[R-G] How the Pew Charitable Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy
How the Pew Charitable Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental 
Movement
http://www.counterpunch.org/pace10092004.html
By FELICE PACE

Across the American West, efforts to designate new federal wilderness 
are gaining ground. From New Mexico to Washington State and California 
to Colorado, western members of Congress have introducing wilderness 
bills. New wilderness has already been designated in California, Nevada 
and Colorado and more bills could pass before the 108th Congress ends.

Each of these wilderness efforts is presented and reported as an 
independent action promoted by grassroots groups; no connection between 
the various efforts has been acknowledged. The typical westerner is 
likely to conclude that there is a diverse, grassroots-led movement for 
wilderness emerging spontaneously from westerner's intense love of their 
special places.

While the proliferating campaigns do involve grassroots groups, in every 
instance of which I am aware the campaign is in reality implementation 
of a wilderness strategy formulated by a small group of professional 
environmentalists working for the Pew Charitable Trust--a very large 
foundation headquartered in Philadelphia. Pew professionals advise each 
campaign, helping develop campaign plans that are then funded by the 
foundation. The unwritten rule is that if you want funding you must 
adopt the Pew approach. Pew favors concentrating on "low hanging fruit," 
that is, wilderness areas which local congressmen and senators are eager 
to support because they are not controversial.

Pew appears to have taken pains to obscure its connection to the new 
round of wilderness bills. This was not always the case. In April 2001 
the Pew Wilderness Center launched with nation-wide TV spots proclaiming 
a nine-year campaign to protect additional federal wilderness. But today 
a web search can not locate the Pew Wilderness Center, nor is it 
mentioned on the Trust's web site. Deeper investigation reveals that the 
Center has reorganized as the Campaign for American Wilderness which 
employs the same Pew professionals and promotes the same "low-hanging 
fruit" strategy. Nowhere is the Pew connection acknowledged.

There is little opposition to Pew's dominance; most members of western 
wilderness campaigns are not aware that strategy and tactics are 
controlled by Pew. Even Oregon Natural Resources Council, which once 
challenged the political wisdom of the eastern environmental 
establishment and thereby created (with help from other grassroots 
groups) the Ancient Forest Movement, has become meekly subservient to 
Pew's views on how to save western wilderness. Consequently, Oregon's 
Democratic Senator, Ron Wyden, is proclaimed an environmental hero for 
sponsoring additions to the Mt. Hood-Columbia Gorge Wilderness Areas and 
avoids pressure to stand up for the largest complexes of roadless lands 
in the region--the Greater Kalmiopsis and the Klamath's vast roadless 
areas. Similarly, Washington's Senator Murray, a Democrat, has a bill to 
designate 106,000 acres of wilderness near Seattle. Three million acres 
in Washington State are eligible for wilderness designation.

Perversion of the term "grassroots" by the Pew Trust and others, 
however, has deeper implications than what sort of wilderness bills are 
passed and which excluded lands become sacrifice zones. The 
environmental movement has become closely identified with the Democratic 
Party and this identification is turning what was once a movement into a 
narrowly partisan interest group. Pew's wilderness strategy allows 
mainly western Democrats to claim they are wilderness champions without 
taking substantial political risks.

Pew's control of wilderness policy has another down side. In the 1970s 
and 1980s a vibrant, truly grassroots public land protection movement 
emerged--first in the West and then nation-wide. During the 1990s Pew, 
with support from other foundations, moved decisively to control this 
movement. In the new century Pew has taken steps to obscure its 
pervasive influence. There are still truly grassroots groups operating 
in the public land arena but they lack funds to get their message out. 
Many smaller foundations, which once supported a spectrum of grassroots 
groups, have follow Pew's lead toward funding centralized--and therefore 
more easily controlled--campaigns.

In the short-run Pew's strategy will garner additional success as more 
modest wilderness bills pass into law. The price for these victories may 
include development of larger, more ecologically important natural 
areas. But more is at stake. Movements are by their very nature not 
controlled or controllable, that is, they are by definition grassroots. 
Because distinctions between grassroots and hierarchical and between 
movement and interest group have been blurred, however, silent control 
by those with will and money becomes possible while diversity and 
democracy suffer. Science teaches that, in the natural world, diversity 
creates resilience and resilience is a key to survival. If this law also 
applies to human society, public land conservation's journey from 
diverse grassroots movement to narrow, centralized interest group may 
involve greater risk than we can conceive today.

The PEW-inspired wilderness strategy and its implication for the Public 
Land Conservation Movement merit thoughtful examination by rank and file 
public land activists. That examination has not, at this point, occurred.

Felice Pace, former Conservation Director of the Klamath Forest Alliance 
and a grassroots leader in the Ancient Forest Campaign, served on the 
steering committee of the California Wild Heritage Campaign until he was 
voted off the group as a result of disputes over strategy and the 
decision making process. He can be reached at: felice at jeffnet.org



-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
Coordinator, http://oilsandstruth.org
--
moderated radical news & discussion list:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green

In the contradiction lies the hope.
    --Bertholt Brecht.