By Peter Montague
The environmental movement is treading water and slowly drowning. There is abundant evidence that our efforts — and they have been formidable, even heroic — have largely failed. After 30 years of exceedingly hard work and tremendous sacrifice, we have failed to stem the tide of environmental deterioration.
Make no mistake: our efforts have had a beneficial effect. Things would be much worse today if our work of the past 30 years had never occurred.
However, the question is, Have our efforts been adequate? Have we succeeded? Have we even come close to stemming the tide of destruction? Has our vision been commensurate with the scale and scope of the problems we set out to solve? To those questions, if we are honest with ourselves, we must answer No.
What, then, are we to do? This article is intended to provoke thought and debate, and certainly is not offered as the last word on anything.
Openness
Open, democratic decision-making will be an essential component of any successful strategy.
After the Berlin wall fell, we got a glimpse of what had happened to the environment and the people under the Soviet dictatorship. The Soviets had some of the world's strictest environmental laws on the books, but without the ability for citizens to participate in decisions, or blow the whistle on egregious violations, those laws meant nothing.
For the same reason that science cannot find reliable answers without open peer review, bureaucracies (whether public or private) cannot achieve beneficial results without active citizen participation in decisions and strong protection for whistle-blowers. Errors remain uncorrected, narrow perspectives and selfish motives are rewarded, and the general welfare will not usually be promoted.
The fundamental importance of democratic decision-making means that our strategies must not focus on legislative battles. Clearly, we must contend for the full power of government to be harnessed toward achieving our goals, but this is quite different from focusing our efforts on lobbying campaigns to convince legislators to do the right thing from time to time.
Lobbying can mobilise people for the short term, but mobilising is not the same as organising. During the past 30 years, the environmental movement has had some notable successes mobilising people, but few successes building long-term organisations that people can live their lives around and within (the way many families in the '30s, '40s and '50s lived their lives around and within their unions' struggles).
The focus of our strategies must be on building organisations that involve people and, in that process, finding new allies. The power to govern would naturally flow from those efforts.
This question of democracy is not trivial. It is deep. And it deeply divides the environmental movement, or rather movements.
Many members of the mainstream environmental movement tend to view ordinary people as the enemy (for example, they love to say, "We have met the enemy and he is us".).
They fundamentally don't trust people to make good decisions, so they prefer to leave ordinary people out of the equation. Instead, they scheme with lawyers and experts behind closed doors, then announce their "solution". Then they lobby Congress in hopes that Congress will impose this latest "solution" on us all.
Naturally, such people don't develop a big following, and their "solutions" — even when Congress has been willing to impose them — have often proven to be expensive, burdensome and ultimately unsuccessful.
Experts
In the modern era, open democratic decision-making is essential to survival. Only by informing people, and trusting their decisions, can we survive as a human society. Our technologies are now too complex and too powerful to be left solely in the hands of a few experts.
If they are allowed to make decisions behind closed doors, small groups of experts can make fatal errors. One thinks of the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) justifying above-ground nuclear weapons testing.
In the early 1950s, their atomic fallout was showering the population with strontium-90, a highly radioactive element that masquerades as calcium when it is taken into the body. Once in the body, strontium-90 moves into the bones, where it irradiates the bone marrow, causing cancer.
The AEC's best and brightest studied this problem in detail and argued in secret memos that the only way strontium-90 could get into humans would be through cattle grazing on contaminated grass. They calculated the strontium-90 intake of the cows, and the amount that would end up in the cows' bones.
On that basis, the AEC reported to Congress in 1953, "The only potential hazard to human beings would be the ingestion of bone splinters which might be intermingled with muscle tissue in butchering and cutting of the meat. An insignificant amount would enter the body in this fashion." Thus, they concluded, strontium-90 was not endangering people.
The following year, Congress declassified many of the AEC's deliberations. As soon as these memos became public, scientists and citizens began asking, "What about the cows' milk?" The AEC scientists had no response. They had neglected to ask whether strontium-90, mimicking calcium, would contaminate cows' milk, which of course it did.
Secrecy in government and corporate decision-making continues to threaten the well-being of everyone on the planet as new technologies are deployed at an accelerating pace after inadequate consideration of their effects. Open, democratic decision-making is no longer a luxury. In the modern world, it is a necessity for human survival.
Economy
For democracy to work, the economy needs to serve democratic goals as well. It seems obvious that the overriding purpose of the economy is to serve the basic human needs of everyone. But increasingly the US economy is violating this principle.
Five per cent of the people are making out like bandits, 40% are doing well, yet the majority are increasingly excluded from the cornucopia, abandoned to fight among themselves over the crumbs. And the chasm between rich and poor is continuing to widen.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Lester Thurow has observed, "No country not experiencing a revolution or a military defeat with a subsequent occupation has probably ever had as rapid or as widespread an increase in inequality as has occurred in the United States in the past two decades".
No-one is advocating equal distribution of income and wealth. Some people want to work harder than others, and they deserve greater rewards for their efforts.
However, it is obvious that all wealth is ultimately derived from, and dependent upon, the community. Bill Gates alone did not create the wealth that is now the Microsoft Corporation. With hard work and a measure of luck, Gates cleverly combined technical details and capacities that he inherited from the larger society.
These centuries of accumulated development are the community's bequest to each of us, and they are what allows us to create wealth. Wealth is largely created by the community, not by individuals. Each member of the community, therefore, has a just claim on a fair portion of the benefits of the economy.
Citizens who cannot share in the benefits of the economy can rarely participate in democratic decision-making. Furthermore, if a large segment of society is cut off from the benefits of the economy, this breeds envy, distrust, animosity and ultimately fear and danger for everyone.
A broad distribution of wealth and of human development should be the goal of our economy because it is morally and ethically right, because it will bring the greatest good to the greatest number and because it is the only way to preserve our most important ideal — our democracy, without which we will surely lose our liberty.
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. Like Green Left Weekly, Rachel's is a non-profit publication which distributes information without charge on the internet and depends on the generosity of readers to survive. If you can help, send your contribution to Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, Maryland 21403-7036, USA. In the US, donations to ERF are tax deductible.]