Environmental Leadership Program: ELP News: Summer 2001: Issues Forum on the State of the Environmental Movement

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newsletter Summer 2001

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Point of View: Don Chen
Interviews on the State of the Environmental Movement
Fellow Profiles: Chip Giller, Na'Taki Osborne
On the ELP Bookshelf
ELP Helps Launch New Leadership Collaborative
Activity Fund Updates
Retreat Highlights

Issues Forum

The State of the Environmental Movement

The dawn of the new millennium seems to bring out the futurist in many of us. In the last 18 months, we have been inundated with retrospectives, predictions for the future, and seemingly endless newspaper stories chronicling life as we know it and how it could change in the 21st century.

The environmental community has had its share of millennium fever. In new books, speeches, and newspaper series, environmental leaders have attempted to review the state of the environmental movement and spur progress with their ideas for the future.

As an organization that connects new environmental leaders from all sectors, backgrounds, expertise, and experiences, ELP aims to involve emerging leaders in this debate. In this issue of Environmental Leadership News, we share what a few ELP fellows think are the strengths and weaknesses of the environmental movement and what they identify as priority areas for the next ten to twenty years.

KAREN DEGANNES (Class of 2000) is a regulatory analyst for the California Public Utilities Commission's Energy Division in San Francisco ands a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan.

ALAN HIPOLITO (Class of 2001) is an adjunct professor at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College and Portland State University's School of Urban Studies and Planning. He is also economic development director for Hacienda Community Development Corporation and executive director of Just Growth, an unincorporated association focusing on environmental justice and smart growth.

JEFF TOMHAVE (Class of 2000) is executive director of the Tribal Association on Solid Waste and Emergency Response, a Washington, DC-based research and policy organization that documents the human health effects of hazardous waste on tribal communities.

What is the most effective environmental accomplishment you have seen and why was it successful? What lessons can we learn from this example to build success in current and future environmental initiatives?

KAREN: The environmental movement had a lot of legal achievements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of the most powerful and progressive environmental policy changes - including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act - were realized during that time. I doubt that these policies would be passed today. These, and other, initiatives resulted in tangible improvement in the quality of life for human and non-human species alike. They also forced positive institutional changes, especially in large, industrial organizations by providing legal and regulatory incentives for those organizations to change their environmental behavior and performance.

ALAN: Portland, Oregon, is home to many progressive, effective environmental efforts. including an aggressive transit system, growth management, streamside and watershed protection, and a relatively inclusive neighborhood-based decision making process.

A more important accomplishment, however, is a change to the community's environmental philosophy, an as-yet-incomplete emergence of the following notion: an environmental effort is not successful nor worthy of support, despite acknowledged environmental benefits, if it has a disparate, negative impact on low income and people of color communities. Justice cannot take a back seat to environmental protection, and environmental protection cannot succeed without being just.

JEFF: The Clean Air Act is the most effective environmental accomplishment that I have seen. I'm old enough to remember what the air was like before the Act. I grew up in rural America, where the deer and the antelope really did play. As a child my family and I moved to the suburban Southern California desert on the eastern edge of the Los Angeles air basin. Mountains surrounded us and the smog would roll in like fog from points west and hang over us, sometimes for months at a time. Depending on the time of day it could be gray or white. The heavier it got, the browner it became. The smog always smelled and it always made breathing difficult. A climate-caused inversion layer concentrated the smog towards the ground.

Many of my elementary school days would end mid-day because of the third stage smog alerts, which meant you weren't supposed to go outside at all. Even then I wondered at the sense of sending little kids walking home in the smog. Although air pollution continues to be a problem it is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, at least in that part of Southern California. This change happened because the regulated community was forced into action (and created some of their own compliance methods) and local governments were given monitoring and enforcement powers.

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