[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 60 (Friday, May 4, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4403-S4406]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE GREEN SCARE
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, our collective national memory is still
haunted by images from the so-called ``McCarthy Era.'' This was a time
in the middle of the last century when ``The Red Scare'' came to
dominate both the headlines and the national consciousness, a time when
no stone was left unturned in the search for the Communists beneath
them.
Truth took a back seat during ``The Red Scare,'' with the result that
innocent and guilty alike had their rights trampled upon, and an
entirely proper investigation became an exercise in hysteria. During
``The Red Scare'' we lost track of the facts and got wrapped-up in the
emotions of the time.
The United States is now entering into an energy crisis. Demand for
power is up and supplies are, if not down, at least not keeping up with
that demand. As an example, gasoline prices are over $2 a gallon, and
the hot weather and travel season aren't even here yet, Mr. President!
We all know there's a real power crisis in the State of California.
How it came about is well-documented and need not occupy us here today.
Suffice it to say, all the elements conspired to come together at the
right time and in the right place--much like the events told in ``The
Perfect Storm''--and this disaster is now upon us.
How are we going to get out of it, or, at least, mitigate the worst
of its effects? How do we get there from here? I submit we are neither
going to exclusively drill our way out of it, nor are we going to
exclusively conserve our way out of it. Both those options may look
good on paper, but they are doomed to failure in the real world.
This body is about to come to grips with designing a national energy
policy. It will be an interesting time for us, as we work to blend
effective conservation measures with ways to ensure that we have the
power sources we need. It is my hope that this plan will be based on
sound science, not on emotions or slogans. If it's not, it's eyewash,
not worth the paper the headlines it would generate are written on.
Mr. President, there is a five-part series entitled ``Environment
Inc.,'' which ran between April 22 and April 26, 2001, in the
``Sacramento Bee'' newspaper.
This series was written by a ``Bee'' reporter named Tom Knudson. Mr.
Knudson has won two Pulitzer Prices for his writing on environmental
issues.
This series examines the high-powered fund raising machine that now
characterizes much of today's Corporate Environmental Culture, a
machine that increasingly funds, not environmental conservation
efforts, but an unceasing flow of litigation and a spreading spill of
public relations efforts. Conservation organizations have, themselves,
become big businesses, complete with fund raising consultants and
tremendous salaries.
Annual salaries for the heads of 9 of the 10 largest environmental
groups now top $200,000; one makes over $300,000 a year. In 1997, and
I quote here: ``. . . one group fired its president and awarded him a
severance payment of $760,335.'' We don't see television ads of fat
cats in their high-rise offices or swilling martinis in ritzy hotels.
The article notes that some are now calling the Sierra Club, ``Club
Sierra.'' John Muir would be appalled, I think.
Make no mistake about it, the Corporate Environmental Culture has
[[Page S4404]]
raised a lot of money. Direct mail efforts. It boggles the mind to
think that anyone would give money to a group that sends out millions
of paper brochures asking for money to save the rain forest.
Telemarketing efforts. ``Send us money or the Jenkins Warbler goes
extinct on the 27th of next month.''
This series points out that, and I quote:
Six national environmental groups spend so much money on
fund raising and overhead they don't have enough left to meet
the minimum benchmark for environmental spending--60 percent
of annual expenses--recommended by charity watchdog
organizations.
Many--although, in fairness, not all--of these groups use an
accounting loophole--and again I quote:
to classify millions of dollars spend on direct mail and
telemarketing not as fund raising, but as public education
and environmental activism!
If a citizen wants to give a few bucks to Club Sierra, that's not
properly any of our business, is it? But increasingly, this series
points out, environmental groups are inundating the courts with
endangered species lawsuits. Such suits have become one of their basic
tools. Even if there's no chance they'll win, they can tie up projects
in courts for years on end.
Every time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service misses a deadline, a
lawsuit follows like a hungry duckling waddling after its mother.
Increasingly, the Service will tell you they are devoting more and more
of their time and resources to fighting lawsuits, which leaves less and
less time for the wildlife biology that is the Service's proper
business.
Why would groups suppposedly dedicated to conservation behave this
way? Increasingly evidence suggests this onslaught of suits might well
have its roots in the Almighty Dollar and the pursuit thereof. A lawyer
who wins one of these ``citizen suits'' is entitled to a refund of his
or her attorney fees from the taxpayers. These attorneys typically
charge $150 to $350 an hour. The series notes that, and again I quote:
When California water districts won a suit . . . last year,
they submitted a bill for $546,403.70 to the government. The
Justice Department was stunned.
It gets worse. There is increasing evidence that environmental groups
are misusing science. They are behaving the way a fellow who tries to
sell you a used toothbrush behaves, that is, they tell the truth, but
they don't tell the whole truth. Here's an example from the series
relating to necessary thinning programs in national forests.
The buildup of fuels in Western forests was a prominent
topic in the 1996 Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project report, a
3,187-page scientific assessment of the California mountain
range.
Citing a remarkable accumulation of vegetation and
deadwood, the $6.5 million, congressionally funded report
warned of a fiery future--unless overcrowded stands were
thinned soon.
One suggested remedy was small-tree logging, followed by
prescribed fire. `Logging can serve as a tool to help reduce
fire hazard,' it stated.
Environmental groups overlooked that part of the report.
Instead, they plucked one sentence from thousands to argue
that all logging is bad. Here's how the National Forest
Protection Alliance, a consortium of activists, used the
report last fall in an action alert, under the heading,
``What the Government's Own Scientists Say about Logging and
Wildfires'': ``Timber harvest, through its effects on forest
structure, local microclimate and fuels accumulation has
increased fire severity more than any other recent human
activity.''
One fire scientist who helped write the report notes that the excerpt
refers to historic logging that left Western forests littered with
woody debris--not modern thinning designed to clean up such debris.
Informed of this, a network coordinator for the forest alliance, said:
``This is the most popular fact we have. It is a quote congresspeople
have used.''
Well, that settles that for all time, doesn't it, Mr. President?
I submit that our national energy policy is increasingly being
affected not by scientific fact and the best interests of the country,
but by the same type of hysteria and misinformation we saw when truth
took a back seat during ``The Red Scare'' of 50 years ago.
During ``The Red Scare'' we lost track of the facts and got wrapped-
up in emotion. During ``The Green Scare,'' which we're going through
now, we're giving ourselves over to hysteria yet again. This present-
day hysteria is fed by a bloated, inefficient environmental industry,
absorbed by its pursuit of money and devoted to the preservation, not
of the natural environment, but of its own high rise, martini-swilling
corporate lifestyle. There is a sizeable body of evidence that
Environment, Inc. is willing to abandon truth and science, even the
very reason for its existence, in pursuit of a buck. It is a movement
that has lost its soul.
There's a bright side to all this. First of all, the word is getting
out. Thanks to people like Tom Knudson, the author of the ``Environment
Inc.'' series and to concerned people in an out of the environmental
movement, more and more people are coming to realize they've bought
that used toothbrush we talked about before. As our population soars
and demands upon our eco-system accelerate, there is much real
environmental work to be done.
I will conclude where Mr. Knudson's series concludes, with the coming
thing in environmentalism, a movement both new and rooted in the very
origins of environmentalism. Everyday ``garden-variety''
environmentalists are bringing ``more science, entrepreneurial skill,
accountability, teamwork, and results to a movement they say has grown
self-righteous, inefficient, chaotic, and shrill.'' The Nature
Conservancy, the Conservation Fund, and other groups are focusing, not
on their offices and attorney fees, but on protecting land and on
restoring it. These groups are making allowances for necessary
development.
This represents a maturing of the environmental movement, a
realization that it is fire not smoke that counts, results, not
headlines. It is time for America to stand up to the lies and hysteria
of ``The Green Scare'' and say: ``No. Not again.''
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that excerpts from the series
``Environment Inc.'' be printed in the Record.
I wish to also note that the entire series may be found at:
www.sacbee.com/news/projects/environment.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Sacramento Bee, Apr. 22, 2001]
Fat of the Land--Movement's Prosperity Comes at a High Price
(By Tom Knudson)
As a grass-roots conservationist from Oregon, Jack Shipley
looked forward to his visit to Washington, D.C., to promote a
community-based forest management plan. But when he stepped
into the national headquarters of The Wilderness Society, his
excitement turned to unease.
``It was like a giant corporation,'' Shipley said, ``Floor
after floor after floor, just like Exxon or AT&T.''
In San Francisco, Sierra Club board member Chad Hanson
experienced a similar letdown when he showed up for a soiree
at one of the city's finest hotels in 1997.
``Here I had just been elected to the largest grass-roots
environmental group in the world and I am having martinis in
the penthouse of the Westin St. Francis,'' said Hanson, an
environmental activist from Pasadena. ``What's wrong with
this picture? It was surreal.''
Soon, Hanson was calling the Sierra Club by a new name:
Club Sierra.
Extravagance is not a trait normally linked with
environmental groups. The movement's tradition leans toward
simplicity, economy and living light on the land. But today,
as record sums of money flow to environmental causes,
prosperity is pushing tradition aside, and the millions of
Americans who support environmental groups are footing the
bill.
High-rise offices, ritzy hotels and martinis are but one
sign of wider change. Rising executive salaries and fat Wall
Street portfolios are another. So, too, is a costly reliance
on fund-raising consultants for financial success.
Put the pieces together and you find a movement estranged
from its past, one that has come to resemble the corporate
world it often seeks to reform.
Although environmental organizations have accomplished many
stirring and important victories over the years, today groups
prosper while the land does not. Competition for money and
members is keen, Litigation is a blood sport. Crisis, real or
not, is a commodity. And slogans and sound bites masquerade
as scientific fact.
``National environmental organizations, I fear, have grown
away from the grass roots to mirror the foxes they had been
chasing,'' said environmental author Michael Frome, at a
wilderness conference in Seattle last year. ``They seem to me
to have turned tame, corporate and compromising.''
This series of articles--based on more than 200 interviews,
travel across 12 states and northern Mexico, and thousands of
state and
[[Page S4405]]
federal records--will explore the poverty of plenty that has
come to characterize much of the environmental movement. Some
of the highlights:
Salaries for environmental leaders have never been higher.
In 1999--the most recent year for which comparable figures
are available--chief executives at nine of the nation's 10
largest environmental groups earned $200,000 and up, and one
topped $300,000. In 1997, one group fired its president and
awarded him a severance payment of $760,335.
Money is flowing to conservation in unprecedented amounts,
reaching $3.5 billion in 1999, up 94 percent from 1992. But
much of it is not actually used to protect the environment.
Instead, it is siphoned off to pay for bureaucratic overhead
and fund raising, including expensive direct-mail and
telemarketing consultants.
Subsidized by federal tax dollars, environmental groups are
filing a blizzard of lawsuits that no longer yield
significant gain for the environment and sometimes infuriate
federal judges and the Justice Department. During the 1990s,
the U.S. Treasury paid $31.6 million in legal fees for
environmental cases filed against the government.
Those who know the environment best--the scientists who
devote their careers to it--say environmental groups often
twist fact into fantasy to serve their agendas. That is
especially true in the debate over one of America's most
majestic landscapes: its Western evergreen forests. A 1999
report by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 39
million acres across the West are ``at high risk of
catastrophic fire.'' Yet many groups use science selectively
to oppose thinning efforts that could reduce fire risk.
``A lot of environmental messages are simply not
accurate,'' said Jerry Franklin, a professor of forest
ecology and ecosystem science at the University of
Washington. ``But that's the way we sell messages in this
society. We use hype. And we use those pieces of information
that sustain our position. I guess all large organizations do
that.''
And sometimes when nature needs help the most,
environmental groups are busy with other things.
As the tiny Fresno kangaroo rat struggled for survival in
the industrialized farmland of California's San Joaquin
Valley in the 1990s, for example, the environmental movement
did not seem to notice.
As a fisheries conservationist tried to save rare trout
species across remote parts of Oregon and Nevada, he found no
safety net in major environmental groups.
As sea turtles washed up dead and dying on Texas beaches in
1993, no groups made the turtles their mascot.
``I contacted everybody and nobody listened,'' said Carole
Allen, who rehabilitates turtles injured in fishing nets.
``Everybody wants to save dolphins. Turtles aren't popular.
It really gets frustrating.''
Yet look closely at environmentalism today and you also see
promise and prosperity coming together to form a new style of
environmentalism--one that is sprouting quietly, community by
community, across the United States and is rooted in results,
not rhetoric.
``I'm so frustrated with the opportunism and impulsiveness
of how groups are going about things,'' said Steve McCormick,
president of The Nature Conservancy, which uses science to
target and solve environmental problems. ``What's the plan?
What are the milestones by which we can measure our
success?''
Today's challenges are more subtle and serious than those
of the past. Stopping a dam is child's play compared to
halting the spread of destructive, non-native species.
Protecting old-growth forests from logging is simple; saving
them from fire and disease is more difficult.
But as the Bush administration takes control in Washington,
many groups are again tuning up sound bites--not drawing up
solutions.
There is no clearinghouse for information about
environmental groups, no oversight body watching for abuse
and assessing job performance. What information exists is
scattered among many sources, including the Internal Revenue
Service, philanthropic watchdogs, the U.S. Department of
Justice and nonprofit trade associations.
Sift through their material and here is what you find:
Donations are at flood stage. In 1999, individuals,
companies and foundations gave an average of $9.6 million a
day to environmental groups, according to the National Center
for Charitable Statistics, which monitors nonprofit fund
raising.
The dollars do not enrich equally. The nation's 20 largest
groups--a tiny slice of the more than 8,000 environmental
organizations--took in 29 percent of contributions in 1999,
according to IRS Form 990 tax records. The top 10 earned
spots on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's list of America's
wealthiest charities.
The richest is The Nature Conservancy, an Arlington, Va.,
group that focuses on purchasing land to protect the
diversity of species. In 1999, The Nature Conservancy
received $403 million, as much as its six nearest rivals
combined: Trust for Public Land, Ducks Unlimited, World
Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, National Wildlife
Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council.
Forty years ago, the environmental movement was a national
policy sideshow. Today, it is a strong, vocal lobby that
weighs in on everything from highway transportation to global
trade. Some groups, such as the National Audubon Society and
Environmental Defense, are generalists, dabbling in many
things. Others, such as Ducks Unlimited and Conservation
International, have found success in specialization.
* * * * *
David Brower, the legendary former Sierra Club leader who
led successful battles to keep dams out of Dinosaur National
Monument and the Grand Canyon in the 1950s and '60s, said
success springs from deeds, not dollars.
``We were getting members because we were doing things,''
Brower said before he died last year. ``Out (strength) came
from outings and trips--getting people out. If came from
full-page ads and books.''
Today, there is a new approach--junk mail and scare
tactics.
``Dear Friend, If you've visited a national park recently,
then some of the things you're about to read may not surprise
you!
``America's National Park System--the first and finest in
the world--is in real trouble right now.
``Yellowstone . . . Great Smoky Mountains . . . Grand
Canyon . . . Everglades. Wilderness, wildlife, air and water
in all these magnificent parks are being compromised by
adjacent mining activities, noise pollution, commercial
development and other dangerous threats . . .''
So begins a recent fund-raising letter from the National
Parks Conservation Association, a 400,000-plus-member
organization. The letter goes on to tell of the group's
accomplishments, warn of continued threats, ask for money--
``$15 or more''--and offer something special for signing up.
``Free as our welcome-aboard gift . . . The NPCA bean bag
bear!''
Let's say you did send in $15. What would become of it?
According to the group's 1998-99 federal tax form, much of
your money would have been routed not to parks but to more
fund raising and overhead. Just $7.62 (51 percent) would have
been spent on parks, less than the minimum 60 percent
recommended by the American Institute of Philanthropy, a
nonprofit charity watchdog group.
And the parks association is not alone.
Five other major groups--including household names such as
Greenpeace and the Sierra Club--spend so much on fund
raising, membership and overhead they don't meet standards
set by philathropic watchdog groups.
It's not just the cost of raising money that catches
attention these days. It is the nature of the fund-raising
pitches themselves.
``What works with direct mail? The answer is crisis.
Threats and crisis,'' said Beard, the Audubon Society chief
operating officer.
``So what you get in your mailbox is a never-ending stream
of crisis-related shrill material designed to evoke emotions
so you will sit down and write a check. I think it's a slow
walk down a dead-end road. You reach the point where people
get turned off.'' Then he hesitated, adding:
``But I don't want to say direct mail is bad because,
frankly, it works.''
Even some of those who sign the appeals are uncomfortable
with them.
``Candidly, I am tired of The Wilderness Society and other
organizations--and we are a culprit here--constantly
preaching gloom and doom,'' said William Meadows, the
society's president, whose signature appears on millions of
crisis-related solicitations. ``We do have positive things to
say.''
Many environmental groups, The Wilderness Society included,
also use a legal accounting loophole to call much of what
they spend on fund raising ``public education.''
In 1999, for instance, The Wilderness Society spend $1.46
million on a major membership campaign consisting of 6.2
million letters. But when it came time to disclose that bill
in its annual report, the society shifted 87 percent--$1.27
million--to public education. The group also shrank a $94,411
telemarketing bill by deciding that 71 percent was public
education.''
The Wilderness Society's spokesman, Ben Beach, said that
kind of accounting is appropriate because fund-raising
solicitations are educational.
``No one is trying to do anything that isn't right by the
rule book here,'' he said. ``A lot of us don't particularly
like getting (telemarketing) calls. But that's not to say you
don't learn something.''
Still, the accounting practice is controversial. Nine of
the nation's 20 largest groups don't use it. ``Playing games
with numbers is not worth the effort or questions that would
come from it,'' said Stephen Howell, chief operating officer
at The Nature Conservancy.
``It should be called what it is,'' said Noonan, the
Conservation Fund leader. ``As we become larger and more
successful, I worry about the ethics of our movement. We need
to think about self-regulation and standards. If not, the
ones who make mistakes are going to hurt it for all of us.''
Dollars can disappear in other ways, of course.
* * * * *
Comfortable office digs and sumptuous fund-raising banquets
are another drain on donor dollars. The Sierra Club spends
$59,473 a month for its office lease in San Francisco. In
Washington, Greenpeace pays around $45,000 a month.
In June 1998, The Nature Conservancy spent more than $1
million on a single fund-raising bash in New York City's
Central Park. Carly Simon and Jimmy Buffett
[[Page S4406]]
played. Masters of ceremonies included Dan Rather, Peter
Jennings, Mike Wallace and Leslie Stahl. Variety magazine
reported that the 1,100 guests were treated to a martini bar
and a rolling cigar station.
``The goal was to raise (our) profile among high-dollar
donors,'' Conservancy spokesman Mike Horak said in a
statement. And it paid off: $1.8 million was raised.
* * * * *
Salaries gobble up money raised, too. In 1999, top salaries
at the 10 largest environmental groups averaged $235,918,
according to IRS tax forms. By contrast, the president of
Habitat for Humanity, International--which builds homes for
the poor--earned $62,843. At Mothers Against Drunk Driving,
the president made $69,570.
Among environmental groups, Ducks Unlimited paid its leader
the most: $346,882.
``Those salaries are obscene,'' said Martin Litton, a
former Sierra Club board member, who worked tirelessly over a
half-century to help bring about the creation of Redwoods
National Park in 1968 and Sequoia National Monument last
year. Litton did it for free.
``There should be sacrifice in serving the environment,''
he said.
* * * * *
____________________