Same old thing - small is beautiful (maybe because it's usually local). "... Meanwhile, the grass-roots environmental groups are starved of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are raised every year by these massive bureaucracies. Over the past two decades, they've turned the environmental movement's grass-roots base of support into little more than a list of donors they hustle for money via direct-mail appeals and telemarketing."
Keith Eat the State! Vol. 7, Issue #8 18 dec. 02 NATURE & POLITICS Adios, Jay Hair: a Corporate Flunky Passes On On November 15, Jay Hair, former boss of the National Wildlife Federation, died of cancer at the age of 56. The New York Times eulogized Hair as "a passionate defender of the environment." But the Times' wistful cruise through Hair's career managed to glide right by his real significance: he established a corporate model for environmentalism that thrives to this day. Whether the Hair approach amounts to a defense of the environment from plunder is another question altogether, a question that Hair himself didn't seem that troubled about. For grassroots greens, Jay Hair came to personify nearly everything that's wrong with the mainstream environmental movement: elitist, PR-driven, politically calculating, and cautious. In fact, Hair helped to shape many of the more odious excesses: the plush offices, obese salaries, and cordial affiliations with big business. Hair was an environmental executive for the go-go 90s. He didn't see unfettered capitalism as a threat, but an opportunity to cash in on the bonanza. Hair perfected the art of environmental triangulation long before Dickie Morris showed up at the backdoor of Bill Clinton's White House with his black bag of trickery. He never lost an opportunity to stab the knife in the back of an environmental group (or idea) that he considered too radical or impolitic--even the middle-of-the-roaders at the Sierra Club got tongue-lashings from Hair, their policies on wilderness and trade publicly ridiculed as unrealistic. Hair was an insider and a powerbroker. Usually, he got entrŽe to politicos such as Al Gore by giving ground. It was the only thing he had to offer. Hair wasn't an organizer. He didn't lead a mass movement of outraged greens. In fact, there's every indication that he despised grassroots environmentalism. He even tried to suppress the independence of the chapters within his own federation, sparking a rebellion of sorts that was put down forcibly by Hair's lieutenants. Hair embraced corporations without question. He stocked his board with corporate honchos from companies with dirty reputations, such as Waste Management. He took their money, greenwashed their crimes, and then often did their bidding on the Hill. His first big moment of betrayal came when he offered to lobby his fellow executives in the DC environmental caucus about the virtues of NAFTA. Not once, but twice. First he hawked the trade pact for Bush, then for Clinton. Unlike many of his colleagues, who operate as adjuncts of the Democratic Party, Hair wasn't a partisan. He worked for whoever was in power and for whoever paid the bills. And they were big bills. Hair believed that if he was going to hang out with corporate execs, he should be paid like them. He was the first environmentalist to crack $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, setting a high bar that others have rushed to match. (When he left NWF in 1995, his salary was $293,000.) He once attended a press conference in DC addressing the issue of global warming. As Hair pontificated about hydrocarbons and SUVs inside, he ordered his chauffeur to keep his limo idling outside the building, with the air conditioner blowing full-blast so that the great man wouldn't break a sweat on the drive back to NWF's lush headquarters. After Hair was finally run out of NWF, he landed in Seattle, where he got a gig doing PR for the Plum Creek Timber Company, a logging outfit so rapacious that a Republican congressman deemed it the "Darth Vader of the timber industry." [Editor's note: Plum Creek is notorious for attempting, a few years back, to do a land swap in the Cascades that would have traded heavily-logged private lands for unspoiled public lands with old growth timber. Fortunately, the deal fell through when local, grassroots environmental groups organized against it.] When the great David Brower at age 84 was on the streets of Seattle during the WTO's confab in late 1999, cheering on the protesters and cursing the police, Jay Hair was cashing in whatever remained of his green credentials for hackwork with the World Mining Congress and the World Bank. Gold mining may be the most destructive and toxic industry on the planet, often involving the use of cyanide and other poisons. But that didn't stop Hair from fronting for the elites of Newmont Gold, one of the industry's biggest and nastiest outfits. "Mining gold can be a pretty messy issue," Hair said last summer. "But the gold industry, at least the (companies) I've talked to, are sensitive about cleaning up their acts." That's classic Hair. His last big project was lobbying for the completion of a giant dam in Chile. This monument of environmental destruction dwarfs even Glen Canyon Dam and will destroy nearly 500 miles of river, hundreds of villages, drown thousands of acres of forests, and forcibly displace indigenous people. Alas, Brower didn't outlive his younger nemesis Jay Jair. Ever the optimists, we're betting that Brower's militant legacy does. --Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn More: In this five-part series, Tom Knudson, The Bee's Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter, examines the high-powered fund raising, the litigation and the public relations machine that has come to characterize much of the movement today. His stories are based on exhaustive research conducted over 16 months with travel to 12 states and northern Mexico. And what he has found is that the movement established, in part, to combat the influence of the powerful has itself become big business. http://www.sacbee.com/static/archive/news/projects/environment/index02.html Environment, Inc. "I think the most insidious public relations campaign -- and the most dangerous -- has been the extent to which corporations have been able to convince public interest groups -- environmental organizations, media literacy organizations, community organizations of all sorts -- that in order to be effective, these public interest groups should be formally partnering with corporations, and sitting down and negotiating win-win solutions." - John Stauber, PR Watch http://www.westchesterweekly.com/articles/prnation.html PR Nation - Anti-spin activist John Stauber penetrates America's lie machine. Stauber: Many so-called public-interest organizations have become big businesses, multinational nonprofit corporations. The PR industry knows this and exploits it well with the type of co-optation strategies that Duchin recommends. Jensen: This seems especially true of big environmental groups. Stauber: E. Bruce Harrison, one of the most effective public-relations practitioners in the business, knows that all too well. He's made a lucrative career out of helping polluting companies defeat environmental regulations while simultaneously giving the companies a "green" public image. In the industry, they call him the "Dean of Green." As a longtime opponent of the environmental movement, Harrison has developed some interesting insights into its failures. He says, "The environmental movement is dead. It really died in the last fifteen years, from success." I think he's correct. What he means is that, in the eighties and nineties, environmentalism became a big business, and organizations like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council became competing multi-million-dollar bureaucracies. These organizations, Harrison says, seem much more interested in "the business of greening" than in fighting for fundamental social change... Another problem is that big green groups have virtually no accountability to the many thousands of individuals who provide them with money. Meanwhile, the grass-roots environmental groups are starved of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are raised every year by these massive bureaucracies. Over the past two decades, they've turned the environmental movement's grass-roots base of support into little more than a list of donors they hustle for money via direct-mail appeals and telemarketing. It's getting even worse, because now corporations are directly funding groups like the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and the National Wildlife Federation. Corporate executives now sit on the boards of some of these groups. PR executive Leslie Dach, for instance, of the rabidly anti-environmental Edelman PR firm, is on the Audubon Society's board of directors. Meanwhile, his PR firm has helped lead the "wise use" assault on environmental regulation... Jensen: It seems the main thrust of the PR business is to get the public to ignore atrocities. Stauber: Tom Buckmaster, the chairman of Hill & Knowlton, once stated explicitly the single most important rule of public relations: "Managing the outrage is more important than managing the hazard." From a corporate perspective, that's absolutely right. A hazard isn't a problem if you're making money off it. It's only when the public becomes aware and active that you have a problem, or, rather, a PR crisis in need of management. http://home.earthlink.net/~dbjensen1/stauber.html War On Truth - The Secret Battle for the American Mind, An Interview with John Stauber, "The Sun", March 1999 Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
