Conservation has lost its edge. Once razor sharp, the movement is dull and rusty. Rosalie Edge had a brass that has leached from the cause. Conservation has become a soirée for the well-meaning, well-heeled saviors.
Conservation did not begin this way, emerging first as a militant. Roosevelt, Pinchot, Dock, Rothrock, Chapman, McFarland, Edge, and their kind were brusiers. A 1948 New Yorker magazine profile called Edge “the most honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation.” An Audubon Society lawyer in the lawsuit she had brought against its officers in 1931 denounced her as a “common scold.”
I like hellcats and scolds. They confront the status quo, and beyond thinking “outside of the box” they recognize that there is no box in the first place.
Hellcats shove movements out of the muck where they inevitably become mired. A civil rights movement existed before Martin Luther King. An environmental movement existed before Rachel Carson. Computers were around before Steve Jobs. They were the game changers, the ass kickers.
How did the current conservation effort become so tepid, so nice? How is it that this once vibrant cause, this movement, now looks more like a marriage between the junior league and the junior varsity?
The Deepwater Horizon blowout is one of those cathartic moments when the emotional debris we collect dissolves and we see ourselves, at least for a brief moment, in a clear light. After Pearl Harbor American isolationists could see the futility of their efforts. After 9/11 the U.S. seemed a little less secure, a little less safe. After the Deepwater Horizon, we see just how fruitless it is to blithely ignore politics and policy while rubbing noses (and purses) with those who may exploit and despoil.
Consider the oil and gas industry. The run-up in prices and industry consolidation have given rise to an industrial oligarchy. Remember that our country’s greatest conservation president, Theodore Roosevelt, broke up Standard Oil to protect the public from this over-reaching industry over a century ago. We didn’t heed his lesson.
What does this have to do with conservation and the movement? The BP fiasco in the Gulf highlights the environmental costs of being asleep at the switch. Where were the hellcats and scolds before the gusher irrupted into Gulf waters? Didn’t anyone notice the reference to “walrus” in the oil companies’ Gulf of Mexico oil spill plans? Shouldn’t that have tipped someone off that these identical plans were fiction? How could the US Fish and Wildlife Service, charged with protecting endangered species, sign off on the MMS risk assessment? According to the NY Times, Deborah Fuller, the endangered species program coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s office in Lafayette, La., admitted that her office did not challenge the minerals service’s assessment of the risk. “We all know an oil spill is catastrophic, but what is the likelihood it will happen?” Ms. Fuller asked. She said her office had considered that any likelihood under 50 percent would not be enough to require the protections of her office.
Oops.
What is also important to recognize is the long reach of oil money and influence. Whether in politics or in the environmental movement, this industry is invested. While the political world has always been on the dole (see a complete list here), this has not always been the case with environmental organizations. Exxon gives to The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Louisiana while funding global warming deniers. ConocoPhillips helps Audubon throughout the nation (just Google ConocoPhillips Audubon), and yet a University of Massachusetts study ranked it the third worst corporate air polluter in the nation.
Here is an example of the political impact of these oil industry investments. According to the Political Wire, even though BP’s corporate code of conduct proclaimed it will make no political contributions, whether in cash or in kind, anywhere in the world, the Washington Post reports that BP North America “has donated at least $4.8 million in corporate contributions in the past seven years to political groups, partisan organizations and campaigns engaged in federal and state elections.” Its most generous corporate contributions — totaling about $4 million — have gone to two Republican-aligned political action groups working to defeat state ballot initiatives in California and Colorado that could have raised oil and gas industry taxes.
Environmental groups have been direct recipients of the oil largesse as well. The blowout prompted a flurry of articles describing how BP had invested in many international environmental groups such as The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International. An article in The Economist noted that the spill seems certain to prompt NGOs to review their ties to business. Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey, one of the authors of a new report, Shaping the Future: Solving Social Problems through Business Strategy, sees a “risk of heading into a vicious circle of antagonism” that he believes would be a mistake.
Stop.
McKinsey? That McKinsey and Company? Is this the same McKinsey that gave us Enron? Is this the same McKinsey that produced both John Sawhill (former CEO of The Nature Conservancy) and his underling Jeffery Skilling (incarcerated former CEO of the former Enron)? Is this the same McKinsey where Sawhill and Skilling were both energy specialists in the Houston office, and worked side-by-side for the client InterNorth (when merged with Houston Natural Gas became Enron)? Is this the same McKinsey and Company that developed Audubon’s 1995 strategic plan, the one that for all intents jettisoned the grassroots? That McKinsey? [For more information, read Robert Bryce’s Pipe Dreams.]
As his obituary in the NY Times generously pointed out, though his credentials as an environmentalist became impeccable, Mr. Sawhill’s positions were not always predictable. In 1974, for instance, he said that the environmental risks of strip-mining coal might be acceptable to meet national energy demands. That year, he said oil drilling off the New England coast, an idea that horrified fishermen, lobstermen and many environmentalists, should not be beyond consideration.
And he told a Senate committee in 1974 that higher fuel prices were not necessarily bad, especially if they encouraged oil companies to find new supplies.
Sawhill came from both the energy sector and from McKinsey. As Range magazine reported, “some of its most informed critics, in fact, suggest that since 1990 when John Sawhill brought his experience as a former McKinsey vice president into the Conservancy’s top job, the world’s richest and most powerful conservation organization has evolved into “McTNC.”” As the NY Times put it, “Mr. Sawhill pressed for more cooperation between business interests and environmental groups.” The fact that The Nature Conservancy and the oil industry developed a cozy relationship should not be surprising. If you launch billion-dollar campaigns, you need friends with deep pockets.
TNC’s admitted success has bled over to shape the entire environmental community. For example, John Flicker served closely with Sawhill at TNC, and then came to Audubon to implement the pro bono McKinsey strategic plan. The TNC model has profoundly impacted both the way environmental groups do business, and the subsequent abandoning of advocacy. After all, pointing out an industry’s deficiencies makes high-dollar campaigns difficult.
Here is an example of the TNC influence at work. Recently Houston Wilderness named a new CEO to replace retiring Rosie Zamora. Here is a quote from their press release; “Johnny’s [Cronin] credentials are second-to-none,” said Joel Deretchin, chairman of the Houston Wilderness board of directors. “Our search committee was impressed with his experience in strategic planning, donor cultivation, supervision and implementation. He has a true commitment to conservation and his experience working on the national level with the Nature Conservancy, one of the preeminent organizations in the country, is impressive.”
The new president of TNC, Mark Tercek, came from another Wall Street favorite, Goldman Sachs. As recently noted, as the head of Goldman Sachs’ Center for Environmental Markets, created in 2005, Tercek has overseen the company’s effort to match environmentally friendly policies with profitable business practices. The center also works with think tanks and academic institutions to develop ways to link environmental conservation with business.
Linking conservation with business. Donor cultivation. Call me atavistic, but t I wouldn’t call “donor cultivation” evidence of a “true commitment” to conservation. I doubt that John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Rachel Carson, or Rosalie Edge would either. Perhaps Cronin and Tercek know the environmental business, but that is different from knowing the environment.
Albert Camus wrote that “by definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.” To influence policy in a democracy, one must embrace politics. The environmental movement has abdicated this responsibility, and the BP disaster has revealed just now politically impotent the movement has become.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “he who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.” The environment, lacking its own voice, must have those of advocates to protect it (or, as Edward Abbey said, “the idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”) The movement (or at least a segment) must labor at the nexus of the public and policy. The Deepwater Horizon offers a chance to return to the policy advocacy of the past, and to reengage with the public (you know, those who we once called neighbors).
As this recent Gallup survey dramatically illustrates, active public support for the movement has eroded this past decade. What makes this particularly surprising is that this decade has purportedly been the dawning of a “green age.” Without advocacy, without governmental policy standing between corporate greed and a vulnerable public, this green age is little more than a marketing ploy.
TNC’s Mark Tercek, responding to the Washington Post article, said that “anyone serious about doing conservation in this region must engage these companies, so they are not just part of the problem but so they can be part of the effort to restore this incredible ecosystem.” Actually, anyone serious about “doing conservation” in the Gulf should begin with engaging the public’s help in forcing policy changes that will insure that such a fiasco does not happen again. In a recent paper, Zaradic et. al concluded that “ultimately, the fate of biodiversity and intact ecosystems may depend less on rates of habitat loss or invasive species, than on public perception of whether conservation should be supported at all.” Those who have devoted much of their lives to this cause must force a return to a balanced approach, one that recognizes that engaging business is not the same as engaging the public and that high-dollar campaigns do not replace progressive public policy.
Modern political practice is to never pay for today what can be delayed until future elections and generations. Want proof? Governor Ed Rendell, working with the Pennsylvania legislature, has crippled one of the most progressive conservation agencies in the nation – the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. As the PA Environmental Digest reports, “the budget just adopted for FY 2010-11 means a total of $1.3 billion has been diverted or cut from environmental programs to help balance the state budget or to fund programs that could not get funding on their own over the last eight years.” Rendell has opened state lands to gas development (Marcellus Shale), yet has diverted the lease revenues that might have mitigated for this new development to the general fund. State parks are threatened with closure, critical environmental protections are underfunded, and yet, at least from my vantage point, there is no general outrage on the part of the public.
Why?
Simple. Conservation has forgotten its constituency, and lost its audience. Organizations have become so enamored with anything big (business, government, foundations, campaigns, galas) that they failed to stay in touch with those who matter the most – the people. The opposition has made no such mistake, and the results (as seen in the Gallup survey) are stark. Those who have devoted their lives to conservation should use the Deepwater Horizon incident to review the movement’s successes and failures. No failures are more obvious than the movement’s disengagement from the public, and the antipathy that has arisen in the movement for advocacy. Without progressive public policy, and the public sentiment necessary for such policies to succeed, conservation’s future is up for grabs.
Ted Lee Eubanks
5 July 2010
Excellent post. Should be required reading for anyone who thinks they’re a conservationist or environmentalist.
Ted: Everything you say here is true. Sadly, I think that if anything, it needs to be stated more strongly; the enviro groups have not only made themselves irrelevant, but also continue to behave embarrasingly and ineffectively even as the oil disaster continues unabated. Just this morning Audubon’s Paul Kemp was quoted in a news story as saying that the oil disaster was akin to “sunburn.” I understand his point that longer-term problems have eaten away at the Gulf ecosystem and coastline, but we are simply in denial if we don’t think the effects of the continued unleashing of billions of gallons of oil into the water won’t be catastrophic. This is not sunburn, it’s death, pure and simple.
Likewise, I continue to be stunned by statements by Audubon folks and others that the actual death toll of birds and other wildlife “seems” to be small (I read in one story that only 1200 or so dead birds have been counted). When we have people like Carl Safina and others (and YouTube video to support it) saying that the oil on the water is pretty much chock-a-block as far as the eye can see — and that’s only ON the water — then how in heaven’s name do we think all those pelicans and gannets and terns et al. are going avoid oil-slicked waters, or find food to eat without diving into oil-slicked waters, or not end up eating oil-and-toxic-soaked organisms. And that is also willful ignorance that we are talking about an entire ecosystem that includes underwater organisms and habitats — of which birds (and turtles and dolphins) are only a small part. Birders always talk about the fact that many migratory birds probably don’t make the journey alive (under normal circumstances), but of course we probably don’t see 99% of them because they die undetected. What makes us think the same wouldn’t be true in this case?
Yet NAS has the gaul to advertise “The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History” as a banner on their web page — as a means of garnering votes for corporate dollars!! Something is seriously wrong. I’m fast becoming ashamed to have been associated with that organization.
And what about the entire fishing and tourism industries that have been shut down? What does it mean that most of the waters have been closed to shrimping? It means that there are either no living shrimp, or no edible shrimp. And with that have evaporated the livelihoods of thousands of people. Period. The end.
Yet the corporate/government cosiness continues unchanged. The most fundamental manifestation of this is a refusal to hold Obama accountable. He is no less accountable than his predecessors, and the fact that his administration has continued to grant deepwater drilling permits even after the catastrophe should be proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has no more interest in you and me and the grassroots than any other government or corporate fatcat. Has Obama been serious about mobilizing every possible resource available to stop the oil from gushing? Hardly. We are talking about a patient bleeding out here, and he has stood by and given us tepid assurances and a $20M token while ceding all authority to BP. He could have created an instant stimulus plan and put every company and every worker on notice that they would work 24/7 until a solution was found — like, dare I say, a domestic war effort. But nothing of the kind has transpired.
I have said this nearly from Day One: The only thing the environmental groups should be doing is mobilizing a massive march on Washington to get environmental regulations put back in place, stop risky deepwater drilling and other high-risk forms of environmental destruction (let’s put gas “fracking” and mountaintop “removal” right up there on the list). I was at Audubon for 20 years while people talked about “letting the markets” regulate and a happy end to “command and control” — in other words, regulation with enforcement. Yeah, right. Is the death of one of the earth’s major bodies of water not enough? Let them now prove their worth and relevance by putting command and control firmly in place.
With appreciation for all you do, Ted, and apologies for taking up so much air space….
–Fred–
Fred Baumgarten
Sharon, CT
Wow, Ted,
Thank you so much for putting the time, effort and research to put such a well formed treatise on this matter together. Being on the front lines here in the gulf, I have been appalled at the jockeying for national attention and image by some of the large NGOs that we have come to associate with conservation and their seeming lack of action proportionate to their position on the national stage and their access to funds and organizational infrastructure . As a representative myself for a national organization, my hands are somewhat tied to speak freely, and I know that the unified command machine has not made it easy to have a real impact in this situation, but I think that the potential to do good has not even been approached by many of the groups that are working here in the gulf, and I think that this often has to do with cultivated relationships with industry and politics. I have no evidence of that, but can’t think of any other reason that more is not being done here to speak out on behalf of the ecosystems and wildlife in peril here.
As the Gulf Conservation Coordinator for the American Birding Association I have had an interesting charge to report on the effects of the spill on birds and bird habitat. Unfortunately, with the lack of transparency and lack of adequate effort it has often transformed my job into investigative journalist and watchdog, which was never the intention. One of the things that I’m most proud about the ABA is has been their pledge of transparency and to give 95 cents out of every dollar donated to groups doing bird work here in the Gulf, which will shortly mean that I may no longer have a job, but that’s ok. Though our fund is not huge, as it reflects our somewhat smaller audience, I am proud to see it in action here in the Gulf. I think that fiscal transparency would do a lot to instill confidence in what our representative conservation organizations are doing, here in the Gulf and for conservation in general.
Thank you again for such a well written and important piece.
I think Ted’s historical perspectives and his perspectives on the current are accurate, but it still leaves me shallow on critisizing what the conservation movement should be doing, and the alliances they should or shouldn’t be forging. People like Roosevelt, King and Carson dealt with significant, but more contained and tangible issues.
In a fundamental way, conservation is an uphill battle exacerbated by two fundamental issues: our intrinsic population growth rates and the increasing shift of more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer entities, many of them larger and larger and impersonal corporations with the underlying goals of further increasing their wealth.
The population issue was addressed and lost in the 1970’s when zero-population-growth lost steam. The problem there is global and multi-culltural. While the interests of money have always maintained influence, the last 20 years have seen policies enacted within our government that have shifted and are shifting a larger and larger proportion of wealth to a very elite minority. Our political system is just a puppet to it, but public outcry and demand could easily compromise their own benefits. And corporations are also multinational, or have multinational options. Dealing with it has issues of biting the hand that feeds you.
The scopes of the problems make them difficult. Just coping leaves denial or avoidance as the fundamental strategy for the average person.
Nonetheless, I also don’t believe that the real scope and seriousness of the BP crisis is being trasnmitted to the public, and is grossly underplayed. I am not sure why. Effective sellouts by leading conservations groups aluded to by Ted seem plausible, but it is probably more complex.
Increased regulation is clearly needed, but public interests have been out-maneuvered by wealth and lobby for some time. Look at how our currently developing regulations addressing the recent financial crisis are coming out. Lobbyists increase complexity of the laws regulating their corporate interests, difusing effective implementation. With increased wealth in fewer hands, the public has to become outraged at the entities that support much of their livlihood. Can that happen. Besides having the knowledge, lobbyists, and resources to deceive and confuse, corporate lobbying may be viewed the favored “most-self-serving” option for the corporate worker. Even tax laws will functionally place things like the $20B (claimed extortion) BP is “volunterring” for compensation into tax writeoffs, which means that taxpayers are relaly paying a large portion of the bill.
We’re screwed, needing impossible innovations.
Joe Grzybowski Norman, OK
Ted, Wow! What a well written, thoughtful post. Lots of work in it. MUST reading!
Your “broadside” is provocative, as it was intended to be, and I have points of agreement and disagreement.
There are many facets to the funding issue. Who should take money from whom? Are there strings attached and what is the impact of accepting the money? National organizations that accept corporate money are easy targets, yet the conservation community includes a wide array of organizations of different types and flavors. We need them all. I am grateful that there are organizations like The Nature Conservancy and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation that are able to take money that would not be given to other conservation organizations with stronger advocacy agendas, and they can turn that money into useful habitat and bird conservation projects on the ground.
You mention Audubon and ConocoPhillips, which typically donates a few 10s of thousands of dollars to Audubon, which has an annual budget of many 10s of millions of dollars. Having been executive director of Audubon’s Alaska State Office for 10 years, I will share my experience. For a decade now, the area around Teshekpuk Lake in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA) has been an Audubon priority. It is an Important Bird Area and has been coveted by the petroleum industry, including—most prominently—ConocoPhillips. Several million acres of NPRA are under lease already, but not the critical goose molting habitats north and east of Teshekpuk Lake. Notwithstanding any corporate contributions from ConocoPhillips, Audubon—yes, the National Audubon Society—was the lead plaintiff on a successful lawsuit that stopped a Teshekpuk Lake 2006 lease sale in its tracks, only days before bids were to be opened. At the time we brought suit, John Flicker wrote a letter to the CEO of ConocoPhillips explaining why Audubon felt compelled to sue. Later, in a series of meetings initially set up by colleagues at The Nature Conservancy, I met privately with the President of ConocoPhillips Alaska and explained that we would continue to shine a national spotlight on Teshekpuk Lake and that if the oil and gas industry persisted in its efforts to open the goose molting grounds to leasing, we would sue them every step of the way. Two years later, after a lot more hard work by Audubon, The Wilderness Society, and other groups, the Bush Administration announced that it was deferring any possibility of new leasing at Teshekpuk Lake for at least 10 years, giving the conservation community time to work for permanent protection. And just yesterday, thanks to more, mostly behind-the-scenes work by Audubon, the Obama Administration announced that it was moving ahead with a new lease sale in NPRA but that none of the tracts to be offered for lease were near the critical avian and caribou habitats around Teshekpuk Lake.
The danger with broadsides is that they are broad, but my own experience at Audubon does not bear out the suggestion that contributions from ConocoPhillips have resulted in the abdication of advocacy by Audubon.
I will close by saying that influencing policy in this country today is a whole lot more complicated now than it was in the late 1960s and early 70s when I joined mass protests over the war in Vietnam and in the late 1970s when I spent weeks on end sleeping on sofas in Washington, DC while I lobbied for passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. No doubt some of the complexity of influencing policy today is due to the influence of corporate money, especially on Congress, but if the answer was as simple as urging people to rise up and once again take to the streets—and we could lure them away from their computers and big screen televisions long enough to do it—I would help lead that march. Thanks, Ted, for providing this forum and a great topic.