The Birth of Environmentalism

Gifford Pinchot, first director of the U.S. Forest Service, recorded the awakening of the movement in the late 1800's in his memoir, Breaking New Ground. Public lands in the West, he wrote, were being despoiled by timber companies, railroads and miners. Placer mining of gold, for example, ravaged California landscapes with torrents of water, washing tons of earth into rivers for each ounce of gold recovered. "At a time when, in the West, the penalty for stealing a horse was death – death without benefit of the law – stealing the public land in open defiance of the law was generally regarded with tolerance or even approval."

Then, toward the turn of the century, the federal government began setting aside occasional jewels of Western land into parks. Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872, eight years after California reserved the Yosemite Valley. Eventually the National Park Service was formed, though its domain grew only gradually, mostly through piecemeal acts of Congress.

Far larger tracts were taken up into what would become the national forests. in 1891 – "without question and without debate," according to Pinchot – Congress authorized the President to reserve selected forest land against private ownership. The law freed presidents to take bold steps to conserve land for public uses. Benjamin Harrison reserved thirteen million acres. Grover Cleveland doubled that in the last ten days of his term. And Theodore Roosevelt, with characteristic vigor; jacked up the total to 194 million acres, created the Forest Service and put Pinchot at its helm.

Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to preach a new ethic called "conservation." In 1908, he hosted a week-long White House Conference on the subject. The star of the show was Pinchot, who had studied forestry in Europe. And the conservation ideal that he and Roosevelt preached wasn't preservation of pristine nature. It was optimal use: management of natural resources for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

"Forest protection is not an end in itself," T.R. had proclaimed only a few months after taking office. "It is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity."

In the late 19th century a competing ideal began to grow: that nature should be preserved for its own sake. The leading proponent was Pinchot's friend and onetime hiking companion John Muir, the avid outdoorsman who founded the Sierra Club.

The two ideals clashed memorably over a spectacular valley on California's Tuolumne River. Pinchot supported damming the river to provide water for the growing San Francisco area. Muir bitterly opposed it. Muir and his allies lost; the Hetch-Hetchy Valley became a reservoir for the greatest good.

Dam-building and forestry accelerated right through President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, but were abruptly shelved by World War II and left there during the postwar drive to feed, house, clothe and transport a booming U.S. population.

It wasn't until John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960 that conservationist ideas surged again, by then intertwined with the preservationist philosophy of Muir. Kennedy and his Interior Secretary, Stewart L. Udall, voiced concern over the pollution and development of wilderness areas and proposed establishing a fund to finance further expansion of federal lands.

"Many nations no longer have the option of preserving part of their land in pristine condition," Udall wrote at the time in his book, The Quiet Crisis. "We must take ours up before it is too late. A wilderness system will offer man what many consider the supreme human experience."

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, was what first alerted the public to the broad destruction of wildlife being caused by highly toxic pesticides such as DDT. Silent Spring drove home a simple message: Man does not exist apart from nature around him, but is himself a part of it. In the poisoning of the natural world, an aroused public began to see the darker side of the postwar "miracles" of modern science. No longer could chemical pesticides masquerade as magic bullets supposedly homing in on unwanted species; just like real bullets, chemicals were now seen as fully capable of striking down innocent bystanders such as birds or fish or man.

Pesticide manufacturers quickly mounted an attempt to discredit Silent Spring and its author; President Kennedy set up a panel of his Science Advisory Committee to study the problem. The panel's report was described by Rachel Carson's biographer as "a complete vindication of her thesis," but it did not result in any immediate corrective action.

Then, in 1967, three scientists living on Long Island and a fourth in Michigan, who were as alarmed as Carson had been by the effects of DDT on wildlife, conceived of a new way to put these concerns into motion. They formed the Environmental Defense Fund, joined with an attorney, and became the first group to take scientific evidence into the courts to achieve environmental goals. With support from the Ford Foundation through National Audubon's Rachel Carson Memorial Fund, EDF's founders brought case after case seeking to replace DDT with pest control methods less dangerous to wildlife. Before they were through, their efforts would lead to the nationwide banning of DDT and to the first established precedents of environmental law.

According to co-founder Dr. Charles Wurster, EDF "was born from the frustration of a group of environmentalists unable to move the system, to make it respond, to force environmental protection." And EDF's founders weren't alone in their frustration. A groundswell was building in response to Carson's writing, augmented by public revulsion at calamities such as the 1969 oil well blowout that blackened Santa Barbara's beaches.

The growing pressure erupted on Earth Day 1970. "A chorus of concern for the environment is sweeping the country," the President's Council on Environmental Quality wrote that year. "It reaches to the regional, national and international environmental problems. It embraces pollution of the earth's air and water, noise and waste and the threatened disappearance of whole species of plant and animal life."

Environmental groups grew and multiplied, and lobbying Washington became a major new activity. The Sierra Club lobbied so aggressively that, prodded by President Richard M. Nixon, the Internal Revenue Service stripped the group of its tax-exempt status.

Ironically, the move to curb pollution rose to full force during Nixon's presidency. It was Nixon who signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required that major federal actions be studied for their possible environmental impacts. The Environmental Protection Agency was established. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 were enacted.

The legislative gains continued into the 1980's, after Love Canal had helped turn the federal focus to the safe handling and disposal of toxic substances. President Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford largely failed to roll back environmental protections, but their efforts to do so made environmental group membership surge anew.

Litigation flourished. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, EDF's success fighting DDT helped spur a host of groups to arm themselves with attorneys. The Natural Resources Defense Council was launched with Ford Foundation funding. The Sierra Club spawned its Legal Defense Fund. The National Wildlife Federation and National Audubon Society started going to court. Environmentalists blocked dams, nuclear power plants and highway projects. They forced regulators to tighten pollution controls to meet ambitious statutory demands for clean air and rivers.

"The legal victories won in the late sixties and early seventies formed the foundation on which the modern environmental movement is built," declared NRDC executive director John Adams in Crossroads: Environmental Priorities for the Future. The same volume quotes David Sive, one of the first successful environmental litigators, saying: "In no other political or social movement has litigation played so important and dominant a role. Not even close."

But as time went on, many environmental lawyers began to complain about diminishing returns. While courts could block actions, they often proved ill-suited to crafting solutions. And using courts in an attempt to steer government agencies could be clumsy and frustrating.

In 1986, for instance, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus was threatened with a contempt of court citation and jail for refusing to set standards for radioactive emissions from uranium mines and some federal facilities. Ruckelshaus got the court off his back by pegging standards at existing emission levels. The lesson for one environmental lawyer was that you can force agencies to write rules, but you can't force them to write good rules.

Some observers also complained that environmental gains were diminishing – or disappearing – as government added new layers of legislation and new ranks of regulators.

"Environmentalists should recognize that behind the waste dumps and dams and power plants and pesticides that threaten major environmental harm, there are nearly always legitimate social needs ... The American public does not want conflict between improving our economic wellbeing and preserving our health and natural resources. The early experience suggests it can have both."
Fred Krupp, The Wall Street Journal

By the mid-1980's some environmental group leaders started talking about new approaches that wouldn't rely on federal regulators, court orders or laws. A few prototypes were cited. In California, EDF had demonstrated that electric utilities didn't have to build massive new power plants to meet future demand. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, D.C., group, had shown Chester, Pennsylvania, how to develop and finance a trash recycling plant instead of an incinerator. The Sierra Club had helped a California timber company design a financial restructuring plan to ward off a corporate takeover.

In 1986, Fred Krupp, executive director of EDF, wrote in The Wall Street Journal about a third stage of the environmental movement. He suggested the environmental past could be seen in two stages. The first was the conservation era launched by T.R. and Pinchot. The second was the explosion of pollution control laws and regulations that followed Silent Spring and Earth Day 1970.

Krupp wrote that in the third stage, environmentalists should "recognize that behind the waste dumps and dams and power plants and pesticides that threaten major environmental harm, there are nearly always legitimate social needs – and that long-term solutions lie in finding alternative ways to meet those underlying needs. Otherwise, we are treating only symptoms; the problems will surface again and again. Answer the underlying needs, and you have a lasting cure."

As other environmentalists picked up on the theme, it became known as the Third Wave theory, after futurist Alvin Toffler's best seller. Different Third Wave concepts emerged, but the unifying theme was that the new wave should be solution-oriented. "We have won the struggle for acceptance with Main Street America, and now people are looking to us for solutions," said Lucy Blake, chairman of the League of Conservation Voters, in a 1986 interview with The Los Angeles Times. "It's not enough anymore to stand on the outside and take potshots."

Another fan of the Third Wave concept was later to become administrator of the EPA – William K. Reilly. As President of the Conservation Foundation, he led efforts to mediate between industry and environmental interests.

"Environmentalists have been enormously successful at passing new laws," Reilly told the L.A. Times in 1986. "Yet real progress has been extraordinarily slow. What we've seen is endless litigation, and when the litigation is over everybody runs back to Congress to change the law. We concluded there must be a faster way to make progress."

Third Wavers draw their share of criticism. Some hard-line environmentalists have accused them of compromising their principles.

Dr. Barry Commoner, the noted environmental scientist and writer, has charged that big, national environmental groups are selling out. In Crossroads, he argued that in negotiating compromises, environmental groups may "become hostage to the corporations' power and will experience the Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages take on the ideology of their captors."

Others are wary of the environmental economists who have risen to prominence in the Third Wave. David Brower, long-time leader of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, once called economics "an advanced form of brain disease." To him, and to many other environmentalists, economics is a tool of business, of the opposition, a tool often used to justify stinting pollution control.

But EDF's Krupp insists that the Third Wave doesn't mean compromise. And he praises Third Wave economists for envisioning new, and often more powerful, means to traditional environmental ends. In pollution prevention, for example, "economic incentives can prod people to do the right thing in the first place, rather than requiring a complex regulatory system that brings in costly cleanup as an afterthought."

Of course, the new tools aren't exclusively financial. California's Proposition 65 – authored largely by EDF's David Roe and pushed to enactment by a host of environmental groups – requires public disclosure of significant health risks from toxic chemicals. The law has created powerful incentives for industry to police its own use of hazardous substances and to resolve regulatory disputes promptly.

Third Wave enthusiasts believe that unconventional approaches can dispel tension between economic growth and environmental protection. As Krupp wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "The American public does not want conflict between improving our economic wellbeing and preserving our health and natural resources. The early experience suggests it can have both."

Ahead of the Curve: Shaping New Solutions to Environmental Problems
by Robert E. Taylor
Published 1990 by Potomac Publishing / Environmental Defense Fund