Environmental Movement Beset by Woes, on Wane

With prominent groups like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society facing sharp declines in membership and revenue as well as waning political influence, the environmental movement is struggling to recapture the momentum that made it one of the strongest forces in the nation over the past quarter of a century.

Few in the movement agree on a strategy for resuscitation. As they grope for solutions, some fear that their cause may have become so much a part of the American mainstream that many people no longer believe that it merits special attention.

The outlook is gloomy despite some smaller success stories. Several regional groups who have built nationwide constituencies on behalf of specific forests or canyons continue to hold their own. And at least one innovative national organization has grown as it looks for ways to curb pollution that minimize costs and regulations.

But at a time when the movement was expected to prosper--just two years after the election of its first White House ally in more than a decade--most major organizations are groping for a vision that will replenish revenue, reunify members and inspire the public.

A deficit of several million dollars has put the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest environmental organization, in its worst financial shape in 20 years, said Carl Pope, the club’s executive director.

“We are trying to do all we can, and that will mean some cutting back, some restructuring, to avoid a crisis,” Pope said.

In Orange County, the Sierra Club’s paid membership has dropped to 8,300 members from about 10,000 three years ago, said local Chairman Diana Berry. Turnout at meetings and at campaigns such as saving Laguna Canyon remains the same, she said, but contributions are not.

“People are still around. They just are not supporting us financially as they had been. People are just as concerned as they always have been about environmental issues. It is just that they feel they have more personally pressing financial concerns.”

Officials of Greenpeace, a group that got its start in the early 1970s trying to block nuclear weapons tests, say membership is down nearly 1 million from its 1990 high of 2.5 million, and its revenues are off by a third. A 30% decline in membership during the same period has forced the Wilderness Society to close offices and lay off employees.

At the same time that many of these groups are hobbled by layoffs and reduced budgets, they are trying to rebound from a dismal performance in Washington. Up against well-organized opponents, the environmental movement has not been able to pass a single piece of major legislation in 1994.

Hostile forces in Congress have succeeded in bottling up bills that would grant Cabinet status to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, strengthen the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act and put more teeth in mining regulations.

The pain of downsizing is aggravated by fierce infighting within the movement over the cause of its problems. Fund-raisers cite the recession and the public’s preoccupation with crime and financial security.

Roger Craver, an executive of a firm that raises money for several major environmental organizations, said the movement has lost support because “it has failed to demonstrate convincingly that its goals are compatible with the economic needs of the country.”

With a friendly Administration in Washington, environmentalists are having to learn an age-old lesson of reform politics. Social movements often have more energy when they are out of power than when they are in. The environmental movement was never bigger or better funded than during the 1980s when it was on the outs, doing battle with two conservative Republican administrations.

For old hands in the movement, the turnabout in fortunes has been breathtaking.

“In all my years I have never before seen such apathy,” said Liz Frenkel, a Sierra Club official in Oregon who has been an activist with the club since 1957.

Other groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Audubon Society are hoping to compensate for declining membership by relying more heavily on foundation support, wealthy donors, celebrity performances and novel marketing schemes. This year, for instance, singer James Taylor is giving a portion of his concert receipts to the NRDC. In a joint venture with a stuffed animal manufacturer, the Audubon Society is offering free memberships to anyone who buys a teddy bear named Nature Bear.

For the past year, public opinion polls have routinely found that fewer than 5% of Americans think that the environment is one of the nation’s pressing problems.

And although most Americans still think of themselves as environmentalists, said Washington-based pollster Celinda Lake, “not so many are inclined to identify with the environmental movement.”

Reflecting on the changes in attitude, some analysts argue that the movement has become a victim of its past success.

“People have brought the environment into their lives to such an extent through recycling or buying green products, many no doubt feel they are doing their bit and don’t need to do any more,” said Jack Murray of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Many of us got into this movement fighting faceless bureaucrats . . . who were hellbent on destroying some beautiful place,” said Dennis Hayes, one of the architects of the first Earth Day 24 years ago, who now runs a foundation that gives $500,000 annually to environmental causes.

“Today, if you ask a typical American to name a bureaucrat, he’ll point to someone in some environmental agency.”

Among environmental groups, the Sierra Club may be the best example of bureaucratic heft.

With its $40-million annual budget, its Washington lobby and legal arm, its $6-million book business and $3-million worldwide eco-tourism operation, the Sierra Club looks more like a holding company than a society of nature lovers.

“Sometimes you want to ask: Will the real Sierra Club stand up?” said Priscilla Feral, an animal rights advocate who tangled with the organization earlier this year.

Feral said she felt betrayed when the club refused to join a boycott of Alaskan tourism spearheaded by her group, Friends of Animals, to protest the state’s decision to allow the trapping of wolves.

Instead of joining the boycott, the Sierra Club took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, encouraging people to travel to Alaska and learn about the wolf issue firsthand. Club officials argued that exposing people to the wilds tended to make them wilderness advocates. But Feral accused club officials of allowing business interests to dictate environmental policy.

The club’s decision also reflected the complicated task of trying to satisfy a huge membership with widely varying views. Although many members favored the boycott, the club deferred to its Anchorage chapter, which opposed the boycott because it did not want to penalize local outfitters and guides who opposed the wolf kill.

The controversy highlighted a developing rift within the movement over the impact that environmental policies have on the lives of working people--from farmers and ranchers to wilderness guides and outfitters.

James Connor, a former head of the Montana chapter of the Sierra Club, quit the organization after it endorsed one of the most sweeping wilderness bills ever proposed in Congress. The bill, unsuccessful so far, would put a 35-million-acre, five-state swath of wilderness off limits to any economic activity.

“I got involved in the environmental movement because I thought it was in the enlightened self-interest of humankind,” Connor said. “But I’m not in tune with what is going on now. Something snapped. People in the movement have lost faith in humankind. They have retreated into utopian fantasies, become 100% environmentally correct and 100% politically impotent.”

Connor argued that environmental extremism has played into the hands of political opponents who repeatedly depict groups such as the Sierra Club as enemies of working people. A broad alliance of rural landowners, suburban real estate developers and big-city industrial interests, the opposition has combined populist rhetoric with corporate contributions to repeatedly beat back environmental initiatives.

Craver, the movement’s fundraiser, agreed. “The groups have not been good at responding to the jobs-versus-nature rhetoric that you hear in so many rural areas, and it has hurt them.”

Still, not every environmental organization is suffering.

The Environmental Defense Fund, which searches for market-based solutions to environmental problems, has grown from 100,000 members in 1990 to about 250,000 today, while its budget has increased just over 20%, to $22 million, said Joel Plagenz, its director of public affairs.

The EDF helped draft provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act that reward companies that comply with clean air standards by allowing them to sell pollution “credits” to firms not meeting the requirements. The group is working on a proposal to offer financial incentives to property owners to set aside land that is home to endangered species.

Even some environmental hard-liners have made gains, particularly in places where ecological degradation has been the most conspicuous.

With 1,500 members scattered across the country and a $2-million budget, Oregon’s Native Forest Council broke ranks with the mainstream movement when it called for prohibiting all commercial logging in the Northwest’s ancient forests.

“We cut through the fog of rhetoric with a simple solution that appealed to a lot of people,” said Victor Rozek, one of two ex-Sierra Club members who founded the group.

But the hard-liners also are contributing to the rural backlash, and the voices of dispossessed loggers and ranchers are the ones being heard in Washington these days.

“The notion that rural people are under siege by a bunch of yuppies is taken quite seriously in a lot of small towns in this country,” said Andy Kerr, an early leader of the campaign to protect old-growth forests in the Northwest. “A lot of environmental groups are learning that these places have a surprising amount of political influence, but they don’t know what to do about it.”

Kerr thinks he does. Last winter, he moved his family from Portland to Joseph, Ore., a small logging town where residents blamed a recent sawmill closure on environmentalists such as Kerr.

“Until we start knocking on doors and getting involved in local issues, showing people their concerns are our concerns, we’re not going to get very far,” Kerr said.

But in Washington and in the offices of the nation’s largest environmental groups, some people are more concerned about making peace within the movement.

At the Sierra Club, officials are so concerned about internal hostilities that they have threatened to cut off computer access to members who uses electronic mail to vilify their colleagues.

“We used to wake up in the morning knowing who the enemy was and how to face him,” said Pope. “All too often lately, we seem to be treating each other like the enemy.”

Times staff writer Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this report.