Too Green For Their Own Good?

By Andrew Goldstein

Here's a riddle to keep you up at night: How come, at a time when the environmental movement is stronger and richer than ever, our most pressing ecological problems just get worse? It's as though the planet has hit a Humpty-Dumpty moment in which unprecedented amounts of manpower and money are unable to put the world back together again. "Why are we losing so many battles?" wonders Gus Speth, dean of Yale's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Of course, the issues are complicated and could require decades and trillions of dollars to resolve. But part of the problem is that it's easier to protest, to hurl venom at practices you don't like, than to find new ways to do business and create change. The dogma of traditional green activism--that business (and economic growth) is the enemy, that financial markets can't be trusted, that compromise means failure--has done little to save the planet. Which means it's fair to ask the question: Have some of the greens' tactics actually made things worse?

This is not to say there hasn't been progress since the environmental movement began. The air and water in the developed nations of the West are, by most measures, the cleanest they have been for decades, and the amount of land protected as national parks and preserves has quadrupled worldwide since 1970. But despite a record flow of financial resources (donations to U.S. environmental groups alone have risen 50% in the past five years, to more than $6.4 billion in 2001, according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel Trust for Philanthropy), the planet's most serious challenges--global warming, loss of biodiversity, marine depletion --remain as intractable as ever, making environmentalists vulnerable to charges that green groups have prospered while the earth has not.

So it's time to look at the past tactics of many green groups and identify lessons to be learned.

BUSINESS IS NOT THE ENEMY

Thanks to scandals on Wall Street, environmentalists who have been bashing "evil" corporations for years have suddenly found themselves with plenty of allies. But the planet needs profitable, innovative businesses even more than it needs environmentalists. "It is companies, not advocacy groups, that will create the technologies needed to save the environment," says Jonathan Wootliff, a former Greenpeace executive turned business consultant.

So how to turn corporations into partners in preservation? For starters, when companies make efforts to turn green, environmentalists shouldn't jump down their throats the minute they see any backsliding. Wootliff says he was exasperated to watch so many environmental groups take special aim at Ford Motor, arguably Detroit's most environmentally friendly carmaker, during the latest fight in Congress over fuel-efficiency standards (in which Ford, GM and Chrysler all fought to preserve the status quo). "For goodness' sake, stop alienating your supporters," he warns. "Going after Ford will mean fewer, not more, CEOs will turn around and say protecting the environment is the right thing to do."

When conservation purity is the only acceptable option, the biggest polluters will have no incentive to clean up their acts. Says Dwight Evans, executive vice president of Southern Co., a major U.S. energy producer: "If tomorrow we announced we were shutting down 25% of our plants to put in new, high-tech scrubbing devices, the headline would be, WHY NOT THE OTHER 75%? We don't get credit for what we've done, or for what we're going to do."

This is not to suggest that environmentalists should be spineless. The threat of boycott prompted Home Depot to promise to phase out its selling of wood from old-growth forests. The good news is that once an industry leader turns green, the rest often follow, fearful that consumers will punish them if they don't. Today every major home-improvement retailer makes an effort to sell only products certified to have come from sustainably managed forests.

EMBRACE THE MARKET

There is a simple economic explanation for why many of China's cities have become shrouded in gray clouds of dust: it's cheap to pollute. Millions of Chinese drive mopeds and old automobiles that don't have catalytic converters, and much of the nation's electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. Technology from the 1950s, after all, is at bargain-basement prices. But that's because the prices don't reflect the hidden costs of air pollution: deaths from lung illnesses and millions of dollars wasted on health-care bills and lost worker productivity. The situation is the same the world over. The price of goods and services rarely reflects environmental costs.

A concerted effort to correct this basic flaw in the market could have a bigger payoff for the environment than would a thousand new national parks. But many environmental groups continue to oppose market-based environmental reforms and instead remain wedded to the "mandate, regulate and litigate" model of the past.

Take, for example, power-plant emissions in the U.S., which environmentalists blame for much of global warming. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration was fairly close to striking a deal with the power industry that would have established a comprehensive emissions-trading program. To gain some certainty for their long-range planning, the utilities would agree to mandatory caps on emissions that included not just nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury but also carbon. Companies would have the flexibility of meeting targets in the most efficient manner by buying and selling emissions rights.

This didn't suit many of the environmental groups involved in the negotiations that believed the market was just a clever way for corporations to skirt environmental regulations. Says Katie McGinty, then chairwoman of Clinton's Council on Environmental Quality: "Practically every utility in the country began to accept the notion that they would face legally binding carbon restrictions. But environmentalists who were opposed to doing anything consensual with industry said what we really should be doing is suing their butts under the current provisions of the Clean Air Act." Result: today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no ability to regulate carbon, and the old, pollution-spewing plants are still in operation.

IT'S NOT ALL OR NOTHING

Toward the end of a war, a simple truism applies: it is better to negotiate a surrender than to fight to the death for a losing cause. Though environmentalists may be loath to admit it, this is their choice in the battle over genetically modified foods. Despite the best attempts by European activists to seal off the Continent from what they call Frankenfoods, the new science of farming is here to stay. So if environmentalists want to help shape the future of agriculture, it's time to raise the white flag and ask the world's bioengineers for a seat at the bargaining table.

What could be better for the environment than a cheap, simple way for farmers to double or triple their output while using fewer pesticides on less land? According to Rockefeller University environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, if the world's average farmer achieved the yield of the average American maize grower, the planet could feed 10 billion people on just half the crop land in use today. Of course it's possible that some genetically modified foods may carry health risks to humans (although none have so far been proved in foods that have been brought to market), and it's unclear whether agricultural companies will be able to control where their altered-gene products end up. But what's needed now are not crop tramplers and lab burners but powerful lobbyists able to negotiate for more effective safeguards and a greater humanitarian use of the technology.

Bioengineering has tremendous potential in the developing world. The U.S., Canada, China and Argentina contain 99% of the global area of genetically modified crops, whereas yields of sorghum and millet in sub-Saharan Africa have not increased since the 1960s. Green groups hoping to earn the trust of the developing world should lobby hard for the resources of Big Agriculture to be plowed into discovering crop varieties that can handle drought and thrive on small-scale farms.

NO MORE EXAGGERATIONS

A shattering piece of news came over the press wire of the Rainforest Action Network in May: "One-quarter of mammals will soon be extinct." An Associated Press story made a similar claim: "A quarter of the world's mammal species--from tigers to rhinos--could face extinction within 30 years." Problem is, the story isn't true.

The source of the number was a report issued by the United Nations Environment Program. It cites the World Conservation Union's most recent "Red List," which indicates that about 24% of mammals "are currently regarded as globally threatened." This figure comprises not only the approximately 4% of mammals that are "critically endangered" but also those that are merely "vulnerable," a category including animals with only a 10% chance of extinction within 100 years. The U.N. report makes this distinction clear--and even cautions against relying on species data from the Red List. But those caveats didn't make the news.

Fuzzy math and scare tactics might help green groups raise money, but when they, abetted by an environmentally friendly media, overplay their hand, it invites scathing critiques like that of Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, whose book The Skeptical Environmentalist debunks environmental exaggerations (see box).

Even more dangerous, notes Don Melnick, head of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University, is how doomsayers create a Chicken Little problem. "We need to bury the notion that the biological world is going to collapse and we're all going to be extinct," he says. "That's nonsense, and it can make people feel the situation is hopeless. We can't have people asking 'So why should we bother?'"