Environmental Problems, Their Causes, and Sustainability 1

the Guest Essay on environmental justice by Robert D.Bullard on the website for this chapter.Grassroots groups have also formed land trustsand other local organizations to save wetlands, forests,farmland, and ranchland from development. Theyhave helped restore degraded rivers and wetlands,and have converted abandoned urban lots into communitygardens and parks. Some groups are coalitionsof workers and environmentalists who aim to improveworker safety and health.International examples of grassroots NGOs areKenya’s Green Belt Movement (Individuals Matter,p. 214) in which citizens plant trees on public and privateland; India’s long-standing Chipko movementwhere villagers protect trees by hugging them and thusplacing themselves between the trees and axes andchainsaws; and Sri Lanka’s Sarvodaya Shramadanamovement, which has developed wells for drinkingwater, gardening, and other small-scale improvementprojects in 12,000 villages.Taken together, a loosely connected network ofgrassroots NGOs working for bottom-up political, social,economic, and environmental change can beviewed as an emerging citizen-based global sustainabilitymovement. These millions of citizens are becominginformed and empowered by access to the World WideWeb, cell phones, e-mail, faxes, GIS mapping programs,and other components of the global communicationsweb.As Jeremy Rifkin puts it, “We are rapidly movingfrom geopolitics to biosphere politics.” According toRifkin, the Internet, coupled with our better understandingof how the earth sustains itself, will allow us,for the first time in human history, to really think globallyand act locally.The late John W. Gardner, former cabinet officialand founder of Common Cause, suggested using thefollowing basic rules for effective political action bygrassroots organizations:■Have a full-time continuing organization.■ Limit the number of targets and hit them hard.Groups dilute their effectiveness by taking on toomany issues.■ Organize for action, not just for study, discussion,or education.■ Form alliances with other organizations on a particularissue.■ Communicate positions in an accurate, concise,and moving way.■Persuade and use positive reinforcement.■ Concentrate efforts mostly at the state and locallevels.Some grassroots environmental groups use nonviolentand nondestructive tactics of protest marches,pickets, road blocks, tree sitting (Individuals Matter,p. 206), confronting illegal whaling ships, street theater,and other devices for generating publicity to helpeducate and sway members of the public to theircauses. Many of these tactics are borrowed from MahatmaGandhi’s successful nonviolent civil disobediencestrategy in helping win India’s independencefrom Great Britain and the U.S. civil rights movement.Some find the tactics of these groups controversialwhile others admire them for standing up for their beliefsin nonviolent ways.xHOW WOULD YOU VOTE? Do you support the use of nonviolentand nondestructive civil disobedience tactics byenvironmental groups and individuals? Cast your vote onlineat http://biology.brookscole.com/miller14.Much more controversial are militant environmentalgroups that break into labs to free animals usedto test drugs or that destroy property such as bulldozersand SUVs. Most environmentalists opposesuch tactics because they involve illegal and destructiveacts, give other environmentalists a bad name,and play into the hands of environmentalists’ politicalopponents.Case Study: Environmental Actionby Students in the United States—Makinga DifferenceMany student environmental groups work to bringabout environmental improvements in their schoolsand local communities.Since 1988, there has been a boom in environmentalawareness on a number of college campuses and publicschools across the United States.* Most student environmentalgroups work with members of the facultyand administration to bring about environmental improvementsin their schools and local communities.Many of these groups make environmental auditsof their campuses or schools.** Then they use the datagathered to propose changes that will make their campusor school more ecologically sustainable, usuallysaving money in the process.*See Ecodemia: Campus Environmental Stewardship at the Turn of the21st Century (Washington, D.C.: National Wildlife Federation,1995) and the Campus Environmental Yearbook, published annuallyby the National Wildlife Federation.**Details for conducting such audits are found in April Smithand the Student Environmental Action Coalition, Campus Ecology:A Guide to Assessing Environmental Quality and CreatingStrategies for Change (Los Angeles: Living Planet Press, 1993),and Jane Heinze-Fry, Green Lives, Green Campuses, available freeon the website for this textbook.620 CHAPTER 27 Politics, Environment, and Sustainability