A Dousing for the Environment

...The federal strategy of the mainstream also has compromised the movement: "Gradually, adherence to the three Ls— lobbying, legislation, and litigation—has eroded the potential of other strategies, by robbing them of talent and resources...

...Yet Dowie finds hope in the thousands of grassroots groups that have sprung up to protect the local environment, block by block, grove by grove...

...Easterbrook writes that "effective environmental influence is assured at nearly every level of government and business...

...Surveying scientific and technical literature on nearly every aspect of the global environmental crisis, he argues that while many of these are issues worthy of concern, none of them justifies donning a sandwich board and announcing that the end is nigh...

...Despite several opportunities along the way, mainstream environmental groups have consistently failed to shed their affluent backgrounds and aspirations to become a truly grassroots, democratic movement, as Dowie points out...

...Easterbrook does not have a very complex understanding of environmentalism as a social and political movement, and as a result he has prosecuted a caricature...

...Nature has hurled far worse at the biosphere—major asteroid strikes, epic volcanism, ice ages, cosmic radiation storms—and it has survived...

...Dowie's book began when he took exception to the claim that environmentalism is probably the most important movement of the century...

...They are not, as is made clear in Mark Dowie's Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century...

...These groups—especially the environmental-justice movement, working with the varied perspectives of ecofeminists, social ecologists, Native Americans, deep ecologists, biore-gionalists, the left, greens, human-rights activists—are the forebears of the fourth wave of enlightened environmental consciousness...

...But he barely attempts to fill this void, laying the pieces to the puzzle on the table and shuffling them briefly about...

...They always wrung more dollars out of a neighborhood than the educators, who labored at every door to discuss the different issues and make true believers...

...Dowie sees environmentalism in four waves...

...And just one paragraph after complaining about bogus statistics, he dismisses the worst known case of species loss as an extreme—a classic tool of statistical torture...

...Anyone who has ever tried to navigate the sea of paper generated by an environmental-impact statement knows that informed citizen involvement in this supposedly open process is practically impossible...

...Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century by Mark Dowie MIT Press...

...But any teenager can tell you that tropical climates are considerably more diverse than Oregon...

...Sometimes his science gets sloppy, even to a lay observer...

...The salespeople avoided the touchier subjects—especially nuclear issues—and could smooth-talk their way into even staunchly Republican wallets...

...Sure enough, several years later, Greenpeace began to lose members by the hundreds of thousands...

...But this book will not be, despite the dust-cover acclaim of former EPA head William K. Reilly, "the most influential book since Silent Spring...

...Easterbrook lays the foundation of his book on contested science...

...This has helped to keep environmental litigators in business, but a movement cannot be built on lawsuits alone...

...The third wave, he writes, is a "fruitless and hopefully brief attempt to find a harmonious ('win-win') conciliation between conservative politicians and corporate polluters...

...Here he may be right: environmentalists don't often enough celebrate or publicly recognize the basic resiliency of life...

...It's the kind of heat that sets people to wondering about global warming...

...Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist," he writes...

...And worse yet, the citizens whose vital interests are at stake have been moved another step away from the process...

...Contemporary environmentalists have yet to articulate a coherent social philosophy, and most American social philosophers have failed to integrate the science of ecology," he states...

...The first wave, conservation, began at the turn of the century and the closing of the frontier...

...25.00...

...Environmental activists must do a better job of educating, arguing, and organizing...

...He treats environmentalists as an undifferentiated mass, as if the National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, and the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste are bosom buddies...

...The fourth is his own case for optimism...

...As antagonists have developed better counterattacks, the effectiveness and power of the entire environmental movement have diminished as well...

...The movement would have been better served by signing up fewer members and building an education base in the community...

...He has already been proven wrong...

...The subsequent flowering of environmental legislation was finally halted by the Reagan Administration...

...And his critique of how foundation funding and the exigencies of direct-mail marketing affect priorities is damning: "When a direct-mail campaign works, it is repeated over and over until it stops working...

...the touted reorganization actually strengthened the old-boy component of the Sierra Club...

...Ultimately, Dowie argues, the environmentalists became so entrenched in a Beltway mentality that they ceased to be advocates and began brokering compromises and even building alliances with corporate destroyers...

...regardless of its intrinsic merit or environmental significance...

...He claims environmentalists have become such obsessive doomsayers—particularly about global warming—that they will miss an ecological renewal of unprecedented scale...

...But Easterbrook, author of A Moment on the Earth, downplays this fear...

...This is not necessarily the fault of environmentalists: frequently science doesn't ask the right questions, and doesn't put the answers in a place where average people can find them...

...The educators doubted the hard-sell victims would remain members as they learned more about Greenpeace...

...Erik Ness is the co-editor of the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive magazine...

...Iwas a canvasser for Greenpeace in the late 1980s when, in part through canvassing, it became the largest environmental organization in the world...

...Unfortunately, Dowie's synthesis is incomplete...

...His analysis of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring highlights the danger of placing too heavy a burden on science...

...For example, to show that the danger of extinction is overrated in the Pacific Northwest, he assumes that the region is equal to any other in species diversity...

...If environmentalists could work to simplify this process, they might lose a few more court battles, but they would demystify environmental degradation for many more citizens...

...The second is marked by the publication of Silent Spring, and the integration of public and occupational-health concerns with the traditional wilderness agenda...

...Even his reporting lacks depth: citing the need for the mainstream groups to streamline their agenda to remain relevant, Dowie reports that the Sierra Club may be the leader in this effort by virtue of a reorganization and subsequent layoffs in 1994...

...Environmentalists may have to change the face of science to accomplish this, and they will meet resistance from scientists who fear the loss of objectivity...

...That's the lesson of these two books, and it's the lesson of the current Congress, as well...

...Making science more accessible would also serve environmentalists well...

...Partly this is an exercise in iconoclasm...

...But this is not a question of methods but of priorities, which are hardly objective: much of hard science is currently funded by either industry or government, and frequently by the military...

...by Erik Ness Gregg Easterbrook issues the following bit of advice: "If you love environmentalists, as you should, today the greatest favor you can do them is to toss cold water on their heads...

...He first declares that "if trends had continued, the severe ecological harm she foretold would have come to pass...

...Of course, trends did not continue, largely because Carson made such a compelling case that she jump-started a movement...

...It's an odd argument to make at this time, when Republican lawmakers are overstepping their mandate by gutting three decades of environmental reform...

...Given the accomplishments of the struggles for labor, women's rights, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, he reasoned, this seemed far-fetched...

...What Dowie missed is the little-reported fact that a disproportionate number of the laid-off employees were women...

...Our machinations, no matter how toxic they appear to us, may not be able to murder the planet, and this is cause for a more optimistic spirit in the movement...

...Easterbrook makes a case for what he calls "ecorealism...

...at the outset he explains he has deliberately chosen to emphasize stories not heard at the expense of accepted environmental wisdom...

...281 pp...

...I could use the dousing, for as I write this, a heat wave grips the Great Plains, sending temperatures over 100 degrees, withering people, livestock, and electric companies...

...Similarly, many arguments made by environmentalists are compelling on the face, but as an environmental journalist I have seen many of them dissolve under scrutiny for lack of evidence...

...Our office was divided sharply between salespeople and educators...