It can no longer be denied:
The national environmental movement has stalled.
It
became glaringly obvious as the movement campaigned against George
W. Bush for three years with no noticeable influence on his
re-election. It’s proven more subtly by the fact that
Congress has passed almost no significant environmental laws since
1980, and by now, whoever happens to be president can jerk around
the priorities of key agencies like the Forest Service and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service.
The environmental
movement’s halt is important in the West, because this is the
movement that set aside all the federal land that distinguishes the
region, and it defends the bedrock laws that preserve the qualities
of the land, wildlife, water and air.
Bush and the
increased Republican majority in Congress are likely to continue
rolling back the laws and regulations, to enable more oil and gas
drilling, coal-fired power plant construction and other industries
that have negative impacts on the environment. So it threatens to
become a full rout for the environmental movement.
It’s ironic. There is still widespread public support for
protecting the land, air and water necessary for life, but the
national groups have trouble tapping into it. For decades,
they’ve built their staffs and budgets, but as they’ve
grown large, they’ve become a bureaucracy, or enough like a
bureaucracy that they’re perceived as one — a movement
of clerks filing the paperwork of appeals and lawsuits and official
comments, insisting on procedure and technicalities.
The
movement has lost the excitement it had during its peak years, in
the early 1900s when it invented federal public land, and in the
1960s and ‘70s, when it passed the laws that began protecting
many aspects of the environment. It’s easy now for opponents
to portray the environmentalist bureaucracy as an inhuman special
interest.
To become effective once again, the
environmental movement needs to demonstrate that it’s not a
bureaucracy. I think the movement can do that, by getting into
motion, organizing a Green March on Washington, D.C.
At
the peak of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. drew
250,000 people to the Washington Mall in 1963; today the Sierra
Club alone has 700,000 members. The environmental movement should
be able to rally a half-million people to the Washington mall,
possibly even a round million.
It would be a showing of
all the different kinds of people who support the goals, many of
whom don’t identify themselves by the stodgy and bureaucratic
term “environmentalists”. This protest march could include Wyoming
ranchers who don’t want their land ruined by coalbed methane
drilling; residents of Libby, Mont., who are dying of asbestos
fibers in their lungs because mining and health regulations were
ignored; scientists whose research on global warming and endangered
species is being squelched by the Bush administration; American
Indians and commercial fishermen who want to save salmon runs;
hunters and anglers who want habitat in roadless forests kept
roadless; recreation businesspeople and real estate agents who rely
on healthy rivers and scenic views to attract customers.
They could link up with people from West Virginia who want no more
of their mountaintops lopped off for coal mining, and people from
Florida who want the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge saved from oil
drilling. From cities across the country, there could be a large
contingent of “asthma moms,” whose kids are caught in the growing
epidemic of lung ailments caused by tiny particulates in emissions
from SUVs and power plants.
This wouldn’t be
another touchy-feely Earth Day march; it would be more insistent
and grounded in real crises. The national news organizations would
devote coverage to it, because it would be right under their noses.
If the Green March came together in a big way, it would
be inspiring, strengthening the identity of the movement and
widening its outreach. It would shore up the Democrats and moderate
Republicans in Congress, encouraging them to resist the Bush moves.
It would make it tougher for Bush to act under the radar screen.
Grassroots groups around the West could point to the crowd and say,
“We’re part of the whole.” It would flesh out the movement
with hundreds of thousands of faces and many diverse stories of
personal commitment.
Most of all, it would test whether
there really is an environmental movement. Will most groups’
members remain content to mail in comments and dues, or, will they
march?
Ray Ring is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He is editor in the field for High Country News in
Bozeman, Montana.
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