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The Rebirth of Environmentalism

Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear

ISLAND PRESS

THE RISE OF GRASSROOTS BIODIVERSITY ACTIVISM AND THE REBIRTH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

On a sunny day in July 1987, a rusty converted fishing boat called the Divine Wind set out from Seattle with a crew of twenty-one environmental activists on board. Their goal was to find a drift-netting vessel on the high seas and ram it. The hull of their boat had been deliberately reinforced for this purpose. The activists called themselves the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Sea Shepherd was a group that, like its land-based counterpart Earth First!, would intervene directly to stop environmentally damaging activities, a tactic known as "direct action." Both groups would sometimes damage property as part of their direct action, but they took great care not to injure other people, even during dramatic acts such as ramming a ship. Sea Shepherd had used this tactic previously in its campaign to stop ships involved in illegal whaling. In 1987, the group hoped to use the same tactic to deter ships engaged in high seas drift-netting and draw public attention to this particularly destructive form of fishing. Drift-netting entails using massive nets—often thirty to forty miles long—which, in addition to catching fish, would also trap and drown more than a million dolphins, whales, sea turtles, seabirds, and other marine wildlife each year as bycatch.

One member of the Sea Shepherd crew that year was Brendan Cummings, a young environmental activist who took a leave from college to volunteer for the drift-net campaign. Sea Shepherd needed an engineer, and although Cummings's only previous experience was repairing his own motorcycle, he was assigned the task of keeping the Divine Wind's decrepit engine running throughout the campaign. During the summer of 1987, Sea Shepherd's crew pursued the drift-netting fleet across the northern Pacific Ocean. Ultimately, the fleet eluded them that year, though during a subsequent campaign in 1990, Sea Shepherd rammed two drift-net ships, disabling their net deployment equipment.

In the meantime, Brendan Cummings had returned to college. He remained involved in environmental activism and attended law school in the mid-1990s. Afterward he became an attorney for a small environmental group called the Center for Biological Diversity. Like Cummings, the Center's founders had roots in direct action activism, but the Center was known for its extensive use of litigation to enforce environmental laws to protect imperiled wildlife. Cummings would develop a program to apply the Center's tactics to the protection of ocean-dwelling species. Although high seas drift-netting had been banned by the United Nations in the 1990s, he discovered that a smaller form of drift-netting called drift-gillnetting was still taking place in the waters off California. This fishery was incidentally catching and killing leatherback sea turtles, the largest and most imperiled species of sea turtle. Cummings devised a lawsuit under the citizen enforcement provisions of the Endangered Species Act that resulted in seasonal closures of the gillnet fishery along most of California's coast. And in the decade since that lawsuit was filed, not a single leatherback turtle has been killed by the fishery.

Litigation proved to be a powerful tactic for accomplishing the wildlife protection goals that Cummings had first sought to achieve through direct action with Sea Shepherd. The Center for Biological Diversity, which fostered Cummings' litigation, was an example of a new form of environmental activism that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s—the grassroots biodiversity group.

Grassroots Biodiversity Groups and the U.S. Environmental Movement

Grassroots biodiversity groups have been unsung heroes of American environmentalism during the past twenty years. These are small, radical environmental organizations that protect imperiled wildlife and forests, particularly through aggressive use of litigation. There was a remarkable proliferation of these groups in the late 1980s and 1990s. The new groups were directly responsible for an unprecedented increase in biodiversity protection during that period. For example, by the early 2000s, logging on national forests had plummeted to its lowest level since the 1930s in response to appeals and lawsuits coming largely from these groups. The new groups were able to accomplish a tremendous amount with very few resources. For example, the Center for Biological Diversity was described in its early years as "a handful of hippies operating off of unemployment checks." Yet by 2004, the Center was responsible for getting 335 species of animals and plants protected under the Endangered Species Act, more than any other environmental group of any size. Today the Center is best known for applying the Endangered Species Act to protect polar bears from the effects of global warming.

Despite all of their accomplishments, the grassroots biodiversity groups have largely been overlooked in the recent histories of the U.S. environmental movement. To understand the role of these groups, it is important to situate them in relation to the concept of biodiversity, the laws protecting biodiversity, and the large national environmental organizations that advocate for biodiversity.

"Biodiversity" was a term popularized by biologists in the 1980s in response to growing concerns that human activities were causing other species of life to go extinct at an unprecedented rate. The term served to convey the importance of maintaining a full range of animal and plant species in the face of this extinction crisis. From this perspective, wildlife and forests were not simply scenic amenities for people involved in outdoor recreation, but instead were integral to the "web of life" of healthy ecosystems. Some advocates for biodiversity protection highlighted the value of maintaining healthy and complete ecosystems for their benefits to humans, both in terms of the ecosystem services they provide (such as purifying air and water) and, more fundamentally, as the life-support system for the Earth. Others asserted that all species have an inherent right to exist and that the extinction of any species is an irreparable loss, comparable to genocide. (Indeed, species extinction is sometimes called "ecocide.") From either perspective, it was imperative to protect biodiversity.

Even before the popularization of that term, the 1970s saw the passage of powerful new laws to protect wildlife and forests, such as the Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and National Forest Management Act. (For an overview of these laws, see the appendix.) However the federal agencies charged with implementing these laws—particularly the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service—were often reluctant to do so. Enforcement of biodiversity protection laws was especially difficult because the animals and plants that would benefit from that protection did not vote in elections, whereas the businesses that profited from lax enforcement, such as timber corporations and developers, were frequent contributors to the electoral campaigns of the politicians controlling the purse strings for those federal agencies. Thus, the amount of logging on national forests allowed by the Forest Service grew rapidly even after the passage of National Forest Management Act, and imperiled species continued to decline toward extinction as they waited for the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect them under the Endangered Species Act.

Although these laws contained provisions that increased public oversight and enabled the public to sue federal agencies to ensure that they enforced these laws, the large national environmental advocacy organizations were hesitant to use these tools vigorously. To understand the causes of their relative inaction, it is helpful to situate those groups in the context of the developments within the environmental movement following the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. National environmental organizations, such as The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense Fund, grew quickly in the two decades following the first Earth Day. During this time, these organizations went through a process of institutionalization into the policy-making apparatus in Washington, DC. They became political "insiders."

While these changes enhanced the stature of the national environmental organizations (known among environmental activists simply as "the nationals"), a growing number of critics expressed concern that their effectiveness was being undermined in the process. The institutionalization of the nationals tied them to a process of deal-making that would sacrifice some biodiversity protection in order to broker political compromises. However, biodiversity issues are often ill-suited to the policies that are created through such compromises. If, for example, the timber industry seeks to log the last remaining habitat of an imperiled species of owl, a policy decision based on compromise might produce a resolution in which half of the remaining habitat will be protected and in exchange the other half will be logged. From a political perspective this outcome might seem like a fair compromise, but from an ecological perspective it could be a disaster. If that species of owl needs more than half of its remaining habitat in order to survive in the long term, the eventual result of that compromise will be extinction. Investigative journalist Mark Dowie concluded, "Compromise, which had produced some limited gains for the movement in the 1970s, in the 1980s became the habitual response of the environment establishment. It is still applied almost reflexively, even in the face of irreversible degradations. These compromises have pushed a once-effective movement to the brink of irrelevance."

In the realm of forest and wildlife protection, Earth First! emerged as the main alternative to the national environmental organizations in the 1980s. Earth First! ers deliberately set themselves apart from the nationals with their slogan, "No compromise in defense of mother earth." Earth First! did not seek to engage in political deal-making and instead used direct action, including sabotage of environmentally destructive machinery, as its main tactic. It also eschewed formal organization and conventional fundraising. While Earth First! attracted much media coverage and helped to reframe debates around environmental protection, its choice of tactics gave it little direct leverage over federal environmental policy.

Thus, in the late 1980s, biodiversity activists faced a dilemma. They had a choice between two approaches to biodiversity protection, but each of these routes had notable shortcomings. The national environmental organizations offered political access constrained by compromise, while Earth First! represented an unconstrained approach that was not directly influential. Then a new set of environmental organizations emerged around this time to challenge that dichotomy. Much as the mythical sailors in Homer's Odyssey had to chart a course between the twin perils of the jagged rocks of Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, the new groups would seek to find a third path that avoided the limited influence of Earth First!'s direct action tactics on the one hand without being pulled into the political constraints of the nationals on the other.

Some activists coming out of Earth First! and others inspired in part by Earth First!'s "no compromise" attitude formed new groups with names such as the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Center for Biological Diversity, Forest Conservation Council, Forest Guardians, Heartwood, John Muir Project, Native Forest Network, Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, and Wild Alabama. While some of these groups focused on the protection of forests and others specialized in using the Endangered Species Act to protect wildlife, there was considerable overlap in these activities, and all of the groups shared an overarching goal of preserving biodiversity. Unlike Earth First!, these new groups were small formal organizations that used only lawful tactics, particularly litigation. At the same time, these biodiversity protection groups were notably different from the national environmental organizations. Indeed, these groups identified themselves as "grassroots" to distinguish themselves from the nationals, although that term did not mean that their efforts were narrowly local in scope. Because biodiversity protection involved federal lands such as the national forests and federal laws such as the Endangered Species Act, the grassroots groups were primarily focused on transforming the policies of the federal government.

In contrast to the national organizations, many of the founders of the new groups described themselves as radicals. The word "radical" has many connotations. For these activists, the label could be best defined as "unconstrained," in the sense that they were willing to pursue the full environmental protections needed to preserve species from extinction even when those goals were considered controversial or politically unrealistic. While no group can be absolutely unconstrained, the grassroots biodiversity groups were qualitatively different from the moderate national environmental organizations. Unlike the nationals, the grassroots groups did not focus their efforts in Washington, DC, and were often critical of the political compromises being brokered there by the nationals. They were not political insiders, nor did most aspire to be. As a result, the new groups were not constrained from filing lawsuits against the federal government for its failure to enforce its own environmental laws in cases that the national organizations avoided as too politically controversial. The grassroots biodiversity groups were therefore able to apply these laws much more extensively than had been done up to this time. Using litigation, they filled a wide gap in the enforcement of environmental laws that had been left by the political constraints on both the federal regulatory agencies and the national environmental organizations. Consequently, these grassroots groups had an unprecedented impact on the implementation of federal biodiversity protection policies throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Three Grassroots Biodiversity Protection Campaigns

The accomplishments of the grassroots biodiversity groups were not easily achieved. These groups were small in terms of their organizational size—often fewer than half a dozen staff members—and their very limited budgets, yet they had to operate in a field that was already dominated by large national environmental organizations with a long history of working on forest and wildlife issues. Indeed, the role played by the nationals created one of the biggest challenges for the new grassroots groups.

To illustrate the challenges and accomplishments of the grassroots biodiversity groups, I focus on case studies of three campaigns that exemplify not only the types of issues covered by these groups, but also three distinct approaches that they took in their relationships to the dominant national organizations, summarized here as (1) never mind the nationals, (2) transform a national, or (3) become a national.

HEADWATERS FORESTS CAMPAIGN

Issue: Forest protection on private lands

Relationship to the nationals: Never mind the nationals

The Headwaters Forest campaign sought to prevent the logging of the last ancient redwood trees on lands controlled by the Maxxam corporation. Many environmental organizations were reluctant to get involved with forest protection on private lands, but a network of bold grassroots groups emerged to defend Headwaters Forest. One group, the Environmental Protection Information Center, was particularly effective in using litigation to block Maxxam's logging. At the same time, there was a proliferation of new small groups in the region that experimented with a variety of confrontational tactics to put pressure on Maxxam. The Headwaters campaign went on for many years with little or no participation by the national environmental organizations. Undeterred by the absence of the nationals, the grassroots groups used informal coordination and later created a more formal coalition as an alternate means to magnify their influence. In response to this campaign, the government ultimately intervened to purchase and protect part of Headwaters Forest. (See chapter 3.)

ZERO-CUT CAMPAIGN

Issue: Ending logging on national forests

Relationship to the nationals: Transform a national

In the late 1980s, forest protection activists began calling for an end to all logging on national forests, a position known as "zero cut." However, the national environmental organizations rejected this goal as being too controversial and they hindered efforts by grassroots activists to introduce legislation to achieve it. In response, the grassroots activists undertook a two-pronged campaign to stop public lands logging. On the one hand, a loose network of small forest protection groups used appeals and litigation to stop individual logging projects, leading to a steep drop in logging levels on national forests. Simultaneously, a network of grassroots activists within the Sierra Club, known as the John Muir Sierrans, mobilized the democratic decision-making processes within that organization to elect their own slate of candidates to the board of directors and change the Club's position to support zero cut. They were then able to introduce legislation that called for an end to logging on national forests. (See chapter 4.)

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Excerpted from The Rebirth of Environmentalism by Douglas Bevington. Copyright © 2009 Douglas Bevington. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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