The book serves up three case studies of influential biodiversity protection campaigns—Headwaters, the “zero cut” campaign in national forests, and endangered species litigations by the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups. Thorough and readable, the book gives a good picture of where we need to go from here.

I spoke recently to Bevington about the lessons he’s drawn from researching his book.

The Rebirth of Environmentalism focuses on grassroots biodiversity protection groups. How do you define these groups?
Grassroots biodiversity groups are small but bold organizations that protect imperiled wildlife and forests, particularly through vigorous use of litigation. The Center for Biological Diversity is the best known. Other examples in California are the John Muir Project in the Sierra Nevada, the Environmental Protection Information Center in Humboldt County, and Los Padres ForestWatch in Southern California. Other groups can be found in almost every state throughout the US. Despite their small size and limited resources, the grassroots biodiversity groups have had a profound impact on federal environmental protection over the past two decades. They have something important to teach us about effectiveness.

How are these groups different from other environmental organizations?
To understand what makes grassroots biodiversity groups effective, it’s helpful to compare them to two other forms of biodiversity protection advocacy—those employed by national environmental organizations and those by Earth First! In the late 1980s, biodiversity protection advocates in the US faced a dilemma of choosing between two paths for protecting wildlife, each with notable limitations. The first path was represented by the well-known national environmental organizations—such as the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund— that relied on the “insider strategy” to try to influence environmental protection. This strategy, commonly used by interest groups in Washington, DC, depended on privileged access to politicians to influence policy. The problem with this strategy was that it regularly led these organizations to avoid taking strong stands on controversial issues when they believed such stands might hurt their access and influence. In other words, they were constrained from advocating for what was truly ecologically necessary.

The second path consisted of Earth First! activists who engaged in direct actions such as sitting in old-growth trees to deter loggers from cutting them down. Because these activists did not rely on an insider strategy, they could be as bold as needed, but their direct-action tactics rarely saved biodiversity on a large scale.

Faced with the limitations of each approach, the founders of grassroots biodiversity groups chose to create a third path. These groups embraced legal tactics while rejecting the constraints of the insider strategy. They were willing to file lawsuits against the federal government for its failure to enforce its own environmental laws in cases the national organizations avoided as potentially controversial. While national organizations would sometimes file litigation, they were often limited by their insider strategy. So when new grassroots groups formed in the late 1980s and 1990s that eschewed that strategy, they discovered that there were many opportunities to enforce existing environmental laws that had not been utilized by the nationals. As a result, we have seen an unprecedented increase in forest and endangered species protection due largely to the work of the grassroots groups. These groups provided an important new path for saving biodiversity that was simultaneously bold and influential, where they could advocate for what was ecologically necessary and also achieve those goals.

In your book, you focus on the past twenty years, from the first President Bush through the Clinton years and into the George W. Bush administration. How have these different administrations influenced the behavior of the grassroots and national environmental organizations?
The national environmental organizations have mostly focused on building access to Democratic politicians. So when there is a Republican president, they are more willing to be critical of the policies of that administration. But when there is a Democrat in the White House, they tend to mute their criticism of flawed policies and will even turn a blind eye when that administration does things that are detrimental to the environment. In contrast, the grassroots groups that do not rely on the insider strategy are more willing to advocate stronger positions in defense of biodiversity regardless of who is in the White House. The distinction between the grassroots and the nationals thus becomes more pronounced during Democratic administrations, such as during the Clinton years. As I chronicle in The Rebirth of Environmentalism, most of the progress in forest and wildlife protection that occurred during that time was a direct result of the enforcement efforts by the grassroots groups, over the resistance of the Clinton administration and the acquiescence of the national organizations. While there can be advantages to having a Democrat as president, those advantages are only realized when there are bold groups willing to push against resistance from that administration to making real changes.

What lessons does that history offer now that Barack Obama is president?
I think it is important to examine the lessons from the Clinton years because we now see similar patterns forming during the Obama years. When the Obama administration has advanced environmental policies that are similar to, or even worse than, the policies under George W. Bush, the national environmental organizations have heaped praise on the president more often than raising concerns. A recent example is the tepid and even celebratory response from many national groups to Obama’s plans to open vast areas to offshore oil drilling. If Bush had tried to propose such a plan, there would have been howls of protest from the nationals. But instead, they focused on praising Obama for the one area that did exclude oil drilling. The main criticisms of the plan came from grassroots groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity, which declared, “Today’s announcement is unfortunately all too typical of what we have seen so far from President Obama — promises of change, a year of deliberation, and ultimately, adoption of flawed and outdated Bush policies.” The best hope for substantial environmental protection during the Obama years is going to depend on bold advocacy from the grassroots.

While you have highlighted the differences between the grassroots and the nationals, doesn’t the insider approach of the nationals complement the outsider approach of the grassroots to increase environmental protection?
One of the most remarkable things I found in my research for this book is that national environmental organizations played surprisingly counterproductive roles in the campaigns I examined. I don’t simply mean the nationals were not advocating for the strongest positions. Instead, in all of my case studies, I discovered that, in their political deal-making, national organizations were willing to trade away powerful legal tools that grassroots groups were using to protect forests and wildlife. In other words, the nationals actively undermined effective work by the grassroots. Unfortunately, this trend continues today around global warming, where we see the Center for Biological Diversity seeking to enforce the Clean Air Act as an important tool to regulate greenhouse gas emissions here and now, but many of the national environmental organizations are promoting legislation that would gut the ability of this powerful law to address global warming.

It is often mistakenly assumed that the national environmental organizations were responsible for the great environmental laws from the 1970s that grassroots groups later applied to protect biodiversity. However, as I document in my book, the big national organizations played a surprisingly minor role in the passage of these laws, and in some cases even wound up weakening them. Even without new legislation, the grassroots groups found that they could dramatically increase environmental protection by using the untapped potential within our existing laws. In short, the grassroots groups discovered that the legislative role of the nationals could not only be counterproductive but unnecessary.

You have worked with both grassroots and national groups over the past two decades. Given your concerns about the nationals, how has it been for you to work with them?
While I have spent some time working in DC, my most significant involvement with a national group has been through the Sierra Club, and the Sierra Club is a bit of an anomaly. On one hand, it has a professional staff that generally follows the insider strategy in the manner of other national organizations. But, unlike most nationals, the Sierra Club also has a chapter-level system for participation by its members, and in theory, its members can play a significant role in shaping the club’s policies. In practice, however, members raised concerns that the staff was constraining the club from taking stronger positions. One of the chapters in my book chronicles how grassroots activists within the club tried to apply the latent democratic mechanisms within the organization to improve its national forest protection policies. The grassroots activists were particularly critical of the role played by executive director Carl Pope. Pope has recently stepped down from that role, and the club’s new director, Mike Brune, came from a bolder group called Rainforest Action Network. It will be interesting to see whether Brune can stay true to his roots, which could be very helpful for the club, or whether he gets tangled up in the insider approach.

What lessons would you like members of the public to take from this book, and how are you applying those lessons in your own life?
All too often, money flows into the coffers of big, high-profile national environmental groups whose political deal-making can actually wind up harming biodiversity protection efforts. A key lesson of this book is that individual donors and foundations may accomplish more environmental protection per dollar by focusing their resources on bold grassroots groups. These are the groups that have had the biggest impact over the past two decades, and it is groups like these that will best be able to address the climate crisis we now face.

I work to support them through my role as the forest program director at Environment Now, a grant-making foundation that specifically funds grassroots environmental groups in California. I also serve on the board of directors of the Fund for Wild Nature, which was created to help the public identify and assist bold grassroots biodiversity activism. Members of the public donate to the fund, and then the fund’s all-volunteer board redistributes that money to small groups across the country that are doing amazing work to protect our forests and wildlife. These groups are the unsung heroes of the environmental advocacy movement, and they deserve our support. We can all benefit from the lessons in effectiveness that these groups have to offer.

Only ten years later, this definition of green jobs seems unimaginably outdated. Now the term usually refers to jobs connected to renewable energy-related industries such as solar, wind, and wave energy. As Van Jones, who recently stepped down from his position as the White House’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, noted in his 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy, this definition encompasses electricians and plumbers who can install energy-saving devices like solar panels and water heaters, builders who can construct energy-efficient dwellings, as well as organic farmers and bio-fuel crop producers.

These kinds of jobs are being funded as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act championed by President Barack Obama. But several Bay Area ecologists feel that today’s definition of green collar jobs needs to be amended to re-embrace—and prioritize—the kind of land management jobs it signaled in the ‘90s. For example, says plant biologist Mark Heath, who works with Berkeley-based open land management and restoration company Shelterbelt Builders, “I would like to open the idea of green jobs to include invasive plant management.”

Heath, together with members of the California Invasive Plant Council, recently met with lawmakers in Sacramento to raise awareness about the impacts of non-native plant species such as yellow starthistle on California’s agricultural and wild lands. Invasive plants are a direct threat to the environment and the economy, displacing native plants and wildlife, increasing wildfire and flood danger, consuming valuable water, and destroying productive range and timberlands.

Heath says he was surprised to find that legislators seemed to think green jobs equaled solar panels and not much else. He would like the government to fund a program like the Conservation Corps in which young people would be paid to learn natural land management techniques and to become stewards of the natural world. He says that since biodiversity is continually under attack by human development, conservation necessitates more than just leaving the natural world alone. “Habitat restoration requires both the academic understanding of how natural systems function and a trade culture to work the land with tools, time, and labor,” Heath says. “To accomplish anything, we will have to foster a class of scientist-laborers who not only understand the land but can also respond to it. Engineers and scientists cannot do it alone.”

Heath’s colleague Daniel Gluesenkamp is a past president of the California Invasive Plant Council; he now works at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve in Glen Ellen as the director of habitat protection and restoration. Glusenkamp says the ranch provides green collar jobs with its habitat restoration projects, offering entry-level experience to volunteers. He is pleased that some stimulus money is going to map invasive plants in California, “so we can figure out which species and infestations are highest priority, then develop clear plans for where we start and where we go from there” to eliminate the invaders.

“We need folks trained to do restoration if we’re to save the biodiversity we’ve inherited,” Glusenkamp says. “Habitat restoration is a new field; we are still refining the technology. A typical restoration worker has a college or grad school degree, [but] we need to involve people without biology degrees. We need people with backgrounds in forestry, landscaping, and customer service.” He says that the field of natural areas land management needs an “efficacy revolution” equivalent to the leaps and bounds made in human medicine in the 1960s. He compares natural areas management to human obstetrics: “Until recently, and in spite of an array of advanced tools available in hospitals, mortality of mothers and babies was lower when birth occurred at home. Obstetrics was improved by an efficacy revolution in which practitioners began measuring outcome, adopting best practices, and improving training. Now we need a restoration revolution. This would produce ‘land doctors’ well versed in what practices have good or bad outcomes for local ecosystems.”

In developing such a specialty, Gluesenkamp says, “We need to look to Native American land management, which tended to combine good understanding of the natural systems with long-term stable management regimes.” He stresses that to preserve biodiversity, “We need to quit introducing and spreading invasive plants and animals, and we need to quit pumping carbon into the atmosphere.”

Gluesenkamp points to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area as an organization that has done a good job of pulling together people of varying backgrounds to work on restoring native plants at San Francisco’s Lands End. In addition to the heavy equipment operators essential for habitat restoration, that job site required project information coordinators who helped explain the scope of work to concerned residents on the periphery. Gluesenkamp says these types of jobs are a good fit for people with customer service experience.

Several years after writing Green Collar Jobs, Durning founded the Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank based in Seattle. Durning’s colleague, Sightline research associate Roger Valdez, worked with him to write a report issued this October called “Green Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise.” Valdez says that while the report focuses on energy efficiency and renewable energy, the need for habitat restoration and invasive species management has not gone away. “It’s not an either/or situation,” he says. “The latest manifestation of the work includes what Alan wrote about initially, but the focus has expanded. At its root is a different way of thinking about the economy: Instead of turning natural resources into capital, we want to turn savings from renewable energy and conservation into capital.”

“Eventually renewable power, alternative fuels, sustainable farming and forestry, clean transportation and ecosystem transportation can all play important roles in the green jobs transformation,” the report states. “Yet buildings, which account for nearly forty percent of US energy consumption, are where the green jobs potential is most accessible.” The authors note that retrofitting buildings will save homeowners billions of dollars while offering employment to out-of-work craftsmen in the building trades.

The authors see great promise in green jobs overall. They cite research from economist Robert Polin of the University of Massachusetts that show the increased “bang for buck” of investing in green jobs. Among Polin’s findings: Spending $1 million yields only 1.5 “high-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as for architects and managers) as opposed to 3.9 similar clean energy jobs; 1.6 “mid-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as for crew chiefs and technicians) vs. 4.8 equivalent clean energy jobs; 2.2 “low-credentialed” fossil fuel-related jobs (such as laborer or clerk) vs. 8 clean energy jobs; and .7 “low-credentialed jobs in fields with good potential for earnings growth” such as construction, manufacturing, utilities in oil vs. 4.8 such jobs in clean energy.

Add ‘em up and you’ve got 6 “conventional” jobs versus 21.5 green jobs for the same million bucks. With doubledigit unemployment, not to mention a grateful planet, the choice seems obvious.

In March, the city passed an ordinance proposed by Mirkarimi requiring its Recreation and Park Department to develop a plan for restoring habitat in Sharp Park for at-risk species. The 410-acre park, which is in Pacifica but is owned and operated by the City of San Francisco, includes an 18-hole golf course on about 133 of its acres. Critics say the course is maintained at the expense of the threatened California Red-legged frog and the endangered San Francisco garter snake.

The park starts at the edge of the beach behind a sea wall, and stretches across a diverse topography: grasslands, scrublands, forest, a lagoon called Laguna Salada, Horse Stable Pond, and Sanchez Creek. The frogs and snakes live primarily in the park’s wetlands and on nearby Mori Point, which is owned by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The animals breed and feed in Laguna Salada, Horse Stable Pond, the canal connecting these two water bodies, and in lower Sanchez Creek—all of which are on the golf course itself. The amphibians disperse to adjacent uplands habitat during the dry season, where they survive the hot weather by hibernating in rodent burrows.

Mark Twain, in his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” immortalized the red-legged frog. During California’s Gold Rush, the amphibian was considered a delicacy and widely eaten by miners out to make their fortune. Today the frog has been driven from seventy percent of its historic range.

Environmental lawyer Brent Plater is a key player in the campaign to restore the natural ecology of Sharp Park. He stresses that the fate of the San Francisco garter snake, which he calls “the most beautiful serpent in Northern California, and the most rare,” is even more worrisome. In the 1940s the snake was considered abundant, but now it is approaching extinction. Fewer than 2,000 San Francisco garter snakes are left globally; Sharp Park/Mori Point is one of only five viable populations left. These populations are small: six snakes were found at Mori Point in 2004, 13 snakes in 2006, and five in 2008. At Sharp Park, five snakes were found in 2004, then only two in 2008.

Proximity to humans and their golf game isn’t helping. In 2005, a lawnmower on the golf course killed one of the few remaining snakes. The same year the Fish and Wildlife Service of the US Department of the Interior noted in a letter to the parks departments’ golf program manager that a water pump “lowered the water level at Horse Stable Pond and resulted
in the stranding and exposure of a number of egg masses of the California Red-legged frog. This action
apparently caused the death of an unknown quantity of embryonic tadpoles of the completely aquatic early stage of this animal’s lifecycle.”

Plater points out that a single “take” of any federally listed species can result in a fine of $25,000. The frog egg masses at the golf course could contain thousands of eggs, so fines for those “takings” could be enormous.

The Center for Biological Diversity joined the Sharp Park debate after San Francisco’s parks department proposed
what Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate with the nonprofit, calls “a flawed plan calling for privatizing the mismanaged and financially failing golf course and illegally reconstructing flooded portions of the course at the expense of endangered species.” After evidence surfaced of the deaths of red-legged frogs and the snake, the group threatened to sue the city if it did not cease harming endangered species, restore Sharp Park to its natural state as a coastal wetland, and provide more diverse recreational opportunities for the public at the site. The center supported Mirkarimi’s legislation and urged their membership to back the initiative.

Once the ordinance passed, the city funded a study of the park by the firm Tetra Tech, which is assessing options for the golf course’s future; at press time its conclusions had not yet been made public. However, the three main ideas on the table are to keep the golf course as it is, shrink the course while making some environmental changes, or shut it down in favor of restoring habitat for the endangered animals, as well as for migratory birds.

The Center for Biological Diversity would like to preserve as large a swath of wetlands as possible, but Plater says that if the study concludes it is a viable option, he “could live with” a Sharp Park golf course reduced to nine holes that did not compete with the snake and frog habitat. If the course is shut down, Plater believes that the city’s other existing golf courses could handle the business at Sharp Park. A 2008 study concluded that of San Francisco city golf courses, only Harding Park is operating above fifty percent capacity; Sharp Park was operating in the mid-to-upper forty percent capacity.

But golfers want to keep the course open. Richard Harris, a lawyer who cofounded the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance, argues that Sharp Park is especially important to golfers because the game started as a seaside sport in Scotland, on bluffs and dunes, and Sharp Park is the only seaside course in San Francisco. He is passionate about Sharp Park being a legacy of Dr. Alister MacKenzie, one of the most famous landscape architects to design a golf course. While Harris concedes that the ocean washed away several of the original holes MacKenzie put in place, he says that remaining links designed by MacKenzie are important highlights of the grounds. The course is “a treasure of the golf world,” says Harris. “It is one of only three public seaside links courses in California. The other two are on the Monterey Peninsula, and one of them has green fees over $200. It is one of MacKenzie’s very few public courses, and it is the only seaside links course built by MacKenzie remaining in the world.” (Green fees at Sharp Park run around $30.)

Harris insists that at other golf courses, endangered species have coexisted with golfers, and adjustments can be made to the course to make the frog and snake safer than they are now. In a letter to the San Francisco Planning Department this June, Harris suggested creating “a native plant/no-golf area surrounding an ‘island’ green complex in the vicinity of the current 12th green,” reducing golf maintenance in some areas to hand-mowing, and making raised boardwalk causeways the only access to some playing areas.

Other defenders of the golf course maintain on the “Save Sharp Park Golf Course” Web site (SharpPark. SaveGolf.net) that the course has actually helped the animals: “The presence and protection of Sharp Park Golf Course since 1932 turned a salt water estuary into a fresh water habitat. The California red-legged frogs and San Francisco garter snakes need fresh water. Were it not for that fresh water habitat created and maintained by the golf course, there would be only peripheral red-legged frogs or garter snakes, if any.” But Miller argues that this isn’t so. “The habitat pre-golf was freshwater wetlands and there were relatively abundant populations of both garter snakes and red-legged frogs at the site,” he says. “The golf course construction nearly extirpated both species and maintenance activities keep both species at the current marginal levels.”

Sierra Club coastal director Mark Massara expresses skepticism about the possibilities for happy inter-species coexistence. He argues that the oceanside links trample the threatened species’ terrain. “There are a hundred acres dedicated to golf. Where do the animals go? There’s a real imbalance they [golfers] are not acknowledging,” Massara says.

Preserving Pacific coastal terrain may become even more important as sea level rises an expected four and a half feet over the next century. Massara says, “As seas rise, we want to protect upland open space and wetland areas as buffer habitat and wildlife corridors.” Miller, of the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that restoring some of the former wetlands will protect the park’s wildlife as well as nearby human residents from sea-level rise. “This will make the endangered species more resilient to climate change and saltwater intrusion, and reduce flooding that threatens park neighbors,” he says.

Massara is no fan of the golfing industry; he says that since the middle of the 20th century, courses have overused resources. He says that the 21,000 golf courses in the US each use millions of gallons of water per day, and, generally, eight to ten pounds of chemical fertilizer per acre per year. Golf courses have wrecked entire island coral reefs with runoff of herbicides and fertilizers. While he concedes that the golfing industry has made some progress in addressing damage caused by overuse of industrial chemicals and fossil-fuel-guzzling mowers, Massara says, “Eighty percent of what’s been done is green washing and PR.”

So far, there’s little agreement about how to restore Sharp Park, and how much it might cost. Although Harris and the SF Public Golf Association have suggested some environmental mitigation ideas, they nevertheless want to preserve the park and public golf course largely as they are, without eliminating holes.

Plater claims that this will be prohibitively expensive. He estimates that repairing and shoring up the sea wall that separates the park from the Pacific could cost up to $32 million, at $10,000 per linear foot. San Francisco also already invested $240,000 on one large outfall pipe that pumps water from the golf course.

On top of that—although golf advocates like Harris disagree—the Center for Biological Diversity argues that simply running the golf course loses money for the city. Jeff Miller claims that the parks department “plays hide-the-ball with their financial data—they subsidize Sharp Park by taking money from the general fund (and depriving the natural areas program and other San Francisco recreational facilities that money) to keep it from showing a loss.” By counting this subsidy as income, Miller claims, they “create the illusion the course breaks a profit.” Indeed, San Francisco’s budget analyst recently concluded that the Sharp Park Golf Course brought a net loss of $42,784 to the department for the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Some critics also say the golf course’s seaside location is a financialliability. In an April letter to the Board of Supervisors, coastal ecologist Peter Baye wrote of the cost of maintaining the current golf course, “The City must expect long-term significant increases in maintenance costs, as well as foreseeable catastrophic storm damage and post-storm reconstruction and rehabilitation of Sharp Park golf infrastructure.”

“These flood and coastal hazard risks are extraordinary liabilities: to my knowledge, no other golf courses in California have been constructed or maintained at or below sea level immediately behind a vulnerable, low beach ridge,” Baye continued.

Plater suggests that greatly shrinking or eliminating the golf course could earn the city money: “A restored Sharp Park could be funded by a wetlands mitigation bank. Credits were selling last year at $3.5 million per acre for wetlands restoration.
There are 200 acres that could be restored at Sharp Park (out of about 400). That’s $700,000,000 in gross revenue. No golf model would ever provide that much money to City coffers.”

Consultant and mitigation specialist Allen McReynolds of Mitigation Strategies, LLC, who specializes in habitat conservation plans for municipalities and developing strategic plans for “landscape-scale” eco-system protection, is surveying Sharp Park for potential restoration. “It’s not ‘golf bad, habitat good’—that’s not the point,” McReynolds says. He mentions that options like a nature center with paths for walking or riding would be “a wonderful opportunity for the broader community,” and says that the bottom line is that any restoration plan must adhere to the Endangered Species Act. He has recommended that the city launch a public discussion about what limitations could be placed on the park if it is used as a wildlife preserve—such as banning dogs or bicycles—and which activities may still be allowed, such as hiking and birdwatching. The result, he says, “would be a park designed for both the endangered species and human uses.”

And there’s another bottom line: “The point is, what is our priority as a city?” Mirkarimi asks. A 2004 survey of San Francisco residents found that the most popular recreational request among respondents was for more hiking and biking trails. Golfing
came in a distant sixteenth. (Nationally, the number of people who play golf has been steadily declining since 2000.)

Yet golf has received the lion’s share of some city resources. A Planning and Conservation League California Park Bond analysis from 2005 concluded that “San Francisco used all of its Prop. 12 and RZH [Roberti-Z’Berg-Harris urban open space] block grant funds, over $13 million in total, for the renovation of the Harding Park Golf Course.” Given that Prop 12 specified that its program funds be used “with emphasis on unmet needs in the most heavily populated and most economically disadvantaged areas within each jurisdiction,” it would seem that monies that should have gone to struggling communities have already been diverted to golf.

Mirkarimi points to the layoff of more than 72 recreation directors in 2009, many in poor neighborhoods, as an example of how resources had been diverted from those areas. Isabel Wade, founder of the San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, agrees. “Where is the sense of equity?” Wade asks. “Other recreations have to consider cutbacks. Golfers can compromise too.”

And in the end, says Miller, we have to consider our amphibian and reptilian neighbors: “We have a rare opportunity to protect and recover two endangered species that are linked to local history and are an important part of the local ecology.”

The first newsletter on health and environment written for the general public, Rachel’s now has a circulation between ten and eleven thousand readers. Montague defines his audience as grassroots activists, but he notes that about a hundred EPA officials read it, and dozens of other subscribers have “dot gov” email addresses. Government-
funded publications do a good job of covering relevant material, Montague says, but non-specialists find them a hard slog. Rachel’s mission is translating technical material for a lay audience, thereby educating local communities on human health and environmental justice issues. I asked Montague how Rachel’s got its start.

PETER MONTAGUE: In 1978 Love Canal was discovered by Lois Gibbs because her children weresick and there was this black crud oozing into her basement, and it was oozing into the playground at her kids’ school. So she started knocking on doors in her neighborhood and asking ‘Is there any illness in your family?’ And she made a little map of it and showed that there were sick kids all around Love Canal. I had been doing anti-nuclear work out in New Mexico, where I lived and was on the faculty at the University of New Mexico. I was aware of the hazards of radiation but didn’t know very much about chemicals. What Lois revealed—and the media immediately picked up—was that there were hundreds of thousands of these places where chemicals had been dumped into rivers or into the soil. It soon became clear that every landfill in the country was some kind of toxic disaster. A citizens’ movement, now known as the toxics movement, arose because people saw what Lois had done and they were concerned about their kids. By 1985 there were at least seven or eight thousand local groups working on toxic chemicals. But there was a huge absence of technical information. People would hear of benzene or dioxin, and they
had no clue what that was. So I started a dial-up database called the Hazardous Substance Databank that you could dial into if you had a computer with a modem. This was before the Internet. In those days there were things called bulletin boards that you could use to communicate. I plugged into that community and put this database online.
As I was doing the research to keep that up to date I realized I could extract stuff and send it out on paper. So I started Rachel’s News as a single sheet of paper printed on both sides. The first issue came out in 1986. Nobody could remember the name of the hazardous substance databank, so I renamed it the Remote Access Chemical Hazards Electronic Library. It was the RACHEL database.

When I was in New Mexico, and even before that, I had become convinced from knowing Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner that citizen action is the only way that anything gets done in this country. If citizens are not on the case, government is not going to start fixing problems. They’re getting tremendous pressure from industry day in, day out, to sit on their butts. And they’d rather do that than anything else because it doesn’t cost them anything, and it doesn’t get them in trouble. As soon as they pick on a problem they’re liable to get in trouble, so they don’t want to do that. But citizens have to have some facts to get government to do anything. My newsletter was aimed at giving people facts that they could use to fight City Hall.

BEN TERRALL: Have your goals changed?
My goals have not changed. But the people who fund toxics activism changed their minds. They decided
they didn’t want to support citizen activism. It took too long, and you couldn’t point to huge successes… they decided they wanted to fund policy work.

The toxics movement has now turned into a policy-debating society. There are lots of activists out there fighting dumps, fighting incinerators, and nuclear power plants, and nuclear waste dumps, and all kinds of stuff, but the infrastructure to support them as a movement is gone. Back in the early days Lois Gibbs had seven regional
organizers who would come to your town, and they would help you beat up the mayor or write a press release and contact the press or do whatever it took… hold a demonstration, whatever you needed to do. They’d help you find a local scientist.

They were what Lois Gibbs called “larger than locals,” organizations that would try to have an overview of what was going on in the state. They would make their presence known to grassroots activists and they would try to be the glue that held the movement together by providing knowledge and awareness of what other people were doing.

As the global economy gets more and more interconnected, do you think that regulation of toxics can be standardized at an international level?
Mark Schapiro’s recent book Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power argues that due to its inadequate regulation of pollutants, the US is beginning to look like a backward country compared to other industrialized nations. Shapiro’s book shows how Japan and Europe provide financial and legal incentives to keep their citizens safer from contamination. There is much more consciousness about regulation in those countries.

Europeans, who seem less beholden to money than we are, have passed regulation that’s pretty far-reaching. If you want to sell products in Europe you need to give information about your product. If Monsanto wants to market products in Europe, they have to come up with data backing up its claims. The Europeans are way ahead of us and are dragging us into the modern world kicking and screaming. In terms of regulation here in the US, we’re not going to be able to effectively regulate anything, whether chemicals or use of land in Western states, until there’s effective campaign finance reform. It’s a reality that people in the environmental movement don’t want to grapple with. They’re happy to devise new policies, even though in private they may acknowledge that the current system won’t enforce those policies.

How do you see individual human health connected to the overall health of the planet?
They’re inextricably connected. The Earth is the only place in the universe conducive to human life as far as we know. By putting fluorocarbons in the atmosphere we almost made the planet uninhabitable. CFCs almost made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. We should have learned from that, but we didn’t. We’re playing with fire, risking making our only home inhospitable. Cancer, autism, attention deficits, nervous system disorders, immune system disorders are all warning signs. Evolutionarily we grew up as a species in a certain chemical environment, and now we’re changing it. The increase in human disease conditions is surely evidence of that.

What do you think is the greatest challenge to creating a healthier world?
I think the greatest challenge to creating a healthier world is our firm belief that an economy has to grow year after year or it’s a failed economy. We have exceeded the capacity of the Earth to absorb the consequences of our economic activities, and as a consequence we are destroying our only home. Our footprint is already so large that we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to absorb the byproducts of our economy. We have got to learn to live without economic growth. We need what’s called a steady state economy where we are merely replacing the stuff that’s wearing out rather than creating new stuff.

You’re thinking of Herman Daley’s [former World Bank economist, now a critic of the “Washington Consensus” status quo] model?
Exactly. Those ideas seem entirely foreign right now. But they’re not foreign to Gus Speth, who wrote the important recent book The Bridge at the Edge of the World. This is the first time that a thinker who you would have to call mainstream has injected these very radical prescriptions into the public discussion of what needs to happen. Capitalism is a system that either grows or collapses. That’s just the way it is. There’s no such thing as a steady state in capitalism. You’re either growing at a healthy clip, like seven percent per year, or you’re collapsing into a recession or a depression. A recession is defined as the absence of growth for two consecutive quarters. So you can either have a healthy economy that’s destroying the planet, or you can have a collapsing economy that may be taking some of the pressure off the planet but is putting thousands of, or tens of thousands of, people out of work and not providing the human benefits that an economy is supposed to provide. But most people in the mainstream would rather destroy the planet than contemplate changing capitalism.

It’s surprising that people are saying that by 2010 or 2011 things will be back on track, when what they mean by that is that we’ll be back to growing at our old rate. As if peak oil wasn’t a real problem, or as if the destruction of the oceans was not accelerating, or as if global warming was not happening, or as if chemical contamination of the entire planet was not worsening year after year. It’s like there’s this huge disconnect between what people see as the economic problem and the really fundamental problems that are simultaneously emerging in the biological platform upon which the economy rests. The Wall Street folks seem like they’re deaf, dumb, and blind to the fact that the biological platform on which the human economy rests is being trashed every bit as bad as the human economy is being trashed. Or maybe the loss of the biosphere is even accelerating more rapidly than the destruction of the human economy. But they think that the economy is somehow floating in the atmosphere, disconnected from the biological systems that produce everything we need.

We either explicitly or implicitly make most of our decisions on cost-benefit analysis. We weigh the costs of doing something and the benefits of doing something. And if the benefits either directly outweigh the costs, or if we just don’t know—we don’t have enough information—we assume, we give the benefit of the doubt to economic activity, that it will produce benefits that are greater than the costs. The assumption underlying that system is that the costs can grow without limit.

So it doesn’t factor in toxins in the environment, for instance.
It doesn’t factor in all the cumulative costs of cutting down forests and warming up the atmosphere
and dumping toxins into the environment and fishing all the fish out of the oceans and converting all the forests into farmland and then spreading pesticides and fertilizer on that farmland—all of those decisions to do those things are justified in the sense that the benefits to humans are very large and the costs are presumably smaller than the benefits. But those cumulative costs are now catching up with us.

In the context of protecting the biosphere, the precautionary principle says we must assume at this point that whatever we are about to do is going to be harmful, unless we can show that it won’t be harmful. And if you can show that it won’t be harmful, then by all means, let’s do it. But until that time, it’s probably not a good idea. So it shifts the burden of proof onto the proponents of some new change that would significantly affect the biosphere.
The second thing is you have to look for the least harmful way to achieve it. So it puts a permanent obligation on economic enterprises to continually look for the least harmful way of doing business and to phase out old ways as soon as a new better way becomes available.

A third change that a precautionary principle would entail would be that regulatory officials, like the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, will often say explicitly—she said this when she was the head of the EPA in New Jersey—my job is to balance between environmental protection and the economy… I want to protect the environment but I’m not going to do it in a way that harms the economy. Well, in a world in which our only home is being destroyed and the rate of destruction is accelerating, that is a completely wrong picture of the role of government. The role of government is to protect the biosphere.

New evidence appears every day that we are ruining our only home. Government must stop that, that is government’s duty, to make it possible for all of us to survive. And if government doesn’t do that, then government has failed and needs to be replaced.

St. Clair and his wife Kymberly, a librarian, and their two children make their home in Portland, Oregon. I spoke with him about the state of the environmental movement today and what hope he sees for creating a livable future.

You’ve argued that the US environmental movement became less focused on grassroots action during the Clinton administrations.

When Clinton came to town, a lot of grassroots environmentalists were caught by surprise. Because not only did you have political co-option going on early on in Clinton’s time, but you also had this new kind of environmentalism being adopted by Clinton and [former Secretary of the Interior Bruce] Babbitt and [former vice president Al] Gore, which was “We’re going to get rid of regulations, and we’re going to replace them with risk assesment, cost benefit analysis, and using market sources.”

Clinton comes out of the DLC [the Democratic Leadership Council], and of course, Babbitt was in the DLC, Gore was in the DLC, and these ideas were being bandied about there. What they didn’t want to do was to piss off their corporate backers. And environmental laws and regulations, if they’re strictly enforced, exact economic costs for these corporations. So right out of the gate, you had betrayals … and deals cut. [Including deals with] sugar barons and real estate developers in the Florida Everglades, you had a very famous evisceration of the Endangered Species Act [involving] the California gnat catcher.

So, right out of the gate, it’s the National Forest Management Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Everglades and the Endangered Species Act, all being gutted …with this sort of cost benefit analysis approach. And then the full force of the betrayal comes to light when NAFTA raises it head. Bush had tried to push through NAFTA three times, and he had been beaten back in the Congress by a coalition of labor groups, environmentalists, human rights groups, and old-line Democrats. And [under Clinton,] John Adams, the former head and founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, bragged about breaking the back of that coalition. At that point it was all over for institutional environmentalism in DC. These groups are no longer membership organizations in any sense in which the members have rights. If you’re a member of the NRDC, you don’t have any rights in determining what their policy will be.

You have a right to their junk mail.

You have a right to junk mail, and that’s a fundamental shift in the character of these organizations; they’re not at all grassroots anymore. And so if your members don’t have rights, all they’re good for is money, so you drill them, like the oil companies want to drill ANWAR. You’ve moved to DC or New York, you’ve got offices in LA and Seattle, and they’re very expensive buildings, and [you need] to keep up the institutional flow of cash. So your members aren’t providing enough money, where do you turn? You turn to foundations.

And that’s another change that happened in the ‘80s, and it really took hold during Clinton’s time. These big groups became increasingly dependent on corporate foundations for their budget. Many of these foundations are the progeny of the oil companies. Look at the major three that are funding the environmental movement: Pew Charitable Trust, that’s Sun Oil; W. Alton Jones, another oil company; Rockefeller Family Fund. Those three foundations basically control the environmental movement. And let’s put it this way: They’re not out for regulation, they want you to practice real politics, and number two, they like the neoliberal approach.

If you look at the board of directors of the large environmental groups, they’re filled with corporate executives. From the timber industry, to the oil industry, to the real estate industry, to the airline industry, to the nuclear power industry, they’re there, on every one of these boards. They’re rich, they’re corporate, and they don’t want you shaking things up. So [the environmental groups] are like Gulliver, they’re pinned down. They’re shackled by their source of money, shackled by their relationship to the Democratic Party, shackled by the fact that their boards are controlled by corporate executives.

Do you think there are signs that people in the US have become aware of this problem and that groups that are scrappier and not spending as much money on overhead are getting stronger?

If you’re fighting mountaintop removal in West Virgina, you’re well aware that you can’t count on these [big green] groups for help. Because it’s West Virginia, oh, that’s Robert Byrd’s state, we’re not going to get into direct conflict with him. Other than that, I don’t think there’s much. The environment isn’t even talked about in political campaigns much anymore … aside from these airy homilies about global warming, or green jobs to try and reinvigorate the economy. But the problems that people are facing in inner cities with air quality, the fact that urban air quality, the risks of getting cancer are about as great as if you were a four-pack-a-day smoker. Walking outside your house, it’s a hostile environment. And these issues aren’t talked about at all in our two-party, one-body political system.

It’s a tragic waste that hundreds of millions each year are going to these large organizations. What it means is that people are now left to fend for themselves, to mount their own resistance. So you have these rebellions taking root, and they’re not under the control of these large organizations … I mean they can certainly use the help, but the help isn’t coming, so they’re not controlled by them and not boxed in by the playground the nationals have chosen to play on. Some have been wiped out, that’s the way it is. But it’s all happening under the radar of the mainstream media.

In the early 1990s, some journalists were talking about the limits to growth. As the ecological crises have gotten more dire and potentially more fatal to the human species, it seems like that’s not such a discussion anymore in the mainstream.

What they would like is sort of the Gore approach, which is painless optimism. And that’s not the way it is. These issues, down at the grassroots, are life and death issues. They’re not being reported, they’re not part of policy. There aren’t any easy solutions, there aren’t fifty easy ways you can save the planet. That’s what they want, but that’s not going to do it. And you can’t shop your way to a better planet.

Difficult choices are going to have to be made in terms of growth, in terms of energy. I mean, California is essentially out of water. What are you going to do, are you going to spend billions of dollars to build a peripheral canal that won’t even solve your problem? Meanwhile, the ecology of your state is crashing. What are you going to do, steal Oregon’s water?

We’re not going to get our way out of this energy crisis as long as the energy system remains centralized. It’s just not going to happen. I mean look, solar power has gone nowhere. Right at the end of the Carter era—it wasn’t just Reagan—Atlantic Richfield and British Petroleum bought up patents for photovoltaics. Check out the book Who Owns the Sun? by Daniel Berman and John O’Connor. They see large solar generation as being inevitable, but they want it to remain in the hands of large corporations. Until we can break out of the cycle of depending on centralized control of energy distribution we’ll have these problems. If you democratize energy production you can begin to enact the kind of fundamental changes we need. Municipal utility districts, like what you have with SMUD in Sacramento, are a good way to go toward a future system of people powering their own energy.

But if the question is the future of the atmosphere of the planet, I don’t think that’s going to get you very far. Certainly you’ll have more control over choosing sources of energy that you’re going to use. But ultimately they’re still connected to the power grid and it’s going to be very difficult. Unless you’re a huge municipal utility district the size of San Francisco, you’re not going to have the capital in order to invest in large solar production plants, or geothermal, or wind power. So frankly, I don’t think there are any solutions, because I think the climate crisis and the extinction crisis are beyond our control.

Thirty years ago, if we’d made radically different choices, perhaps… There’s an element of hubris in this [that recalls] British philosopher David Ehrenfeld’s view of technology and the environment, the arrogance of humanism. Ehrenfeld wrote an influential book that came out in the early ‘80s called the Arrogance of Humanism … kind of precursor to Deep Ecology, but a much more disciplined philosopher than any of the deep ecology people. The idea that a technological solution can stall or reverse climate change is almost the same kind of hubris that got us into this mess.

So from my point of view it comes down to, what’s the best way to live your life? If these issues are important to you, in a moral way, then you have to disconnect from the grid. And more than that, you need to be essentially generating your own power. You need to have control over your own power. And perhaps be in small collectives along the lines of what Amory Lovins talks about in terms of soft energy paths.

You need to grow your own food in community gardens. What it’s going to require, even to feel good about yourself, as the planet careens toward a kind of climate Armageddon, is a radical downscaling. What we’re being offered is a kind of short-selling of the environment. The solutions from Gore, the solutions of many of the mainstream environmental groups, are a kind of profit-taking as the planet hurtles toward a radical reshaping of the global ecosystem which I think spells doom at the end of the line for mammalian species. That’s what these solutions are about. They’re about how to make money, how to capitalize off the anxiety and panic and guilt and hopelessness that many people feel about the state of the environment.

Amory Lovins was way ahead of the curve back in the ‘70s, he was talking about issues that are just now sort of nosing their way under the tent. Amory is trying to develop environmentally neutral forms of transportation. In a way he’s trying to work radically within a very corrupt system. I have a lot of respect for him. He’s been working on this car for twenty years or so, and that’s a lot of time and investment [laughing] in something that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and in the end will have such a minimal, micro-fractional influence on the state of climate, on the state of the atmosphere. But you can see how you get sucked into this. It’s like being pulled into a black hole.

Do you have a sense that as the global economic crisis gets worse that it could be dramatic enough to have a positive effect on the sustainable future of humans on the planet?

I don’t think so. I think the deterioration of the current economic regime in the short term will have dramatically dire economic consequences for a lot of the things I care about. Forests, endangered species… there’s not going to be the capital to invest in large-scale sustainable projects. What you’re going to see is the opening up national forests. A lot of the public estate is going to be at risk. As the economy tumbles south in what I think is going to be a prolonged recession, if not depression, if you look historically, those situations have always had very dire consequences for the ecology of native ecosystems.

We’re already fighting resource extraction; now we’re going to be fighting them at a much more intensive level. I think you’re going to see governments act to preserve themselves by giving away the public estate in the name of job production, in the name of whatever. Taking down dams in the Columbia River in order to protect salmon species in the middle of a depression, that’s not going to happen. The dams went up in the middle of the [‘30s] Depression.

So, no… I’ve heard these arguments but I don’t buy them. Look at Africa, which has been mired in something beyond a depression for fifty years. It’s been disastrous for ecosystems.

Will the economic crisis result in foundation money drying up for the big environmental groups and for smaller ones?

Well, that is a positive. These major foundations have been like cloning shops for environmental groups. They control their agenda, they want all of them to look the same, behave the same, be utterly predictable, and dependent upon their money. Once you get on the foundation dole, it’s like becoming like a meth addict. A lot of them, certainly the smaller groups, will lose their funding first, and that’s going to be a very good thing. The weaning process is going to hurt for a while. But when they emerge from that, they’re going to be much better off. That’s what I’m interested in—the varieties of resistance to industrial capitalism and neoliberalism, the forces that are exploiting the planet. The first mission of the foundations was to take critiques of capitalism off the table. Hopefully in the future, you’re going to be seeing, five to ten years from now, much more indigenous radical and unpredictable, organic environmental groups that will end up being much more effective, much more healing for people.

You want it to be fun, like Edward Abbey says… of all the movements out there, the environmental movement should probably be the most fun. You can see what you’re fighting for, the kind of direct actions and protests that you can engage in are much more exhilarating than a lot of other issues. And it has to be fun, otherwise you’re going to burn out. One of the things the foundations have done is turn it into a bureaucracy. It’s easier to control that way.

Do you see the environmental justice movement as holding hope for a shift toward that kind of activism?

Yeah, I do. Environmental justice became a sort of passing interest of the foundations in the ‘90s. But the big money never came. It was the same old white Eastern elites pimping off of their issues, with the exception of Greenpeace, which probably was the only big environmental group that had a commitment on environmental justice issues in the Mississippi Delta Region, in Cancer Alley. They actually went there and listened to people living in the chemical soup bowl. And they put their expertise at direct action, how to train people in Cancer Alley, how to shut down a chemical plant for a day with a protest.

The other groups remained in DC, they put out their White Papers, and when interest eroded in environmental justice they moved on to something else. I think people will be happy to extract themselves from the likes of the Environmental Defense Fund and the NRDC.