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."