Jolly Green NGOs vs Environmental Movements

By Peter Rugh - System Change not Climate Change, April 10, 2014 (used by permission)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Jolly Green NGOs are mighty popular dudes. Their donation envelopes have been at your table for years, right next to your gas bill, asking you to feed them in exchange for a tee-shirt or a tote bag.

“Collectively,” Inside Climate News reports, they have “15 million members, 2,000-plus staffers and annual budgets of more than $525 million” in their jolly, green bellies.

But despite the widely acknowledged severity of the environmental crisis we face and the supposed-size of the environmental movement, how come we’ve seen, comparatively, so little action?

In physics, mass is a measure of inertia, yet historically we masses have shown ourselves to display a propensity for social change; from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia all the way up to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011. A mass environmental movement in the United States in the 1970s prompted Richard Nixon, one of the most reactionary presidents to ever occupy the White House, to create the Environmental Protection Agency — a pretty radical step at the time.

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the largest of our Jolly Green NGO’s are taking our Jolly Green Dollars and putting them towards lobbying politicians to pass miniscule legislative measures that don’t come close to addressing the radical change necessary to tackle the ecological emergency we’re in.

This Inside Climate info-graph sketches out who’s got the dough and where they’re spending it.

It’s important to point out that groups like 350.org on the lower end of the money spectrum have, to their credit, been channelling funds towards grassroots movement building and direct action. Inside Climate notes that the “environmental movement has undergone a tectonic shift and resurgence over the last several years, spearheaded by the failed legislative effort to cap carbon emissions in 2010.” Tectonic might be a bit of an overstatement but some groups on the graph are now “supplementing inside-the-Beltway campaigning with grassroots organizing and civil disobedience.”

The Sierra Club comes to mind. The group secretly took $26 million from the fracking outfit Chesapeake Energy from 2007 to 2010. Since then, perhaps catching wind of what 350 was up to in the streets or perhaps because the White House wasn’t returning their calls, they’ve taken a different approach. In 2013, the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, got himself arrested protesting the Keystone XL at President Obama’s doorstep. (An act of civil disobedience immediately followed by a fundraising pitch to their members, mind you.)

Still, the Sierra Club’s corpulent brethren, and to a large extent the Sierra Club as well, have a far way to go. They continue to funnel the good intentions of people who express their concern for the environment by donating hard earned cash into soft solutions dry-heaved out of a stagnant political system.

It’s is not a new strategy. Following their successes in the Nixon-era, Brian Tokar explains in his comprehensive history of Earth Day just how our NGO giants warped themselves into statues:

[T]hroughout the 1970s and 1980s, representatives of the largest national environmental groups became an increasingly visible and entrenched part of the Washington political scene. As the appearance of success within the system grew, organizations from the National Wildlife Federation to the Natural Resources Defense Council restructured and changed personnel so as to more effectively play the insider game. Large environmental groups worked to sustain the smooth functioning of the system, rather than challenge it. The Sierra Club grew from 80,000 to 630,000 members during the 1980s, and the conservative National Wildlife Federation reported membership gains of up to 8,000 a month, totaling nearly a million. The total budget of the 10 largest environmental groups grew from less than $10 million in 1965 to $218 million in 1985 and $514 million in 1990. Those advocating a more corporate-style organizational model invariably won internal battles within the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and even Greenpeace. They increasingly avoided issues and tactics that might prove alienating to wealthy donors. By the early 1990s, even the thoroughly mainstream former editor of Audubon magazine would lament that “naturalists have been replaced by ecocrats who are more comfortable on Capitol Hill than in the woods, fields, meadows, mountains and swamps.”

A lot of that dinero powering these fatty NGOs isn’t coming from tote bags anyway, but from the corporate vistas where their jolly, green heads rest — leading to a mentality Naomi Klein aptly described in an interview with Salon last year. “It’s not, ‘sue the bastards,” she lamented. “it’s, ‘work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.’”

Referencing the late 19th century origins of many of today’s Jolly Green NGOS, initially formed by white men seeking to enjoy the pristine territory that had been usurped from America’s indigenous population, Klein adds:

I think it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. . . [I]f the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And [they] weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.

Our climate’s alarm bells are ringing louder than ever; storms, floods, droughts melting polar icecaps, you get the picture. Our response when we hear that the president plans on regulating methane gas emissions (no doubt the work of our Jolly Green Ecocrats), for instance,  should be yes, and. . .

Yes and how about banning fracking entirely. As a matter of fact that’s exactly the change actor Mark Ruffalo, who plays the lead in Hollywood’s Hulk blockbusters has been pushing for.

Kids, don’t go trying to KATHAM tractor trailers with your bare knuckles; organizing a community protest is far more effective than anything that could land you in jail on an ecoterror charge, but the Incredible Hulk is a much more fitting role model for our environmental movement than what the Jolly Green NGOs have on offer.

He’s big and he’s angry. He destroys the impediments in his way. Exactly what we have to do to our current political system through mass activity in order to transform this rotten world our elites have handed us into one that can heal itself, into one in which human beings are treated on the level.

As we stand now, we’re so big and yet we expect so little of ourselves. Expect more. Demand more. Tap a friend. Hit the streets and turn the Jolly Green Fat of our environmental movement’s inertia into muscle.