To: Permaculture ibiblio <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, openpermaculture <permaculture@openpermaculture.org>
Subject: [permaculture] The Withering of the American Environmental Movement
Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2007 15:38:42 -0500
Just received in email. Starts out depressing but gets better at the end:
/The Withering of the American Environmental Movement
/The Thrill is Gone
*By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR**
*
*"The Dark Ages. They haven't ended yet." *Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
*A** kind of political narcolepsy has settled over the American
environmental movement. Call it eco-ennui. You may know the feeling:
restlessness, lack of direction, evaporating budgets, diminished
expectations, a simmering discontent. The affliction appears acute,
possibly systemic.**
Unfortunately, the antidote isn't as simple as merely filing a new
lawsuit in the morning or skipping that PowerPoint presentation to join
a road blockade for the day. No, something much deeper may be called
for: a rebellion of the heart. Just like in the good old days, not that
long ago.
What is it, precisely, that's going on? Was the environmental movement
bewitched by eight years of Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore? Did it suffer an
allergic reaction to the New Order of Things? Are we simply adrift in a
brief lacuna in the evolution of the conservation movement, one of those
Gouldian (Stephen Jay) pauses before a new creative eruption?
Perhaps, the movement, such as it was, experienced an institutional
uneasiness with the rules of engagement during the long cold war in
Clinton time. A war (War? Did someone say war?) where hostilities, such
as they were, remained buried beneath graceful gestures at meaningful
discourse-where the raw passions for rare places are, at the insistence
of lawyers and lobbyists, politically sublimated or suppressed altogether.
Environmentalism has never thrived on an adherence to etiquette or quiet
entreaties. Yet, that became the mode of operation during Clinton and it
has continued through the rougher years of Bush and Cheney. Direct
confrontation of governmental authority and corporate villainy was once
our operation metier. No longer. None aggression pacts have been signed,
an unofficial détente declared. Was it sealed in the spring of 1993 on
the lawn of Blair House, perhaps, while the cherry blossoms where in
bloom? Did the late Jay Hair, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation,
forge a deal in the fall of that year to green light the logging of the
last ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest? (What was the late Vince
Foster's role in all of this? He had one, you know, but that's another
story.) Cold wars, naturally, engender such paranoid perambulations.
More than a decade later, this much is clear: the vigor of the
environmental movement has been dissipated, drained by the enforced
congeniality displayed in our disputes with Clinton and Bush, the
Democrats in congress, and the grim, green-suited legions of the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Despite the rampages of the
Bush administration, the big green groups can't even rouse themselves
into much more than the most reflexive kind of hysteria, fundraising
letters printed in bold type.
Like so many vacant-eyed victims of Stockholm Syndrome, most
professional environmentalists find themselves conscripts to the
conference room and the consensus table, situations about as satisfying
as computerized chess or phone sex. (I'll sign up for one jolt of
Electro-shock over four years of group therapy any day.)
Accusations of elitism, hurled at us like political creampies, from the
property right jihadis, hit their targets more often than not these
days. Once highly regarded (and deeply reviled) as fierce advocates of
the "public interest," environmentalists now are largely dismissed in
the living rooms of America as merely another "special interest" group
(weaker than most), peddling its meager influence on the Hill, angling
for access to the anterooms (never the control room) of power, or, at
least, a line item in the federal budget.
What's worse, our best efforts these days hardly seem to even raise a
hackle on the hierophants of industry. After okaying the logging of
ancient forests, signing off on anti-wilderness legislation in Oregon,
Idaho and Montana, pampering the whims of Bruce Babbitt (and Dick
Cheney), endorsing NAFTA and GATT, the failure to stand up for high
level whistleblowers like former BLM head Jim Baca, the mainstream
environmental groups don't scare anyone anymore. Except maybe their own
members. Yes, they may scare them a great deal, indeed.
*
Something Happened
*
The surest sign of decadence in a social/political movement is its
engagement in the suppression of internal dissent: such decadence now
erodes the moral core of the environmental movement. Stray beyond the
margins of permitted discourse, publicly critique the prevailing
"strategy," strike out in an authorized new direction and the overlords
of the environmental movement crack down. They enfilade the insurgents
with legalistic maledictions, gag orders, and accusations of sedition.
Witness the Sierra Club's threats to sue renegade chapters that publicly
opposed anti-wilderness bills proposed by the Club's political favorites
in Montana. Or its attacks on anti-war protesters in the Club's ranks in
Utah. Or NRDC's attempt to squelch the filing of endangered species
petitions, for on-the-run critters such as the Queen Charlotte's
goshawk. Or the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund's arm-twisting of its own
clients in the spotted owl cases. Or the Environmental Defense Fund's
betrayal of at-risk communities across America when it endorsed Dow
Chemical's proposed "revamping" of the Superfund Act. (Col. Fred Krupp,
EDF's CEO, was once overheard telling Carol Browner, Clinton's head of
the EPA, "You are our general. We are your troops. We await your
orders.") Or the sado-masochistic pleasure that NRDC (yes, them again)
displayed while boasting about "breaking the back of the environmental
opposition to NAFTA."
You don't have to be versed in the works of Hannah Arendt or Michel
Foucault (although Madness and Civilization ought to be required reading
for all activists and other "eccentrics") to understand the dynamics of
power and repression at work here. Activists are now aliens on the
political landscape; their relationship to the lawyers, lobbyists,
economists, marketing agents, PR flaks and CEOs that management the
environmental movement parallels that of welfare mothers to the welfare
bureaucrats: abusive indifference.
To quote Jospeh Heller: Something happened. Somewhere along the line,
the environmental movement disconnected with the people, rejected its
political roots, pulled the plug on its vibrant and militant tradition.
It packed its bags, starched its shirts and jetted to DC, where it
became what it once despised: a risk-aversive, depersonalized,
hyper-analytical, humorless, access-driven, intolerant, centralized,
technocratic, dealmaking, passionless, direct-mailing, lawyer-laden
monolith to mediocrity. A monolith with feet of clay.
National environmental policies are now engineered by an Axis of
Acronyms: EDF, NRDC, WWF: groups without voting memberships and little
responsibility to the wider environmental movement. They are the
undisputed mandarins of technotalk and lobbyist logic, who gave us the
ecological oxymorons of our time: "pollution credits," "re-created
wetlands," "sustainable development."
In their relativistic milieu, everything can be traded off or dealt
away. For them, the tag-end remains of the native ecosystems on our
public lands are endlessly divisible and every loss can be recast as a
hard-won victory in the advertising copy of their fundraising
propaganda. Settle and move on, is their unapologetic mantra. And don't
expect them stick around to live with the consequences of their deals
and trade-offs.
Into this political vacuum rough beasts have already been loosed and
others are bound to follow. The decline of a militant environmental
movement has been countered by the rise of a militant anti-environmental
movement, unrestrained, and all to often encouraged by, the agents of
federal and state governments. The new anti-environmental movement, a
strange hybrid of Aryan Nationists, gun-fetishists and the loonier
incarnations of the Wise-Use crowd, have used arson, muggings and deaths
to intimidate local environmental activists across the West.
The ranks of this malicious melange continue to expand up and down the
spine of the Rockies and across the Great Basin. Like deranged Deadheads
on tour, these neo-militians follow roving weapons bazaars (some of
which were reportedly backed by arms merchant and Iran/contra star
Richard Secord) across the rural backwaters of the American West, from
Libby, Montana to Tonopah, Nevada.
At these moveable conclaves of righteousness, the blonde, blue-eyed
penitents can purchase enough firepower to call forth the Second
Coming-a state goal of some attendees. Here's the Defense Dividend we've
all been waiting for, where the Pentagon largesse of the Cold War is
offered for sale on the homefront at discount prices: tanks,
armor-piercing bullets, APCs, night-vision gunsights, Humvees. It's all
there for the bidding.
Living embodiments of the quaint cultural traditions of the West
memorialized at places like Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, these
characters are preparing to defend what's theirs and what they think
ought to be theirs. By force if necessary-perhaps preferably.
What do they want? Simply unfettered rights to grazing, mining and
logging on public lands, the federal lands themselves revested to the
states or private corporations and, to quote one Arly Gruder, a rancher
from somewhere near Salmon, Idaho, arguably America's most inhospitable
town: "To run all the damn feds, Jews, Spics and homo-enviros the hell
out of here." Run them back across the 100th Meridian, no doubt. But how
far? Back to Brooklyn? Back to Juarez? Back to Buchenwald?
Listen to Hugh McKeen, a rancher and former commissioner in Catron
County, New Mexico, who told reporter Tony Davis that his neighbors and
friends are arming themselves, preparing for a new range war, against
greens and their sidekicks, the illegal immigrants: "The people have
fought for this land in the past. There have been killings over water.
It runs in the genes. You have very independent people here. They want
to be left alone. But the government oppresses them. And the
environmentalists come in here and want to oppress their life."
Apparently, the West is theirs to waste by virtue of the Doctrine of
Manifest Genetics.
The absence of a forceful opposition from progressive greens and the
appearance/reality of collaboration with the federal government by
Beltway groups, only strengthens the cause of the extreme right. As the
left migrates toward the center, the right repels further to the
right-and the government follows suit. This a recipe for a future in
which things, to crib from Thomas Pynchon, will not be quite so amusing.
**Toward a Resolute Clarity of Place**
Still there's no reason to beginning strumming a threnody just yet.
Beneath the six-figure salaries, limo-driven executives, and glossy
magazines clotted with ads for SUVs, there's a flickering pulse to the
grassroots environmental movement, in the hinterlands and barrios, in
the secret gardens of the Bronx and amid the toxic detritus of New
Orleans. Foucault and Tom Paine sang the same refrain: the more
pervasive the repression, the more profound the rebellion to come. Well,
the rebellion has started. *
In the southwest, a small outfit called Living Rivers is
campaigning to decommission Glen Canyon Dam and restore the
Colorado River. In Montana, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies
remains the grizzly bear's most unflinching ally and advocate.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Western Land Exchange Project is
nearly alone in challenging the disposal of public lands to
private concerns and the Center for Environmental Equity is
chasing the big gold mining companies out of Oregon.. In the
Midwest, Heartwood is defending the incredibly diverse
hardwood forests of the Ohio Valley and waging an intense
campaign against the proliferation of noxious and inhumane
confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs. In the heart of
cancer alley, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (aka
LEAN) is taking on chemical and oil companies, as well as the
toxic sludge left behind by Katrina. In South Dakota, the
Lakota Student Alliance is waging a courageous battle to have
the Black Hills and other sacred lands returned to the Sioux
Nation. Deep in Appalachia, Save Our Cumberland Mountains is
fighting the most destructive form of mining ever devised by
man or satan: mountain top removal.
*Like snowpeaks sprouting from a far horizon, these scattered pockets of
resistance can help us triangulate our way back home, entrench with a
resolute clarity of place. And that move, as Terry Tempest Williams
suggests in her shimmering book The Unspoken Hunger
<*_http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679752560/counterpunchmaga_*>
, may be the most radical act of all.**
Environmentalism was once a people's cause, unaligned with any political
party and independent from the demands of the shadowy syndicate of
mega-foundations (Pew, Rockefeller, Ford) that now hold the mortgage on
the movement-those high priests of what Foucault called "condescending
philanthropy." Environmentalism was once driven by a desire for social
justice and an unremitting passion for the wild. We need to tap back
into those populist currents. Let the vision attract the money and don't
allow it to be refracted through the ideological prism of neoliberal
foundations.
The power of the environmental movement derives from its essential and
shared imagery, its sensual tangibilities. Simply put: the destruction
of the wild sparks militancy in the heart. At least it does for me. Wild
places communicate their own passion and power, sensations that are the
antithesis of political abstractions.
It's all about the singular sense of openness on the Snake River plains.
The way light plays across ancient petroglyphs on the canyon walls of
Navajo sandstone outside Moab. The smell of sagebrush in the high desert
on the north slope of the Ruby Mountains. A cool rush of wind unleashed
by distant storms hammering the Gallatin Range. The bluegray fogbanks
that sleeve up the North Santiam River canyon on an August morning in
Oregon. The crisp shock of being busted out of a raft by a rapid on the
Selway River. The carcass of a grizzly-clean salmon annealed by the
Alaskan sun to a granite boulder along the MacNeil River. The
surrealistic explosion of October color from dense forest of oaks,
poplars and maples on Nebo Ridge in southern Indiana. The cry of a lone
coyote trembling across the sepia sky in the predawn badlands of South
Dakota. These are the threatened images that haunt my nights, the green
fires that burn in my soul. You have your own. Nearly everyone does.
Everyone with a heartbeat.
*
The power of the people can still overwhelm the influence of
big money. Look at Chiapas. Read Edward Abbey. Listen to
Mandela and Evo Morales. Anything is possible. Find your
place, take a stand. People will join you.