Green movement stumbles in US

‘The environmentalists allowed themselves to be painted as a left-wing movement,’ says Ms Donna Bojarsky, an experiences political observer in Los Angeles, ‘and that was very damaging.’

Fashionable alarmism may create backlash

‘As Earth Day approaches there is a growing sense that the only socially respectable attitude towards the environment is pushing the panic button. Fashionable alarmism may eventually create a Chicken Little backlash: as the years pass and Nature doesn’t end, people may stop listening when environmentalists issue warnings.’

—Gregg Easterbrook, a self-styled liberal sceptic.

EARTH day 1990 was one long party for the environmental movement. Hollywood film stars took to the air-waves In droves. Elephants crushed aluminium cans at Washington DC’s national zoo to demonstrate recycling, jungle-style.

Commentators prematurely heralded the birth of environmental populism, an invincible grassroots movement which would dominate the political landscape for years to come.

Almost a year later, the Gulf war and the recession have turned the green movement a whiter shade of pale. Organisations such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Worldwide Fund For Nature are experiencing a slowdown in membership and revenues. At the National Wildlife Federation the first staff lay-offs have already begun.

The sudden squeeze may only prove cyclical, matching the economic downturn; but it is all the more painful because environmentalists entered the 1990s convinced that this, was to be the green decade. So, too, was Mr George Bush, the self-proclaimed "Environmental President".

The first sign that something was amiss appeared in last November’s mid-term elections. Statewide measures backed by environmentalists lost in California, Missouri, Oregon, New York, and Washington. In each case, voters either rejected new billion-dollar bond Issues for "green projects", or they simply refused to back new environmental regulations.

The biggest defeat occurred in California, often viewed as a trend-setting state for the rest of the US and for that matter Europe. Voters overwhelmingly turned down Proposition 128, a hugely ambitious environmentalist package known as "Big Green" which needed only a bare majority among voters to pass into law.

Big Green sought to enforce sweeping new regulations on timber cutting, agricultural pesticides, offshore oil-drilling and petrol emission standards.

Proposition 128’s defeat can be interpreted just as the triumph of common sense on the part of the California voter, a declaration of support for the status quo. Having just witnessed the passage of the Clean Air Act in Washington DC, which mandated important practical measures such as tougher exhaust emission standards, the public saw Big Green as one step too far.

Many environmentalists draw wider lessons, arguing that the Big Green fiasco has ramifications for the rest of the country and for the political methods and tactics used by the green movement.

In a prescient article which appeared last April in the neoliberal New Republic magazine, Mr Gregg Easterbrook, a self-styled liberal sceptic, pinpointed many of the movement’s weaknesses:

"As Earth Day approaches there is a growing sense that the only socially respectable attitude towards the environment is pushing the panic button," he said. "Fashionable alarmism may eventually create a Chicken Little backlash: as the years pass and Nature doesn’t end, people may stop listening when environmentalists issue warnings."

Eco-activists have certainly become more adept at using the national media to convey their warnings about oil spills, global warming and the fate of the spotted owl in Oregon.

Two years ago, the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC), an environmental pressure group, sought maximum exposure for its report on Alar, a potent pesticide used on apples, by leaking its findings exclusively to a weekend network news programme.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency were inundated with calls from anxious mothers, but were unable to respond effectively because they had not been given the data in advance.

The result was a tidal wave of publicity which panicked the federal government into declaring that the chemical might pose a risk to children.

School districts stopped buying apples, export markets collapsed temporarily; and domestic prices took a beating.

It was only several weeks later, when three government agencies declared that the apples were safe to eat, that the debate on the pros and cons of Alar became more balanced.

The Alar scare is instructive because it foreshadowed what Ms Mary Nichols, a senior attorney at the NRDC and a director of the California Clean Air programme, describes as the intellectual arrogance inherent In the Big Green movement.

"We thought we did not need to convince people of the merits of our argument," recalls Ms Nichols. "We thought we did not even need to respond to arguments against Big Green."

Mr Bob Hattoy, regional director for southern California for the Sierra Club, another environmental pressure group, agrees that Big Green supporters failed to make their case to the ordinary voter.

"We talk to each other too much. We go to West Side liberal, chardonnay-and- brie cocktail parties," he says. "We don’t hang out In shopping malls or bowling alleys. But that is where working people are."

In defence of the environmentalists, Ms Nichols points out that Big Green was Invented not by one of the main green organisatlons, but by a politician: Mr John Van De Kamp, the colourless former state attorney-general who was running last year for the Democratic nomination for Governor of California.

Like many other politicians, Mr Van De Kamp calculated that if he played the green card, he could not lose. (He did — to Ms Dianne Feinstein, the former Mayor of San Francisco).

Before it went over the edge, a host of eco-activists clambered aboard the Van De Kamp bandwagon.

"The environmentalists a!lowed themselves to be painted as a left-wing movement," says Ms Donna Bojarsky, an experienced political observer in Los Angeles, "and that was very damaging."

Especially in a recession. "In a strong economy, voters can have the luxury of focusing on softer issues such as homelessness and the environment," says Mr John Emerson, deputy city attorney in Los Angeles and a future candidate for the state assembly.

"When the economy is weak, you have to use different arguments: such as cleaning up toxic waste means higher local property values; open spaces in California means less need to spend money on a vacation in Florida."

Like Mr Emerson, environmentalists are searching for a new message to broaden their appeal to the American public.

The difficulty seems to be that their cause has become mainstream — and more and more politicians are laying claim to the middle ground, too.

Between 1982 and 1990, the World Wildlife Fund’s US membership grew from 60,000 to one million: meanwhile, between 1984 and 1990, the NRDC membership alone doubled to 170,000.

Instead, most copy President Bush, the one-time Texas oilman who has neutralised the environmentalists by coopting their message and taking symbolic steps such as awarding the Environmental Protection Agency Cabinet status.

"George Bush says Ich Binem Environmentalist, and everybody cheers," says Mr Hattoy with heavy irony.

Big business, too, dresses up green. Chemical companies such as Dow, Monsanto or Du Pont invariably run advertisements with babies or animals to demonstrate that they too support a greener, cleaner America.

But US companies are not only talking, they are taking action. McDonald’s, the fast-food company recently bowed to environmentalist pressure and abandoned the styrofoam container which for years housed the Big Mac and the Double Cheeseburger.

Utilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric have introduced wide-ranging energy conservation measures.

The biggest practical change came last year In the US Congress when legislators, after an 11-year battle, passed a Clean Air Act which set new standards for reducing smog in the big cities by 1999.

The final bill toughened exhaust emission standards, and will mandate the car industry to produce at least 150,000 "super-clean" cars and light lorries under a California pilot programme by model year 1996; even cleaner models are required by 2001. Similarly, strong new provisions to curb acid rain were enacted.

The Clean Air Act spreads political credit to Mr Bush and Democratic congressional leaders such as Senator George Mitchell of Maine, in roughly equal measure: both can now claim to have influenced what turned out to be a classic US political compromise after prolonged bargaining.

More important, it offers the two parties ammunition against the environmentalists who criticise from the sidelines that neither the executive branch nor the legislature are tackling other pressing eco-issues such as global warming and energy conservation.

They are right. Mr Bush’s recently announced national energy strategy strongly favours increasing domestic production including recommendations to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge In Alaska for oil drilling, and expanding exploration on the outer continental shelf such as the Mexican Gulf and the California coast.

As well as raising oil output, the administration is seeking to ease regulations to stimulate natural gas and nuclear power.

Conservation has become a casualty of opposition from White House economic advisers who argue that ambitious environmental plans would increase substantially industry’s or consumers’ costs.

Instead the focus is on more efficient use of energy by businesses, public utilities and households.

The Sierra Club has denounced the national plan as "nothing more than an answer to the prayers of the oil, nuclear and auto industries".

The Gulf war and the recession have certainly helped reshape the environmental debate. Mr Hattoy recalls being buttonholed recently by one US congressman who said he would vote to support oil-drilling off the US coast — if the price was avoiding sending the troops to the Middle East to secure the oil supply lines. "It’s a Drill or Die policy," says Mr Hattoy.

The story - sounds extreme, but it serves as a reminder that the environmental movement is going to have a fight to maintain its hard-won gains in the coming months.