermal energy...

...the United Auto Workers...

...The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) seemed innocent enough when its essential feature was a bureaucratic process—the environmental impact statement—which provided no specific mechanism for outright cancellation of projects but simply identified key issues for public officials to ponder...

...No, Ronald Reagan, in his 1970state-of-the-state message as governor of California...

...The Clean Air Act, which did arouse considerably more debate, contained enough loopholes and occasions for delay to seem acceptable for the moment...

...Environmentalists have just begun to fight The World Directory of Environmental Organizations lists more than 200 national and multi-state environmental groups, and that's only the beginning...

...Environmental Defense Fund, 52.000...

...Friends of the Earth has 25,000 members in the United States and 175,000 worldwide, including Les Amis de la Terre in France and Los Amigos de la Tierra in Spain and Latin America...

...Such spectacular incidents as Cleveland's Cuyahoga River aflame from volatile factory wastes, raw sewage dumped by large cities in the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and highly visible urban air pollution provided concrete evidence in the sight of all that the American environment was being seriously despoiled...

...Can we in America reach beyond the present political malaise and bring together not only labor and the environmentalists, but women, minorities, and the rest of the effectively disenfranchised...

...Only a coherent, clearly drawn program that demonstrates that a healthful and pleasant environment is compatible with economic prosperity can win the day against that challenge...

...Environmentalism, in fact, has become so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that it's hard to remember this wasn't always the case...

...Farmworker unions and such legal aid agencies as California Rural Legal Assistance have carried the battle for control of pesticide use, with environmentalists often playing a secondary role...

...In Oregon and California, farmers, salmon fishermen, and parents concerned about birth defects and miscarriages have united against aerial spraying of herbicides on timberlands...

...Greenpeace, 150,000...

...The growing complexity of that task and of environmental issues in general, say some, makes it difficult to involve large groups of people in the decisionmaking process...

...For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, concerned about unemployment, recently came out in favor of nuclear energy, despite convincing evidence that soft energy would produce more jobs than nuclear power...

...California has forty-five separate groups working on local water issues alone...

...Such peace organizations as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the Fellowship of Reconciliation have helped drive home the connection between civilian nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons...

...Natural Resources Defense Council, 45,000...

...While the Reagan Administration would have us believe the public at large has wearied of envi-ronmentalism and is ready to cast it on the trash heap of worn-out fads, the polls show otherwise...

...Those who remained active in the organizations turned to lobbying their former associates within government instead of keeping the membership active and the public aroused...

...A third choice is to heed the political winds blowing in reaction to the Reagan Administration policies, to join forces with those sharing compatible views, and to begin using the only real weapon which has ever been available to the environmental movement anyway—the force of numbers...

...Greenpeace reports it raised 19 per cent of its'$500,000 California budget for 1980 through door-to-door solicitations and grew 35 per cent in the process...

...The Carter Administration in Washington, and some state administrations—Governor Jerry Brown's in California, for example—pulled many out of the movement and into government...

...Such groups as National Intervenors...

...in those terms, environmental organizations are stronger than ever...

...When the answer was "yes," canvassers asked whether the person would like to see the voting record of the local representative on those issues...

...In Australia, labor unions have recognized that what is seriously damaging to the environment will sooner or later do harm to the people who live and work in the environment, and especially to people who have limited resources for private escape or personal protection against general social ills...

...The health and safety director of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, Tony Mazzochi, calls the 1980s the "era of genetic confrontation," when birth defects and sterility will begin to be experienced personally by millions of Americans...

...Former Washington environmental lobbyist Elizabeth Martin argues that the movement should retain a few highly professional lobbyists but that others now doing lobbyist work "should be harnessed to canvass every district in the country door-to-door...

...And the League of Conservation Voters credits its door-to-door campaign work for the election of Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Edgar, an environmentalist, to Congress last year, despite Edgar's initially weak position in the district...

...The concentration on lobbying leads environmental workers into enemy territory where they are outnumbered and outspent by industry forces...

...But others say technical expertise is often useless in a political context without public pressure to back it up...

...Those who think the work of the environmental movement can be dismantled overnight should reflect on how much more the public understands about the environment than it did in the early 1960s...

...But just as the movement has failed to win over rank-and-file union members, it has also failed to demonstrate to poor people and minorities that a sound environmental program is compatible with their interests...

...the National Audubon Society, 325,000...

...In a 1980 Resources for the Future poll, 75 per cent of the respondents said they knew about the Three Mile Island accident and 90 per cent said they would not want a nuclear power plant within five miles of their homes...

...In cities, minority groups have worked to improve mass transit and to halt the spread of highways, which are often designed to cut through low-income neighborhoods...

...One area where environmentalists have made progress in forging alliances is, ironically, the area where they are generally perceived to have failed completely—in joining forces with labor...

...But his record soon belied the rhetoric: As governor, he undermined the state air pollution control agency, fought protection for the California coast, resisted mass-transit funding, pushed to expand the state highway system, and implied that in a Redwood National Park of his design, perhaps one tree would be sufficient...

...They have also pointed out that the technical retraining period for workers to put these solutions into effect is often much less the endless retraining of the American work force that takes place for the goal of increasing profits...

...In political outlook, environmentalists, on the whole, have more in common with the Left than with conservatives...

...What we are seeing is not the decline of former concerns but the rise of a virulent counterattack...

...However valid or invalid the justification, environmental organizations have put coalition-building on the back burner in favor of lobbying and courtroom activities...

...A lobbyist who has worked for various environmental groups in Washington describes the scene: "What you have are all these fresh-scrubbed young people on $300 a month, very unsophisticated, up against well-paid professional lobbyists with all the money they need behind them...

...Interior Secretary James G. Watt, and company launch their attack so openly because they sensed a vulnerability in the enemy, a faltering of will or strength...

...With so much public backing of environmentalism and with that backing likely to intensify, why do the Reagan Administration and the corporations believe they can make the nation retrace its steps to an earlier, more indifferent age...

...Problems that are pernicious but often invisible (toxic wastes, for example), problems that are difficult to explain in lay terms (such as loss of genetic resources through plant breeding and the genetic implications of nuclear radiation), are all matters that can finally only be dealt with by experts—so the argument goes...

...Garrett Hardin, a professor of biological sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has received lengthy and sympathetic treatment in national magazines with his xenophobic "lifeboat ethics" philosophy...

...It is not easy work, and many groups feel compelled to save an organization's best resources for a court battle or a hearing room and to leave public education to others...

...If conservative Republicans and business groups go all out in seeking to cut back the Clean Air Act," said Harris, "it is likely that they will create, as a counterforce of major proportions, a new and revived environmental movement in this country...

...The National Wildlife Federation now counts 2.5 million members nationwide...

...Indeed, where environmental groups have tried door-to-door campaigning the results have been strikingly successful...

...From seemingly naive and innocuous beginnings, the environmental movement began to question the basic right of corporate and government officials to make investment and production decisions without active citizen participation...

...In many of these fights in the Dakotas and Rocky Mountain states they are joined by ranchers and farmers while environmentalists come in late or not at all...

...The technique was so effective that the League was able to pay canvassers good wages, raise money for its own organization, and contribute funds to Edgar...

...One factor which turned the movement in that direction was the process of co-optation on the part of Democratic Administrations...

...There are other ways for environmentalists to reach beyond talking to legislators, bureaucrats, and each other...

...One justification environmentalists give for concentrating so narrowly on lobbying and litigation and for not involving more people in the work of the movement is the increasing need to deal with "second-generation issues"—that is, seeing that the environmental statutes passed in the 1970s are adequately translated into regulations and enforced by the agencies charged with enforcing them...

...it can be counted as a real achievement that labor has frequently been enlisted in the cause of the environment and vice versa...

...But environmentalists will have to remember to speak more clearly and listen more closely to those outside government if they expect to have their message understood...

...With only $14,000, they managed to contact 25,000 voters in door-to-door canvassing and telephoning, sent out 15,000 letters, and got.5,000 targeted voters to the polls on election day...

...National Wilderness Society, 100,000...

...The conservative elements within the movement have not escaped the notice of the Reagan Administration, which has shown signs lately of attempting to seduce conservationists into supporting the Administration's programs...

...General public support for environmental goals also continues unabated...

...Nor is environmental work any longer the exclusive province of environmental organizations...

...As those events begin to unfold public reaction is bound to escalate...

...Angus Wright heads the Environmental Studies Department of California State University in Sacramento...

...On the environmentalist side, groups such as Environmentalists for Full Employment have produced excellent studies—together with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor—showing that the best solutions to environmental problems can create a net gain in numbers of jobs...

...Together, the three organizations put 100 workers into three state legislative races and into Democrat James Florio's campaign for governor...

...And while conservatives have always existed within the environmental ranks, in today's political climate they are beginning to speak more loudly and to gain more media attention...

...There, union councils declare "green bans" on projects when environmentalists or others are able to convince them that an unacceptable level of environmental damage is involved...

...We were right all the time on the empirical data...

...A Louis Harris survey in May showed overwhelming opposition to weakening either the Clean Air Act or the so-called Clean Water Act (actually an amalgamation of several water protection measures...

...the Machinists...

...Only 5 per cent of those questioned said they would not mind living within five miles of a toxic waste dump...

...the Union of Concerned Scientists, Science in the Public Interest, Science for the People, and Concerned Medical Professionals have worked to provide the technical base to do battle with corporate and government experts and to popularize the basic concepts involved...

...The environmental movement, it would appear, is in trouble—the target of a determined and audacious assault...

...Such Indian groups as the National Indian Youth Council, along with traditional Navajo, Sioux, and Hopi, have organized against uranium mining and are fighting strip-mining operations for coal and oil shale on sacred lands...

...Not only was it virtually impossible to deny the reality of these problems, but conservative forces also saw some real benefit in the rise of environmental issues to divert attention from the Vietnam war, the civil rights struggle, life in the ghettos, and America's loss of power abroad...

...When these kids do succeed in meeting a Congressman or Senator, he gets the impression that the environmental movement is made up exclusively of unsophisticated young people...

...Their weaponry is now familiar to all...

...The Water Quality Act, after all, meant the largest public works project in history, with fat contracts for sewage treatment plants in every state and most cities...

...Whatever the labels, the point is the same— environmental issues, like the problems of workers, must somehow be defined and expressed in powerful political terms as something more than the demands of special-interest groups...

...Meanwhile, the national environmental movement has chosen to focus its efforts on the legislative, bureaucratic, and judicial arenas without rooting those efforts in that source of strength which made the movement successful in the first place—the public at large...

...Machinists Union President William Winpisinger has repeatedly made the connection between environmental decay, military spending, unemployment, and inflation...

...Consider how few people fifteen years ago had even heard words like "ecosystem" or "biodegradable," worried about what they were breathing on the job, knew about PCBs, questioned the need for dams, or wondered about the effects of aerial pesticide spraying on themselves and others...

...immigration and a guarding of American resources against an inevitable day of global environmental and economic collapse...

...And with friends on the inside, organizations tend to be less critical of the agencies involved in crucial decision-making...

...Now, though, some are setting up political action committees to overcome that obstacle...

...David Brower...

...Right-wing direct mail tycoon Richard Viguerie, by the same token, has built a $15-million-a-year business on campaign mailings at the national level...

...Identified as a fundamental question of control and authority, Nature's banner became a red flag that enraged the corporate bulls to attack...

...Even such conservation house organs as the beautiful Audubon are jammed with ads from timber, oil, and chemical companies assuring environmentalist readers that these firms are in the forefront of environmental protection...

...What we have are the bodies, not the money...

...And feminist writers have begun to analyze the relationship between the macho ethic and the despoiling of the environment...

...The outcome will determine whether it is possible in this country to create a movement that identifies inequality and environmental decay as parts of the same economic and social process, and goes on to present a persuasive alternative...

...Did Reagan...

...Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, Reagan's acting chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, tried to make a case recently in Environment magazine for the compatibility of en-vironmentalism and conservative goals...

...slowing down identification of endangered plants and animals...

...The mantle of elitism is difficult to shed Leftists often speak with dismay of the awesome power of the "media bucks" wielded by the other side, but the fact is that in electoral politics, at least, the media dollar plays a relatively minor role...

...The lessons are particularly indelible when they have been reinforced by real-life ecological nightmares...

...In the 1978 California legislative election, for example, state senate campaigns spent only 6.8 per cent of total funds on radio and television advertising, whereas the biggest share of the campaign money—48.1 per cent—went to campaign literature...

...Another choice is to yield to those in the movement who would go along with the "lifeboat ethic," which casts the poor as environmental villains and permits maximum exploitation of the Earth's resources for the principal benefit of corporations...

...Is the assault itself a sign of weakness in the movement...

...Reagan and his backers, appealing to a deep sense of frustration, are trying to convince Americans that what is good for the corporations is good for the people...

...The woods and plains are full of environmental groups that work at state and local levels—from Save the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas and the Black Hills Alliance in the Dakotas to the North Cascades Conservation Council in Washington...

...That mantle of elitism—partly a legacy of the movement's social origins—is difficult to shed...

...Conservatives saw redeeming virtues in the Water Quality Act, which promised fat contracts and huge public works projects The National Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Water Quality Act sailed through Congress...

...The money raised can go not only to support a more sophisticated lobbying effort, but also to fund a broad range of other activities...

...Edgar won the election by a substantial margin and now holds a crucial position on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee...

...NEPA inspired state legislation that often carried the matter further than NEPA itself (as in California, where impact evaluation was extended from public to private projects...

...Winpisinger's solution would be "socialist," while others like the OCAW's Mazzochi speak of a "workers' party...

...On one hand is the option of continuing on the present course, which means the almost certain loss of most of the environmental gains made in the last decade...

...A decade later, however, corporations were in a much different frame of mind...

...Groups as diverse as the American Friends Service Committee, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio, Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy, Nurses for Social Responsibility in San Francisco, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, the Machinists' Union, and the American Indian Movement carry on environmental work as part of broader programs...

...and the list goes on...

...The Water Quality Act had brought attention to many pollution problems that could not be solved by the construction of sewage plants but would require, rather, control of pollution at its source and sometimes major modifications or abandonment of particular manufacturing and agricultural processes...