Page 152 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: GYG/IJD/IBA/IJD
August 14, 2002
CY101-Bimber
0 521 80067 6
CY101-04
Environmental Advocacy 18:0
with more congenial occupants in the White House. Many organizations
felt frustrated by the national policy process because their capacity to
oppose antienvironmental policy was not matched by an equal capacity
58
to obtain new proenvironment policy. At the same time, some groups
found that new state-level institutions – some adapted from the federal
level – were increasingly responsive and well situated to make environ-
mental policy. The result was what Barry Rabe calls a “decentralization
mantra” among some organizations during the 1990s to reorganize and
attend to policy at the state, rather than national, level.
The other contributor to evolving tension within environmental
groups over whether to align themselves nationally or subnationally
has been a membership issue. The groups originally most successful
in attracting large memberships were organizations with a national
focus and wide name recognition. Yet by the 1990s, many of these
organizations found that citizens were animated and motivated most by
local or regional environmental issues with which they could identify
closely. Also, with national institutions in the hands of Democrats by the
mid-1990s and the threats of the Reagan years gone, many groups found
it hard to sustain national membership growth. The rapid membership
expansions of the 1970s and 1980s for most national groups leveled off by
59
the 1990s. Some groups stagnated, while some actually lost substantial
numbers of members between 1990 and 1995, including the Sierra Club
(down 60,000 members), the National Audubon Society (down 30,000),
60
andtheWildernessSociety(down40,000). Byoneestimate,totalmem-
bership in the ten largest groups declined 6 percent in just three years,
from 1990 to 1993. 61 Operating budgets of some groups also shrank
commensurately.
The ideological tension among groups is somewhat different but
equally important organizationally. A small conservative cluster of envi-
ronmental organizations, including the so-called Wise-Use groups, has
long existed, but for the most part the tension is between moderate,
mainstream groups, such as the Audubon Society, and more aggressive
and sometimes extreme groups, such as Greenpeace and Earth First,

58 ChristopherJ.Bosso,“SeizingBacktheDay:TheChallengetoEnvironmentalActivism
in the 1990s,” in Vig and Kraft, eds., Environmental Policy in the 1990s,pp.53–74.
59
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
60
Membership figures from Bosso, “Seizing Back the Day.”
61
Ronald G. Shaiko, Voices and Echoes for the Environment: Public Interest Representation
in the 1990s and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
135