Page 154 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: GYG/IJD/IBA/IJD
August 14, 2002
0 521 80067 6
CY101-Bimber
CY101-04
Environmental Advocacy 18:0
representatives. 65 By the 1990s, coalition building had become, along
with “grassroots” mobilization efforts, one of the chief strategies of en-
vironmental organizations seeking to influence policy. 66 An increasing
tendency over time to work in coalitions is by no means limited to
environmentalorganizations,buthasalsobeenreportedgenerallyamong
interest groups. 67
The fifth characteristic, an orientation toward information as a polit-
ical resource, is intriguing and perhaps stronger among environmental
groups than any other category of interest organization. As Samuel Hays
has shown, from their origins most environmental groups have oper-
ated on an implicit premise that information must be assembled and
distributed if the goals of environmental advocacy are to be achieved. 68
This premise is a foundation of many of their activities. It is manifest in
public education campaigns, when groups attempt to inform the public
about previously unacknowledged relationships, such as between fossil
fuel use and global warming, electricity production and acid rain, or be-
tween pesticides such as DDT and a variety of complex effects through-
out the ecosystem. It is manifest in organizations’ efforts to monitor
corporations and industrial activities for pollution, release of toxins, or
compliance with rules. It is manifest further in the reports and studies
the organizations produce, and in their publicizing of voting records and
positions of public officials.
Hays calls this implicit and widespread orientation toward the flow
of information an “environmental knowledge culture.” 69 It is a conse-
quence of the revelatory history of environmentalism even prior to the
1950s, involving the discovery and making public of information that
activities generally presumed harmless by the public, such as spraying of
DDT, were in fact damaging to the environment. A fundamental theme
of environmental politics since has been revelations of this kind, in which
new information is disclosed to the public about atmospheric warming,
acid rain resulting from electricity generation hundreds of miles away,

65 See Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, Environmental Politics: Domestic and Global Dimen-
sions (New York: St. Martins, 1994).
66 Shaiko, Voices and Echoes for the Environment.
67
Kevin Hula, Lobbying Together: Interest Group Coalitions in Legislative Politics
(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999); Kay Lehman Schlozman
and John T. Tierney,Organized Interests and American Democracy (New York: Harper
and Row, 1986).
68
Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
69
Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945, p. 101.
137