Flying High, Swooping Low.

Assessing the Environmental Movement --at the Close of the `E Decade'

The second issue of E Magazine coincided with Earth Day 1990, the 20th anniversary celebration of the first event and, in its own way, a landmark in environmental history. With its huge turnouts around the world, Earth Day 1990 proved that in the two decades since that first small Washington gathering, the environmental movement had grown enormously and become united in common goals.

Speaking just before the April 22, 1990 event made world headlines, organizer Denis Hayes cautioned that if Earth Day turned out to be merely another one-day celebration, it would fail. "Unless we have an agenda," he said then, "we become just one more of those transient phenomena that have become so common: where, for example, nuclear winter is on the front pages of every publication, and a year later nobody can remember what it is ... The best way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to come out of it with a strengthened, broadened movement, with clear-cut plans for where it wants to go." That was 10 years ago, in a more optimistic time. That rising tide of optimism gave birth to E Magazine, and to two other independent environmental magazines that are no longer with us. We were clear about the historic moment. "Nineteen ninety marks tile dawn of a new decade during which we'll be working together to rescue our environment," wrote publisher Doug Moss in the inaugural issue.

Going for Broke

Now that the 1990s are over and a new millennium is ready to be born, it's fair to ask, did the Environmental Decade, born with momentum and enthusiasm, achieve its aims? Did the movement evolve into an effective coalition? Are we, as Ronald Reagan once asked, better off than we were 10 years ago?

The short answer is, well, not really. Nearly all the issues that loomed large ill 1990 loom larger now, with tile possible exception of holes in the ozone layer. Despite a leveling off of fertility rates, population has increased dramatically, topping six billion just days before I wrote this story. Despite some important victories by tile Rainforest Action Network and others, the logging and burning of our wild forest reserves continues apace--"a massive loss" according to tile World Commission on Forests. Despite good and important work preserving endangered plants and animals, Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard University estimates we are losing 100 species per day around tile world, four an hour. Despite the Clean Air Act and strong legislation around the world limiting emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that nearly half the American population, and more than two thirds of the people on Earth, breathe unhealthy air. Despite a global economy that grows by $1 trillion a year, 150 million would-be workers are unemployed around the world, and half the world's people are malnourished.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have concluded that humankind's "ecological footprint" is already 20 percent greater than the planet's land base. Writing for the online magazine Grist, Beyond the Limits author and Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows concludes that we're approaching the end of our ability to mortgage the future. "The only reason we can get away with our overbig impact [on the planet] is there are still stocks of forests, fish, soils and water to draw down. We can't go on drawing down forever, or even much longer ... If we don't reduce our load on the planet voluntarily, the planet will do it for us." Faced with massive global problems like these, is the environmental movement to blame for our achingly slow progress; forestalled by many steps backwards?

In that first issue of E, archdruid David Brower, who served as the Sierra Club's first director and founded both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, was critical of movement leaders for "trying to negotiate too much ... trying to compromise instead of standing up for things." Mark Dowie, author of the 1995 book Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, echoes Brower's words today.

"I think movement organizers are to blame both for what they did do and what they didn't do," he says. "They continue to take accommodating positions, and to put too much faith in the federal and state government to protect the environment. But if you look at the history, you'd see that the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and others were created largely to force the federal government to enforce its own laws. The environmental movement built up a force of 100 registered lobbyists, who are still trying to convince legislators to enforce the law, because people care about the issues."

Dowie would like to see the movement get out of Washington and return to the grassroots, reigniting environmental passions. Even though the majority of Americans self-identify as green, exit polling shows they don't necessarily vote that way. A shrinking public commitment emboldens politicians to vote the way the campaign cash dictates, and that's almost always against the environment.

One for Our Side

That's not to say there haven't been victories, and significant ones. Pressure from the Sierra Club, Tim Hermach's Native Forest Council and many other groups undoubtedly spurred the Clinton Administration's proposal to ban road-building and logging on more than 40 million acres of American national forest. Ozone Action pressed for--and got--U.S., commitment on an international treaty to ban use of chlorofluorocarbon products that damage the Earth's protective ozone layer. Because credible environmental groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Clean Air Trust kept the public informed about air quality and auto emissions, California enacted the world's most stringent pollution regulations, and now has its cleanest air in 50 years. These same environmental groups applauded the Clinton administration's decision to sue coal-fired power plant operators in federal court. A combination of EDF and toxics activist Lois Gibbs brought McDonald's to the table and kept a lot of styrofoam clamshells out of the waste stream. Grassroots activists in a dozen poverty pockets have effectively informed the public about environmental justice issues. The Tulane Environmental Law Clinic was so effective at fighting unfair plant sitings that Louisiana's governor helped usher through a law limiting their operations.

And if environmental groups can be compared to gunfighters, San Francisco's Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has the most notches in its belt. "We're interested not in isolated victories, but in changing the way the public, and businesses in particular, value the environment," says Mark Westlund, RAN's communications director. In the late 1980s, RAN helped persuade Burger King to cancel $35 million in beef contracts with forest-killing cattlemen in Central America, and Westlund says that victory laid the groundwork for the group's successful boycott campaign against Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsubishi Motors, persuading them to use tree-free paper. With RAN's clout firmly established, it took only two years to convince Home Depot, which retails 10 percent of the world's lumber, to agree to get out of the old-growth business and gradually switch to environmentally certified, sustainably grown wood products. RAN will next set target Lowe's, another major home improvement retailer.

"The Home Depot decision raises the bar for what it means to be a responsible business," Westlund says. "We don't take a `we're good, you're bad' approach; we just work for achievable change."

Bars are being raised, good laws passed, rivers and air getting cleaner. And yet the environment inexorably deteriorates. There is a limit, to be sure, in the achievements environmental groups can reasonably be expected to make, given the press of those six billion people, who bring with them human-induced mega-phenomena like global warming, desertification, ocean pollution, rapidly encroaching development, subsistence hunting and resource depletion. As the Worldwatch Institute notes in its 1998 State of the World, "We have overwhelmed the natural systems from which we emerged and created the dangerous illusion that we no longer depend on a healthy environment. As a result, humanity now faces a challenge that rivals any in its history: restoring balance with nature while expanding economic opportunities for the billions of people whose basic needs . are still not being met."

The Sky is Falling?

Worldwatch's Lester Brown--like Meadows, population activist Paul Ehrlich and others-- has been called an inflammatory Cassandra by critics. But what's striking about the writings of these environmentalists is how solution-oriented and full of hope they are. There's no shortage of good, workable plans emerging from the green think tanks. One could fill a good-sized shelf with books about, for instance, how to create the livable city through carless corridors, riverfront parks, bike racks and efficient public transit. The trick is getting these plans implemented by municipal officials more likely to favor new highway projects.

A useful model for environmentalists is the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins. Far from molding in file drawers, Lovins' concepts for what he calls the lightweight, fuel cell-powered "hypercar" are studied carefully in Detroit, Stuttgart and Tokyo, where he is a frequent and persuasive consultant. Auto companies may not subscribe to all of Lovins' theories about the car of tomorrow, but they're incorporating elements of his vision in the aerodynamic, hybrid and fuel cell cars that will begin arriving in dealers' showrooms this year. "I think the odds are close to 100 percent that we'll have a hydrogen economy," he says, with authority based on inside knowledge.

Other influential environmentalists include Sylvia Earle, a popular media figure with her warnings about the effects of ocean pollution; Bill McKibben, whose accessible writings about global warming, population and other topics appear in all the mainstream journals; and actors Ted Danson, Ed Begley, Jr., Pierce Brosnan, Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, all of whom effectively use the bully pulpit that fame affords them. It's a measure of their success that the actors' work on behalf of consumers and the environment draws fire from special interests like the Guest Choice Network, an arm of the restaurant lobby, and the industry-supported American Committee on Science and Health. The truth is, however, that industry is no longer the anti-environmental monolith it once was, and dinosaurs like the National Association of Manufacturers can't claim unanimous support on issues like global warming. Toyota and British Petroleum, for instance, have signed on with the educational. Pew Center on Global Climate Change, funded with a $5 million startup grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Even a conglomerate as big as General Motors has moved toward acknowledging global warming, going so far as to hold a joint press conference on the subject with the World Resources Institute (though it got hot under the collar when The Detroit News headlined the story, "Global Warming is Real, GM Says").

Observers looking for environmental progress will find it. As Mark Dowie notes, "There's clearly measurable progress. People on a broad level are more aware of environmental issues." But awareness may not be enough. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's all too little, too late. We protect one forest, and lose five. One species is brought back from the brink, but 100 quietly disappear. We control the damage to the ozone layer, but lose ground on global warming. "I approach the next century with some degree of trepidation," admits Dr. Ken Kimball, director of research at the Appalachian Mountain Club. "The fact of six billion people stands in contradiction to our goal of preserving open space and controlling sprawl."

Let's imagine an extremely optimistic scenario. Using the rosiest of three likely United Nations population outcomes, family planning measures are widely adopted, birth rates drop in the developing world, and there are only seven billion people sharing the planet in 2050. There would still be considerably more development pressure on the world's remaining wild places than there is today. Urban sprawl will have filled in the spaces between our cities, turning our coasts into giant megalopoli. A lack of fresh water, which threatens to cut the food supply by 10 percent, will grow more acute.

And that's under the best set of circumstances. Much more likely is a teeming, shoulder-to-shoulder world of 10 billion. Asked to look forward 100 years, Gar Smith, editor of Earth Bland Journal, sees "a completely new and chronically overcrowded planet, one with less land mass because of rising sea levels, more dirty air, more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and more refugees. And a lot of the biotic choir will be silent--the last tigers and hippos will likely have gone. The 1990s were the decade of decision for our species, and we didn't take the steps necessary to ensure our survival."

Some environmentalists decry a focus on population numbers, pointing out that consumption matters far more. Who can argue that the U.S., which consumes 19 percent of the world's resources with four percent of its people, has a disproportionate effect on the planet? Our 270 million people use a quarter of the world's oil, and 20 percent of its metals. We win the consumer goods sweepstakes year after year. Ask teenage girls in the U.S. about their favorite pastime, and 90 percent will say shopping. "It is not poor people--the major subject of population control programs--who are responsible for environmental degradation; it is the consumers of the rich countries," argues SUNY Professor Richard Robbins in a recent letter to E.

But high consumption rates are no longer the exclusive playground of the West. Fueled on a diet of American television and its acquisitional value system, the developing world is going on a buying binge. China is leading the ominous Third World rush to "modernize" which means television and other consumerist trappings in all but the poorest homes. Another symbol of wealth is the private car. Although almost 80 percent of its travel is now either on foot or by bicycle, the world's most populous and rapidly industrializing country projects auto sales of 1.6 million a year by 2000, and could have 100 million cars by 2015. According to the journal Geophysical Research Letters, if 400 million Chinese drivers hit the road in cars over the next 50 years, the plume of tailpipe exhaust would "bathe the entire western Pacific in ozone" extending all the way to the United States.

Technocratic Triumphs?

But even if technology has in many ways gotten us into this mess, can it also save us, as conservatives like Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute insist? By increasing crop yields and producing ever-more efficient extraction techniques, science has been able to confound the doomsayers who were saying that the turn of the century would see widespread famine and universal deprivation. We've made huge advances in agricultural mechanization, in fertilization, in soil science. And green technology has flowered, too, with new efficiencies in source reduction, recycling, waste management, mobile source pollution, organic agriculture and building construction.

You want a good example of benevolent technology? Talk to Nancy Todd, vice president of the nonprofit Ocean Arks International. She'll point to the northern California town of Arcata, where water purification is achieved not through budget-busting high-tech machinery, but through a large manmade marsh. One recent E story described how a Massachusetts company had built a self-sustaining biosystem using fast-growing fish, sprouts and filtered water. Canadian biologist Wolfgang Amelung designs "living walls" that clean the air in the heart of downtown. "If we can tap into the organizational ability of the natural world by, say, studying the extraordinary efficiency of a plant's root system, and apply that efficiency to human problems on a sufficient scale, then we can reduce the footprint on the Earth by 90 percent" says Todd. "It could be an extraordinary turnaround."

Ocean Arks is now helping introduce bioremediation technology around the world. "The once-radical ideas we had about creating a sustainable future are now considered mainstream," Todd says. "It's moving much faster than we can keep up with." Complementing Ocean Arks' work are efforts to save the seeds of crop plants that would otherwise pass out of existence; remove dams from once-wild rivers to restore fish populations; reclaim land that erosion has turned into desert; and replace chemical-intensive farming with equally productive organic methods. Wind energy enjoyed its best year ever in 1999, adding $1 billion in new generating equipment. But is this progressive tide moving fast enough? .

Looking at the future, Todd calls herself "intellectually pessimistic, but a glandular optimist." We're trying to maintain that stance too, in the face of mounting bad news about the planet's prospects. Unfortunately, the many positive programs underway are dwarfed in scale by the ruinous effects of both large-scale and subsistence agriculture (particularly when it involves raising livestock), by population-fueled land-clearing, and by massively destructive "development" projects like China's Three Gorges Dam, funded in part by the techno-friendly World Bank. (For another example of the Bank's baleful global reach, see the Currents section this issue.)

Sandra Steingraber, the scientist/author who was interviewed in last issue's E, does a brilliant job in her book Living Downstream of personalizing the toxic fallout from our technological society. Herself a cancer survivor, she shows the dark side of the dream. Lives that were supposed to have been lived better through chemistry, caught up in a worldwide "green revolution;" are instead foreshortened by it.

In April, we'll celebrate the 30th anniversary of Earth Day, again with Denis Hayes at the helm. There is indeed much to celebrate, and much to get done. We should turn the event into a clarion call for action, a redoubling of efforts to motivate the American people to support green initiatives. And it should focus on the lack of political leadership, from either major party.

There's something fundamentally wrong when eight years of an environmentally friendly administration in Washington can produce such limited results. Obviously, Congress is getting the message that the voters essentially don't care about the issues. The chilling Senate vote against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, surely a bedrock environmental goal, is just one example. In a warmer climate, Clinton's protective action on national forests would have come much earlier in his administration. Al Gore, with all the trappings of a genuine environmentalist, has simply been absent from the debate.

What is E's role in all this? It's certainly not to only accentuate the positive, though we've had people tell us they can't read the magazine because of all the bad environmental news. But we think most of our readers want to get their medicine straight, not coated in a sugar pill. There are plenty of uplifting stories to report, though, and you'll often read them here first.

As environmentalists, an honorific most of our readers share, I think we can go into the 21st century with a sense of renewed purpose, knowing that our work is more important than ever. And for those of you sitting on the fence, wondering which way to jump on these issues, there's never been a more crucial time to paint yourself green.

RELATED ARTICLE: Evolving Activism

It was said in the 1980s that tree-hating Reagan administration Interior Secretary James Watt was the best recruiter the environmental movement ever had: His image on fundraising letters led to an unprecedented jump in membership and contributions to groups from the Wilderness Society to the Sierra Club. In the '90s, Watt's role fell to Newt Gingrich.

Because it wasn't based on firm commitment, some of the enthusiasm and financial support for 1980s activism faded, forcing environmental groups to retrench. Greenpeace, for instance, laid off its entire canvassing operation and reduced the role of its magazine; other groups suffered membership declines and cut back on operations.

But despite some hand-wringing editorials, the environmental movement was far from dead. One important new source of revenue in the 1990s was the foundation world. The Goldman Foundation, to take the most significant example, gave $1 million gifts to each of three organizations: Rainforest Action Network, Earth Island Institute and International Rivers, and significantly expanded its marine protection funding. Both Ted Turner and Bill Gates made multi-billion-dollar gifts on behalf of population activism. For the United Nations Population Fund, that money helped fill a budget gap caused by the politically-motivated loss of U.S. government funding.

Media access is a perennial problem for environmentalists, but $11 million from such foundations as the John Merck Fund and W. Alton Jones is financing tile National Environmental Trust's airing of 30-second, issue-oriented TV spots in 200 U.S. cities. The Florence Fund supported full-page issue ads in major newspapers.

"A number of foundations concluded that environmental groups were competing with each other and putting out a diffuse message," says Stephen Greene, a contributing editor with the Chronicle of Philanthropy. "The media campaigns are an attempt to attack the problems more strategically." Greene adds that foundations have pooled resources to create the Sprawlwatch Clearinghouse, another attempt to build a broad coalition.

The 1990s were also characterized by some degree of infighting. Environmental groups differed sharply on such issues as endorsing the 1999 Clinton administration protection plan for California's Headwaters Forest that ceded large blocks of virgin timber to loggers. At the Sierra Club, the bickering was internal: Members staged a flashy but ultimately unsuccessful ballot initiative to persuade the club to endorse immigration restrictions. And ousted members of the group's New York chapter filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement and damages. Yet the club, now with 550,000 members, still launched highly effective campaigns on family planning, global warming, vehicle emissions and many other issues.

The Internet became a major tool for activists in the 1990s. The Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, launched www.scorecard.org, a site that allows visitors to learn about their local air quality and polluters. At the Environmental Working Group's "Chicken Little" site (www.chickenlittle.org), surfers can read the eye-popping comments of polluters who fought against the most basic environmental regulations.

Environmentalists also took the advice of thinking globally and acting locally. The decade saw the launch of scores of issue-based grassroots groups. Often headed by women, these groups fought effective home-turf battles. As one example, Phyllis Glazer's Mothers Organized to Stop Environmental Sins took on the operators of a toxic injection well in small-town Texas and won. Julia "Butterfly" Hill drew international attention without going anywhere: she's spent more than two years personally guarding Luna, a 1,000-year-old redwood in Northern California.

And as our world gets more complex, so have the issues environmentalists are forced to take on. Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we'd have to fight a rear-guard action against genetically modified oatmeal?--JIM MOTAVALLI

RELATED ARTICLE: Environmental Heroes: In Memorium

Some dedicated environmentalists returned to the Earth in the 1990s, after sowing a legacy of green activism. Majory Stoneman Douglas, the founder of Florida's environmental movement, passed away last year. Her seminal book, The Everglades, led to the designation of the wetlands as a national park in 1947, and she unfailingly defended the beloved swamp until her death at the age of 108.

Former Congresswoman Bella Abzug also continued to make a difference later in life when, to enhance women's roles in environmental decision-making, she created the Women's Environment Defense and Development Organization eight years before her death in 1998.

Seventy-year-old grandmother Aurora Castillo fought for green causes in her twilight years when she founded The Mothers of East Los Angeles, a community organization dedicated to protecting East L.A. from environmental and public health threats. She was 84 when she died.

Ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, another lifelong activist, passed away in 1997 at age 87. Best known for his TV series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, the veteran diver also founded The Cousteau Society, which now boasts 300,000 members dedicated to the preservation of ocean life.

Celebrity singer-songwriter John Deutschendorf, better known as John Denver, died in a plane crash in 1997 at age 53 after championing wilderness in his ballad, "Rocky Mountain High," and backing up his convictions through efforts on behalf of his own Windstar Foundation and Plant-It 2000.

Last year marked the loss of three key figures in the animal rights movement: Linda McCartney, the wife of Beatle Paul, used her celebrity status to promote vegetarianism, and published several meat-free cookbooks.

Journalist, activist and author Cleveland Amory, 81, founder of the Fund for Animals, was buried next to his beloved cat, Polar Bear, the subject of a popular trilogy of books.

Henry Spira, the founder of Animal Rights International, 71, used his skill for negotiation to help curtail face branding of cattle and the blinding of rabbits in cosmetic safety trials.

Animal advocate Michael Werinke walked the African and North American continents to raise international awareness about the plight of five endangered rhino species. He died this year in Kenya, where he was working on a rhino conservation project in Tsavo National Park.

Ugandan journalist Ndykira Amooti also passed away recently. His exposes had encouraged the government to create a new national park and crack down on the illegal trade in endangered species.

Another activist who leaves a living legacy is High Chief Fuino Senio of the Savai'i Island of Western Samoa. Senio persuaded his fellow village chiefs to sign an historic accord which saved 30,000 acres of locally-owned land from logging and turned the area into the Falealupo Rainforest Preserve.

U.S. Senator John Chafee (R-RI) was a forthright friend of the environment, and a leader in defending the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Lawmaker and activist Petra Kelly became an influential politician when she founded Germany's Green Party. The Greens' political victories distinguished Germany as the first parliamentary system to elect an environmental contingent. In 1992, Kelly, then only 45, died in a tragic suicide-murder case.

Earth First!er Judi Bari had, like Kelly, received death threats for protesting liquidation logging of California redwood forests. When a motion-triggered pipe bomb exploded under the driver's seat of her car in 1990 she survived, but she died seven years later at age 48 from breast cancer.

In 1998, another Earth First!er, David "Gypsy" Chain, 24, never had a second chance after a tree felled by an angry logger crushed him during a peaceful Earth First! anti-logging protest in California's Grizzly Creek State Park.

Chain was one of several environmental activists who died on duty in the 1990s. Indian activist K.A. Rahman protested against a factory accused of releasing carcinogens into his community. He was himself a cancer victim this year, and his name was added to the list of pollution-related deaths he helped to create.

Another cancer victim, Jeton Anjain, fought for the rights of his fellow residents on Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where radiation was pervasive from the largest nuclear detonation ever conducted by the U.S.

In Colombia, conservation biologist and policy analyst Terence Freitas was murdered while on a mission to protect the traditional lands of the U'wa people from exploitation by Occidental Petroleum.

A courageous symbol of the battle against oil companies, Ken Saro-Wiwa, fought to save the land of the Ogoni people from further exploitation by Shell in Nigeria. Just before the Nigerian government hung him on murder charges, he spoke his final words, "Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues."--JOSH HARKINSON

RELATED ARTICLE: Enviro-Politics: Sneak Attacks and Sleazy Riders

Environmental battle lines were clearly drawn in the 1990s, and largely along party lines. George Bush declared himself the "environmental President," but launched few new initiatives and did nothing to reform his own party. Did it cost him reelection votes? Very likely, yes. Despite the Clinton administration's failure to fight for green reforms it ostensibly supported, environmentalists have seen some leadership from the White House, especially in the appointment of such tough-minded administrators as Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Carol Browner. In fact, Allen Mattison of the Sierra Club's Washington, D.C. office has praise for "one of the most pro-environmental administrations of the modern era," a sentiment echoed by Werner Fornos of the Population Institute and others.

Opposing Clinton on the environment was a block of congressional Republicans, led by then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America. In the early 1990s, these conservatives took anti-environment positions in about 80 percent of their votes, according to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). When Congress yielded to their control in 1994, the way was cleared for a Republican-sponsored rollback on environmental legislation.

A pattern was established: Industry lobbyists could write their own legislation. In early 1995, Representative Bud Shuster (R-PA) worked with "experts" from International Paper and other companies to draft a bill gutting the Clean Water Act. The following month, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) introduced an Endangered Species Act revision authored, according to New York Times, "by a group of lawyers who represent timber, mining, ranching and utility interests." The Senator himself said of the bill, "It doesn't undo everything that's been done. But I suspect it would end up having that effect."

Congress' frontal assault on environmental regulations ultimately alarmed the public and threatened to cost the party votes in the 1996 elections. "We did enact laws for a reason, and I don't like to see my party overturning the very laws that we put through," said Joanne Wood, a frustrated Republican voter interviewed on National Public Radio that same year.

Newly aware that environmental issues are important to the public, conservatives switched tactics in the latter half of the decade. Instead of trying to repeal environmental protections head-on, legislators switched to a "trojan horse" approach in which unpopular legislation is passed by attaching it as a "rider" to an unrelated but important bill. For example, a recent emergency spending bill for disaster relief included riders that would allow new logging roads in national forests and reduced fees on oil extracted from public lands. Last year's generally pro-environment transportation bill contained a rider prohibiting any tightening of fuel economy standards for cars and trucks (see Currents this issue). By 1998, there were over 40 anti-environmental riders attached to critical appropriations bills.

Another strategy has been to strip environmental programs of their financial support. In 1998, the House cut funding for endangered species protection and President Clinton's climate-related energy efficiency programs. "Rather than attempting to repeal or gut these laws head-on, they're doing it by starving the programs," says Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

According to LCV, activists in the next decade need to be extra vigilant against these tactics. They should also watch for creative wordplay. A 1998 bill designed to open large tracts of national forest to logging was coined "The Forest Recovery and Protection Act." LCV President Deb Callahan says that such maneuvers are designed to "confuse the issue enough so that the American people will tune out." CONTACT: The League of Conservation Voters, 1707 L Street. #750, Washington, DC 20036/www.lcv.org.--DAMON FRANZ 

RELATED ARTICLE:

Since 1990, the global environment has both made progress and suffered setbacks. For the big picture, we've compiled this planetary report card, with both good grades and bad. Its the Earth on balance.

First the Good News ...

The Ozone Hole. The hole isn't shrinking yet, but our use of aerosols and other chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is. Are better air days ahead?

Hemp. There are movements underway to legalize this versatile fiber in 14 states. But don't worry, nobody's smoking the industrial stuff.

Dams. The crash of Maine's 160-year-old Edwards Dam was heard 'round the world. Too bad some of the megaprojects--like China's Three Gorges Dam--are still on track.

Styrofoam, This landfill stuffer has an unlimited half-life, and McDonald's isn't the only corporation getting the message to trash it.

Car-Free Zones. Europe is leading the way in getting automobiles out of central cities. Unclogging the highways is the next step.

Urban Air. Happy days: Los Angeles has its clearest skies in 50 years. But now Houston is the smoggiest city in America, Come home, George W. Bush, your state needs you.

Environmental Awareness. A huge majority of Americans, 85 percent in some polls, identify themselves as green. Though for many that means little more than putting the recycling bin by the curb, it's a start.

Fertility Rates. Most parts of the world are moving, albeit slowly, back down to a replacement level of two children per couple. In Africa, five kids are the average, but consumption rates are low.

Recycling. Our 28 percent recycling rate is four times what it was 30 years ago. Now if we'd just learn to reduce and reuse ...

Packaging Laws. In Germany, companies voluntarily reduce packaging to avoid having to pay to reclaim it. When will cardboard-and-cellophane-obsessed America follow suit?

Fuel Cells. By 2004, four or five auto companies will be marketing cars powered by these clean power plants. And fuel cell houses are on their way, too, (It's about time, since the cells were invented in 1839.)

Wind Energy. This zero-polluting power is the fastest-growing energy source in the world today, Do you feel the breeze?

Organic Agriculture. With national standards finally in place, organic producers are supplying a hungry market that grows by 25 percent a year. It's not hard to understand the appeal, when displayed next to genetically engineered tomatoes grown with flounder genes.

Natural Foods. They're not just in health food stores anymore. Boca Burgers and Not Dogs have gone mainstream as part of a $28 billion natural supermarket explosion.

Green Business. Is "corporate conscience" an oxymoron? Tell it to the environmentally concerned companies that do $110 billion in sales annually.

Voluntary Simplicity. The American Dream is changing. Happiness is no longer a two-car garage.

Open Space. Communities are finding their best protection against sprawl: preserving their natural legacy. And the public gets a place to walk the dog without being slapped with a jaywalking ticket.

Environmental Education. Despite a corporate backlash, green curriculums are the law in more than 30 states. Maybe the kids really are all right.

The Internet. Green information once sequestered in dusty files and government databases now appears on-screen with the click of a mouse.

River Cleanups. Our favorite Merit Badge.

College Activism. Bye, bye binge drinking. Students on America's 3,700 campuses are getting buzzed on building cob houses and fighting environmental racism.

Fair Trade. From Rainforest Crunch to Thanksgiving Coffee, it's about workers' cooperatives and paying a living wage. Are you listening, Nike?

Ecotourism. Nobody just bakes in the sun anymore. It's about taking responsibility for your travel and treading lightly.

And Now the Bad News ...

Global Warming. The rising tides, melting polar ice, migrating species and unusual weather that come with the territory are made worse by all the hot air from Congressional Republicans and industries-in-denial fighting to prevent ratification of the Kyoto Accords.

Ancient Forest Protection. We have only five percent of our old-growth left, and it's disappearing fast. Will we ever get Julia Butterfly down from that tree?

Genetically Engineered Foods. American producers are quietly modifying more than half our food supply. At least Terminator Seeds got terminated.

Saving Endangered Species. According to biologist E.O. Wilson, we're entering the "sixth extinction," the greatest loss of animals and plants in millennia. Most likely to survive: humans and cockroaches,

Oil Spills. The Exxon Valdez was just the one that got reported.

Overfishing. Factory trawlers are vacuuming the seas, and throwing one quarter of the annual catch back overboard--dead, They call it "bycatch"; we call it shocking waste.

Ocean Pollution. We thought the seas were too vast to damage, but now six-pack rings and old tires wash up on even our most remote beaches.

Desertification. Grazing and logging-related erosion are squandering millions of acres of productive farmland each year, Today's Old MacDonald is tomorrow's Bedouin.

Population. We reached six billion this fall, and we'll be 10 billion by 2050. Isn't birth control a family value?

Exotic Species. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brown tree snakes in Guam, rabbits in Australia--all play havoc with natural ecosystems.

Endocrine Disruption. Girls are maturing earlier and animal abnormalities are piling up. Is it something in the water? The food supply? Or both?

Urban Sprawl. In 20 years, Chicago swallowed up 46 percent more land area, while the population grew by only four percent. How many more mini-malls and big-box outlets do we need?

Environmental "Riders". Congressional Republicans are using "trojan horses" to sneak bad bills through the legislature. There's a Lott of blame to go around.

Pollution-Induced Asthma. Asthma rates among American kids have doubled in the last decade. Do we need to add "breathing" to the Bill of Rights?