Scorecard on Environmental Groups

This scorecard compares the problems attacked by the world's major environmental groups with the problems identified as most serious by the United Nations Environmental Programme, as described in its 2002 State of the Earth Report.

Problem	Listed by UNEP	Greenpeace [1,2]	Friends of the Earth [3]	Sierra Club [4]	Natural Resources Defense Council [5]	Public Citizen [6] See Note A
Land Degradation
Deforestation		Against logging and clearing for palm farms or soy farms.	Against	Has lobbied to protect wilderness areas.	Favors protecting scenic locations
Loss of Biodiversity		Protected whales and fur seals.		Has lobbied against many new dams and favored removal of existing ones.	Favors protecting wildlife
Fresh-Water Deficiency and Pollution				Against pollution and wetland reduction.
Marine Health		Protested oil spills. Against pollution.		Has complained about oil spills.	Favors reducing pollution and over-fishing
Atmospheric Pollution		Against global warming.	Against pollution and global warming.	Actively litigates against coal-burning power plants and coal mines.	Against coal. Favors biofuels, efficiency, and carbon sequestration to slow global warming
Atomic-Bomb Testing		Historically, has protested against atomic-bomb tests.
Nuclear Safety		Opposes nuclear plants.	Opposes nuclear plants.	Opposes nuclear plants.	Opposes nuclear plants.	Opposes nuclear plants.
Nuclear Waste		Opposes isolating nuclear waste.			Opposes isolating nuclear waste.	Opposes treating and isolating nuclear waste.
Toxic Chemicals		Against			Against locating repositories for hazardous wastes near places with minority residents.	Historically, opposed the insecticides DDT and DBCP.
Genetic Engineering		Against	Should be national decision.
Corporations, Corporate Subsidies, and Globalization			Against

[Note A] Public Citizen doesn't claim to be an environmental organization but opposes nuclear energy on environmental grounds. It also opposes the reprocessing of spent fuel to allow the recycling of the uranium and the transuranic actinides. Further, it opposes the permanent isolation of the residual radioactive wastes.

United Nations Environmental Programme Information

All of the following information comes from the UNEP 2002 State of the Earth Report. In some cases the text is the same or a near paraphrase.

Land Degradation

According to UNEP, the following amounts of land have been degraded and rendered less productive, in millions of hectares:

This is an area 29 times the size of France or about 15% of Earth's land mass.

Deforestation

World-wide, forests are shrinking 0.24% per year. But tropical forests are shrinking almost 1% per year. At this rate, when a young child of today grows up and becomes a parent tropical forests will only be three-fourths of what they are now.

Loss of Biodiversity

Presently, 24% of mammals and 12% of birds are threatened with extinction. At the current rate of extinction, over 15% of vertebrate animals could be extinct within a century.

Loss of habitat is the most important factor, but nitrogen deposition, oil spills, and invasive species are other factors.

Fresh-Water Deficiency and Pollution

Although some gains have been made, 1.1 billion people (one sixth of the world's population) still lack access to safe drinking water.

About half of the world's wetlands disappeared during the 20th Century due to human activity.

Marine Health

Sewage discharge continues to be the main source of pollution in ocean waters. Another pollution source is nitrogen, as runoff from fertilized fields or dissolved nitrogen from the exhausts of fossil-fueled powerplants and motor vehicles. The nitrogen leads to eutrophication and the asphyxiation of sea life. Over-fishing continues to threaten commercial species, and sedimentation and invasive species are additional threats.

Atmospheric Pollution

The burning of fossil fuels and biomass is the most significant source of air pollutants such as SO , CO, certain nitrous oxides, particulates, volatile organic compounds and some heavy metals.

It has been estimated that in developing countries the excess mortality due to outdoor levels of particulates and SO amounts to about 500,000 people annually.

Acid precipitation has been one of the most important environmental concerns over the past decades especially in Europe and North America, and more recently also in China. Significant damage to forests in Europe became a high priority environmental issue around 1980, while thousands of lakes in Scandinavia lost fish populations due to acidification from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Acid deposition is one of the causes of acidification of soil and water that results in declining fish stocks, decreasing diversity in acid-sensitive lakes and degradation of forest and soil. Excessive nitrogen (as nitrate and/or ammonium) promotes eutrophication, particularly in coastal areas. Acid rain damages ecosystems, provokes defoliation, corrosion of monuments and historic buildings and reduces agricultural yields.

Carbon-dioxide concentration is more than 30% higher than it was before the industrial revolution and has already induced climate change, which will increase as the concentration rises. The additional stress of climate change will interact in different ways across regions. It can be expected to reduce the ability of some environmental systems to provide, on a sustained basis, key goods and services needed for successful economic and social development, including adequate food, clean air and water, energy, safe shelter and low levels of diseases.

Other Subjects

UNEP did not list any of the following subjects as environmental concerns:

Atomic-Bomb Testing

This topic is out of date now because no atmospheric testing of bombs is being done and, appropriately, none of the organizations is actively opposing it.

Nuclear Safety

Nuclear Waste

Toxic Chemicals

Genetic Engineering

Corporations, Corporate Subsidies, and Globalization

Scorecard Results

The scorecard shows that the major environmental organizations have focussed on causes that UNEP doesn't consider important, and have given short shrift to subjects that affect the health of natural systems. Why those organizations have chosen concerns different from those identified by UNEP can best be explained by the people who know the most about them.

Dr. Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace in 1975 and was President from 1977 to 1979. He left it in 1985, which he explains in a short article he wrote in 2005. He has this to say about the environmental movement:

"Environmentalism has become anti-globalization and anti-industry. Activists have abandoned science in favor of sensationalism."

Friends of the Earth's website describes its failures differently:

"FoE member organizations suffer in varying degrees from insufficient infrastructure, lack of staff, and crippling workloads. When groups become overwhelmed by national problems, international communication may falter. Differing analyses and strategies can result in divisive or deadlocked discussions, and necessary bureaucratic business can consume valuable time during international meetings. The lack of clear progress in many campaign areas, and the simultaneous proliferation of environmental damage and social misery can dishearten and demotivate activists." [Excerpted from FoEI's 25th anniversary publication: 25 years for the planet, for people, 1996.]

Amos Eno is a career environmentalist, having spent 35 years in government and non-governmental organizations to defend the environment, including three years at the National Audubon Society. He says,

"Audubon went from one of the preeminent conservation organizations under the competent, politically and fiscally shrewd leadership of Elvis Stahr to a successive pair of environmental demagogues who succeeded in torpedoing the finest nature magazine in America (AUDUBON), shrinking one of the healthiest philanthropic endowments to a pittance, and committing repeated acts of managerial and political seppuku. Most importantly, the successors undermined Audubon’s brand and leadership position by giving its traditional program focus--birds, wildlife and natural resource conservation--short shrift, as they expanded Audubon’s focus to attacking nuclear power, advocating agricultural reform, population control, and pollution control. By this time it was clear that the environmental movement was fracturing into many niche markets with Darwinian precision. This proliferation of niche markets were defined by subject (American Rivers), species (Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Ducks or Quail or Turkey Unlimited), or geographic region (Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Yellowstone Coalition). Having a well defined niche became the key to success of many environmental NGOs competing for money and attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Meanwhile the big shots such as Audubon foundered."

Writing in the early 1990's, journalist Mark Dowie blamed it on money. The national organizations hired lobbyists and fundraising consultants, and to pay for them adjusted their priorities from genuine environmental concerns to popular causes: photogenic mammals and wilderness instead of toxic chemicals and air pollution. In the years of the Reagan presidency, membership and donations rose dramatically because of the administration's openly anti-environmental policies. The lobbyists promoted accommodation over confrontation as a strategy. When the donors lost interest, the organizations were left with neither income nor credibility.[7]

Different though these viewpoints are, they describe the same reasons for the failure of environmental organizations to contribute meaningfully to solving the world's environmental problems. In the early years of the movement, pressure from citizen-based groups encouraged elected officials to control agricultural poisons and to restrict mercury and lead. Air and water in advanced-world cities were improved to an extraordinary degree. Important wilderness areas were protected as wildlife habitat. But, by turning their attention toward side-issues, the major organizations diverted their energies away from serious but unpleasant problems. Most of the world's environment continues to deteriorate.

While the environmental organizations are failing, many people study the environment to gain understanding of natural systems and how they best can be protected. That's the kind of environmentalism that serves the world's interests. Will the real environmentalists please rise!

REFERENCES

[1] Weyler, Rex. Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Rodale, 2004.

[2] Greenpeace Website

[3] Friends of the Earth Website

[4] Sierra Club Website

[5]NRDC Website

[6] Public Citizen Website

[7] Dowie, Mark. Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.