Ann Corcoran: Environmental Grantmaker Association (EGA) Denis Hayes Talks About the Environmental Movement

Denis Hayes Talks
About the Environmental Movement
by Ann Corcoran, Land Rights Letter, March 1993.

Last October [1992], Denis Hayes – chief organizer of Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 1990 – spoke to a meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association on Orcas Island off Washington State. Readers of Land Rights Letter may recall that Hayes faced off with Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation in a USA Weekend readers poll in January (see Pendley page 7).

Hayes, who is president of the Seattle–based Bullit Foundation, was the kick-off speaker in a closed–to–the–public (taped) session of the Grantmakers “retreat” entitled, “Building an Environmental Majority.” Moderator Con Nugent set the tone of the session by stating, “We start with the premise... that the current use of the earth by humans is unsustainable and that damage is done through billions of microeconomic behaviors and that stopping, modifying, or transforming those behaviors at any place along the economic spectrum from raw material to the landfill, through law or through culture is what we do in this business.”

Denis Hayes began his talk by giving a brief history of the environmental movement. “The environmental movement was conceived by a joining of the traditional conservation movement... with the forces of activism in the 1960's,” he said. The movement was officially born on Earth Day 1970 which “ushered in a period of almost unparalled accomplishment for a social movement,” a period during which many of our major environmental laws were passed. “It resulted in the image, and it was a correct image, of an unstoppable political machine,” he told the audience comprised of representatives of major foundations and corporations.

For 10 years, he said, they could get just about anything they wanted. But he went on to say that all that has changed. “Anti–environmentalists” are running for political office and the major environmental groups have become “competitive in the marketplace for members” so that they no longer coordinate their lobbying efforts – each one seeking to claim victories for themselves to generate membership. “The machinery as well as the momentum of the first decade has fallen into disrepair.”

The second area in which the environmental movement has been successful according to Hayes is in the area of lawsuits. He listed for his audience several of the environmental groups that began as litigating groups and noted that some have now broadened their focus. The early lawsuits, he said, were chosen with “enormous care” and “were successful in case after case after case advancing the movement frankly much farther than I thought it could be advanced in the courts.” But, he said, “that is running into shoals now” citing the large number of Reagan/Bush appointed judges in the federal court system. He reported that environmentalist legal strategy has now shifted to state courts.

Hayes said that the third area of success for the environmental movement is in the “financial area.” “We have clout that grows out of numbers and out of dollars that are collected.” However, he predicted that that would soon come to a “rapid decline” if Clinton and Gore were elected. People would assume, he said, that the environment would be taken care of inside government. He wondered, “... if any of the large national environmental groups have really begun planning for what could be a fairly dry desert for popular fund raising.”

However, he remarked, the exception to that was in the area of land acquisition. “We are acquiring vast amounts of land and setting it aside... The Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, Conservation International all are doing extremely well.” He went on to say, “they have a stable source of funding.” Of course, he did not say that part of that stable source of funding was state and federal government coffers.

He concluded his discussion of the history of the environmental movement with the comment that “all movements ossify” and that the environmental movement has “lost much of the vitality and leadership that characterized its earliest years.” He expressed hope that it would be revitalized as a broad “majoritarian movement” rather than a “special interest pressure group.”

A broad majoritarian movement

Abroad majoritarian movement could be achieved in his opinion if the following steps were taken:

Environmentalists should be concerned with people.
“... We have had a lot of sensitivity to fish and to forests and to owls. We need to more dramatically, overtly and profoundly incorporate into what we are up to a sensitivity to the point of view of people. We have been more indifferent than we should have been about the pain some of our policies have caused. If you drive through the southwestern part of the state of Washington you will pass hundreds and hundreds of lean–to houses with crudely stenciled signs out in from of them that have painted across it, this family supported by timber dollars. We have tended to view this as a fight against Plum Creek, a fight against Weyerhauser, and the people who are being thrown out of work have received less sensitivity from us than they should have... We can't continue to do that if we are going to have the kinds of sensitivity that will allow us to build a majoritarian movement, not necessarily because it's a majority of people who are affected by these things... but because the broad middle classes that we have to reach are sensitive to those kinds of issues, and more profoundly because we as a movement have to do that because if it's the right thing to do if we are to have a moral core to us.”

Environmentalists must recapture the word “balance”.
After stating that it was a great “tactical blunder” for the anti-war movement to give up the flag by burning it, he said that environmentalists have made a great mistake by giving up the word “balance”. “Balance is the word right now that most motivates people,” he continued. “It is an area once again where the wise use movement right now is capturing some sources of support that ought to be our supporters because they are manipulating some of those symbols more ably than we are.” Ironically, in January environmentalist Senator John Chafee(R–RI) commented at confirmation hearings for EPA Administrator Carol Browner that he did not want to hear the word “balance” (See LRL Jan/Feb '93). Hayes said the word is important in order to capture the “symbolic high ground.”

He also told his audience that in order to build a majoritarian movement:

Environmentalists must focus on what is relevant to people not the “cosmic” issues that environmentalists have tended to focus on.

Environmentalists must focus on education of our children.

Environmentalists need a charismatic leader especially since ours is a culture dominated by the mass media.

Environmentalists must develop a vision of where they want to go.
He said, “We have been enormously effective at stopping things and constraining things, we have not been very effective at coming up with an ideological context that expresses our values... we don't have a vision of the kind of society we want to build...”

And finally, he made an interesting admission. He talked about how Americans value freedom:“... [M]any of the people including myself,” he said, “got into the environmental movement to fight faceless bureaucrats... who were making mindnumbingly stupid bureaucratic derisions. We and our values and our movement have begun to be increasingly thought of by many Americansas those faceless bureaucrats who are now making decisions that are trampling their freedoms.”