Introduction
Perhaps it is best to first ask the question, “What is environmental organizing?” Let us divide this into its components; we will start with the word “organizing.” This means to become like an organ of the body, a collection of individuals who work together to accomplish something large and important, just as the cells of my heart work together in an organ to pump oxygen throughout my body. We could also look at an organ as a big instrument that makes a lot of noise—and certainly that is something else that organizations do. So the goal of organizing is to bring individuals together for the purpose of doing something greater than what any individual alone could do, and this sometimes means just creating a big noise. Now let us discuss the word “environmental.” In general, an environment is one’s surroundings. What are the surroundings which all people share? Of course, those are such things as the atmosphere, oceans, cornfields, forests, and tundra. The adjective “environmental” therefore indicates something or someone with a concern for the environment that all people have in common, namely, the Earth. We can now say that environmental organizing is the getting together of individuals for the purpose of caring for the Earth.
This paper attempts to do two things: it outlines the reasons for which people become environmentalists, and it describes some of the tactics used in environmental organizing. All of this will be done with oft references to Ecopledge, an organization with which I have had substantial experience. During January of 2003, I traveled to Colorado with two other students, Justin Johnson and Milena Klimek, and worked closely with the Ecopledge chapter at Colorado University in Boulder.
Section I : Why Organize?
Personal Stories of Environmentalism
Four years ago I experienced a revelation of beauty. In the low mountains of Maine’s Atlantic coast, I began hiking one overcast afternoon in the middle of spring. I was on a trail that would lead me to the top of a hill that overlooked the ocean. While I walked, the air was filled with mist, and my eyes were consumed with the glistening red ground and green trees. When I reached the peak of the hill, I watched fog dilute the horizon into a thick gray sheet, and I felt what I think the Buddhists call bliss. That moment provoked a transformation within me, and I began to seek beauty wherever and whenever I was able to. Like Dante, I had seen Beatrice.
One of my chores while growing up was to walk my dog, a Siberian husky, several times a week. My suburban neighborhood was still being constructed in those days, so I spent many of my walks in the trees at the edge of the development. I loved watching the deer and squirrels fly among the tree trunks, and I didn’t even mind combating the infamous Minnesota mosquitoes. During the nights, dim light from the street lamps would filter among the branches of those forests, and knew that I was in an enchanted place. It is needless to say that those forests were soon cut down, that houses and streets replaced them, and that I was saddened and enraged at the loss of this beauty.
Though my own house also was built where a forest once stood, this story nevertheless remains a potent source of inspiration for me. Visiting the natural world elicits in me a joy of fantasy, of danger, and of beauty. I wish to preserve wilderness areas in order to encourage the growth of these three things. This is why I first became an environmentalist.
Since then, I have come to see beauty in human interactions with the world, especially those that are sustainable, efficient, and organic. Cooperation stimulates creativity more than any form of domination or control, and my imagination is delightfully snagged by ideas of human cooperation with the environment: organic farming, solar and wind power, or sustainable communities such as Gaviotas, Colombia. In essence, I am environmentalist so I can create and protect beauty.
But the environmental movement includes people marching to thousands of different drums. One activist friend of mine says that he is an environmentalist because he wishes for justice in the world, and he hates to see both the subjugation of living beings to others and the suffering inherent in such actions. He is concerned with many social justice issues, especially in Latin America. But the reason, he says, that he is an environmentalist instead of a social worker is because the plants and animals of this world cannot speak for themselves. He, like the Lorax of Dr. Seuss, speaks for the trees.
My mother volunteers for the city’s Environmental Commission She first became an environmentalist in high school, influenced by the wisdom of her biology teacher, magazines from the National Wildlife Federation, and environmental campaigns of the day such as “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” or Wisconsin’s bottle and can recycling. She appreciates the beauty of the created world around her, and sees it as her duty to take care of what God has given to the human species.
My brother is an environmentalist, he says, because of the teachings of my mother. He is essentially a compassionate person, and it is easy for him to extend his compassion to the natural world. He treads lightly so as to not disrupt the actions of other people, plants, or animals.
A student volunteer working with a carnivore restoration program in Colorado says he is an environmentalist because he loves wolves. He feels a strong connection to these powerful carnivores and to the image of a lone wolf running free among the trees.
Sara, the professional organizer for Ecopledge at Colorado University (CU) in Boulder has been an organizer all of her life. Her mother worked for Greenpeace and was a radical in many ways. Sara began organizing in elementary school, fundraising for various charities, and it was a natural progression of events for her to become a canvasser for Greenpeace and then to begin organizing a college campus for Ecopledge.
Milena, one of my companions on the trip to Colorado, loves the non-human natural world because she finds spiritual renewal there. She considers wilderness a place of amazing beauty.
John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle is a novel about California apple pickers who are organized by Reds to demand better wages. The protagonist Jim, when asked why he wants to be an organizer, simply says, “I want to work toward something” (10).
Traditions of Environmentalism
People have long been working toward an environmental consciousness among the world’s population. Environmentalism itself is a term that conglomerates the philosophies and traditions from a wide swath of people and organizations, all somehow desiring to protect nonhuman and human life alike. Joseph M. Petulla, in his book American Environmentalism, defines three major traditions in the environmental movement: the biocentric, the ecologic, and the economic.
The biocentric tradition is literally the “life-centered” tradition. Biocentricism is as old as human rituals that deified the life, essence, soul, or spirit of living things. Petulla includes in the biocentric tradition people such as the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, the conservationist John Muir, painter Thomas Cole, and author James Fenimore Cooper. These figures all demonstrated the inherent value of Nature and its ability to be a constant source of inspiration and beauty (Petualla, 27-30). The conservationist Aldo Leopold writes in his essay The Land Ethic of the need for humans to properly live in community with nature: “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold, 241).
Recognizing this value of nature, environmentalists of the early 20th century pushed for legislation to protect wilderness areas. Their arguments were similar to those of John Muir, whom Petulla quotes: “Wilderness areas have become to us a spiritual necessity; an antidote for modern living” (Petulla, 44-45). Arguments of this sort stopped the building of a dam in both Dinosaur National Monument, in 1956, and the Grand Canyon, in 1968; passed the Wilderness Act into law in 1964; and protected nonhuman animals through the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (43-51). Thus the biocentric tradition is able to persuade many people to offer protection to the nonhuman life.
A recent development in the biocentric tradition is the philosophy of ecofeminism. Though there are many variations of ecofeminism, Karen Warren generally describes ecofeminism as “the position that there are important connections—historical, experiential, symbolic, theoretical—between domination of women and the domination of nature” (Des Jardins, 239). Ecofeminism, which is not unlike Leopold’s land ethic, values life other than humans, thus placing it in the biocentric tradition. The vocabulary of feminists, including such words as “domination” and “hierarchy” provide a valuable lens through which we may perceive the environment. Murray Bookchin’s social ecology also uses this language, and “suggests that social structures of domination preceded the domination of nature” (243). To repair our relationship with nature, then, and make it “diversified, balanced, and harmonious,” we must completely reconfigure human society. Social ecology promotes sustainable agriculture and appropriate technologies to achieve this end (245).
Another philosophy that advocates a radical transformation of society is deep ecology. Deep ecology so values nonhuman life that two of its advocates, Arne Naess and George Sessions, say that “humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity [of nonhuman life] except to satisfy vital needs” (217). Furthermore, they propose that for other life to flourish, the human population must be drastically decreased. Deep ecology is an attempt to rethink the very foundations of human culture and society; it rejects most of civilization in favor of a holistic, natural, and simplified approach to culture, one that honors all of life.
Placing less emphasis spiritual connections (emphasized by biocentrism), the ecologic tradition instead turns to scientific study of the natural world. Its roots are buried deep in the philosophies of natural law and are “characterized mostly by the desire to uncover predictable ‘laws of nature’ and to use those laws according to the prevailing religion, ideology, or dominant class interests” (Petulla, 19). The ecologic tradition contains a focus on understanding of “progress” and its effects on both humans and the environment (20).
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, armed with facts about DDT, brought public focus to the issues of ecology and human impact on the environment. This provoked a discussion about pesticide use, and in 1972 Congress passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, which provided basic regulation on environmentally hazardous pesticides (66-67). Barry Commoner, another environmentalist in the ecologic tradition, demonstrated the problems of saturating watersheds with organic wastes and detergents, noting especially that Lake Erie was “dying” (69). Now ecology has become a regularly studied science, and many Americans are familiar with its basic ideas, such as the interrelation of species and the harm caused by pollution.
The third tradition of environmentalism is a turn from science to economics. “It grew out of the need to make efficiency a virtue in early capitalist society” (20). Environmental economists make particular note of the inefficient use of scarce natural resources and the heavy tolls of pollution on “significant natural environments” (21). Using the language of economics, environmentalists are able to dialogue with corporations, which tend to understand money but not morality.
Perhaps the most powerful tool of the environmental economist is cost-benefit analysis. If the costs, particularly environmental, of a project outweigh that project’s benefit, then the project should not be undertaken. Also considered is the discount rate, which takes into account the fact that certain assets will be more highly valued in the future, as it becomes more difficult to obtain them. Had this sort of knowledge been prevalent at the beginning of the 20th century, Petulla claims that the Hetch Hetchy Valley would not have been dammed at all (81). Today, environmental economics is crucial in our understanding of resource allocation and energy usage.
Philosophy of Ecopledge
Ecopledge draws on all three of these traditions—the biocentric, the ecologic, and the economic—in order to find philosophical and moral justification for its actions. I will begin this section with a brief account of the workings of Ecopledge.
Ecopledge is, in essence, a national grassroots organization that promotes corporate accountability for environmental action. It is built as a coalition of other environmental organizations, and the campaigns of Ecopledge correspond to the campaigns of these other organizations. Ecopledge asks its target corporations to take “simple and inexpensive” steps to help the environment. The primary tactic used is the Ecopledge itself—a pledge that people sign to indicate that they will not buy from, work for, or invest in corporations not agreeing to the demands of Ecopledge. Ecopledge works primarily with students, who have considerable economic power with corporations, as those bright young minds are the desire of any corporation. The corporate targets of Ecopledge are chosen for a variety of reasons, and the philosophical justifications for targeting these corporations work well to stimulate Ecopledge’s members, though the corporations themselves must be persuaded to action by economic reasons instead. The following is a brief list of some of Ecopledge’s targets, past and present, and the reasons for which they were targeted.
PepsiCo, the soft-drink manufacturer, had long been selling soda in plastic bottles, but it never had used recycled plastic in the making of those bottles. Ecopledge pushed Pepsi to use recycled plastic. By doing so, Ecopledge promoted a sustainable industry in the spirit of Bookchin’s social ecology. Furthermore, Pepsi’s use of recycled plastic would decrease reliance on virgin materials needed for the manufacture of plastics, preserving those materials for future use and making efficient use of available resources.
Also emphasizing efficiency and recycling is Ecopledge’s campaign against Dell, the computer manufacturer. By necessity, computers contain many hazardous chemicals. When obsolete computers are thrown away, these toxins end up in landfills and watersheds, and then affect both humans and the natural world. Ecopledge wants Dell to implement a free computer recycling program, so consumers can send their old computers back to Dell for recycling and reusing (some components of old computers can be reused, others must be disposed of in environmentally responsible ways). The motivation for this campaign is largely human health, for no one wants to drink poisoned water. But it is also an attempt to decrease human impact on the environment, fitting directly into the ecologic tradition.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is one of the most pristine wilderness areas in America, but there is a possibility that this area will be opened to oil exploration by Congress. Ecopledge wants the petroleum company BP Amoco to promise not to drill in ANWR, even if Congress opens it to oil exploration. By taking this step, BP Amoco would not only live up to its image of an environmentally friendly oil company but also take the lead in promoting environmentally responsible actions among the oil industry. Ecopledge values the sanctity of undisturbed wilderness and the life in it, and uses this as its leverage against BP Amoco.
In another attempt to preserve unique and diverse ecosystems, Ecopledge has targeted several companies—Home Depot, Sprint, Staples, and Office Depot—for their use of old growth trees in paper products. Old growth is a term indicating forests that have experienced minimal human impact and have been in a pristine state for decades, if not centuries. By discouraging the use of old growth products, Ecopledge is encouraging sustainable alternatives, especially recycled paper. Ecopledge is placing an intrinsic value on old growth forests—thus an old growth forest is “valued for itself and not simply valued for its uses” (Des Jardins, 144).
Section II : How to Organize
The essential goal of the environmental movement is to give political and economic power to the environment, an entity that has traditionally been disregarded in these places. The environmentalist must be the Lorax and stand in for the environment when other people cannot understand its power and importance.
The environment can be classified in the terms of Saul Alinsky as a Have-Not. From the beginning of human history, it has been trampled upon, beaten down, raped, plowed, plundered, and disregarded. The environment is a Have-Not also in the sense that it has not a voice with which to speak. Its only communication comes when people develop skin cancer from too much UV radiation, have their property burned from poor forest fire management, or encounter other such signs of environmental degradation. What follows is a list of tactics and strategies for organizing people to speak for the environment.
Recruitment
In order for environmentalists confront the world, they must first show that they have power. Alinsky says that “power has always derived from two main sources, money and people. Lacking power, the Have-Nots must build power from their own flesh and blood” (127). The grassroots environmental organizer must recruit people to his or her cause, thus building a foundation of power, before continuing to press for change. Recruitment can occur in many ways, whether people show their support through petitions, through volunteering, or through becoming organizers themselves.
In the 2001-02 school year, I was involved with a small group of students at St. Olaf organizing to rid the campus of paper made from old growth forests. Though only four or five people were directly involved in organizing the campaign, those organizers sent a petition around the school that collected signatures of over half of the student body. This petition then allowed the organizers access to the student senate and college administration, where we finally were able to make changes. Now the campus uses paper with 30% recycled content.
During my time with the Colorado University (CU) Ecopledge, that organization performed a massive recruitment operation. Each day of the week, several volunteers took clipboards and flyers to the sidewalks, and asked passing students if they were interested in signing the Ecopledge or volunteering with the organization. Student volunteers also gave announcements about Ecopledge to various classes on campus. Both of these tactics provided substantial visibility for Ecopledge, which makes people more comfortable with the group in the future, and it had the direct effect of recruiting nearly eight hundred students and about fifteen dedicated interns into the organization.
The labor strike in Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle runs in to many roadblocks, both literally and figuratively, and its organizers find it difficult to continue. But Mac, one of the communist organizers, understands that this strike, whether or not it succeeds, has taught over a thousand men that they can become organized, and it has developed a strong leader in a man named London. Mac says of London, “But London’s a valuable guy. We need him. I don’t like to get these stiffs killed off; they’re good guys. But we need London. This whole strike’s worth it if London comes over.” (305)
It is important for the organizer to discover other people who would make great leaders and organizers and to recruit these people to the cause. This makes the movement stronger.
With enough visibility, recruitment happens naturally and without much struggle. If people see that an organization can get things done, they will likely join. The St. Olaf Ecopledge noticed a surge of interest from students after it had performed a grand media stunt, sending in hundreds of plastic Pepsi bottles to the CEO of Pepsi, asking him to recycle the bottles into newly manufactured ones. Saul Alinsky says of a new organizer, “His acceptance as an organizer depends on his success in convincing key people…that he has ideas, and knows how to fight to change things; that he’s not one of these guys ‘doing his thing,’ that he’s a winner” (99).
My Knowledge Bowl coach, Jan Baker, used to tell her team, “We play because we like to have fun, and it’s more fun to win.” People are more likely to join an organization if they know it will be successful.
Communication
Communication among members of an organization, especially between the organizer and the organization, must be clear and understandable, or the organization will have no substance. Alinsky says, “It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people” (81). He offers good insight into the nature of communication:
Communication with others takes place when they understand what you’re trying to get across to them. … People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience. Further, communication is a two way process. (81)
And further writes: “Another maxim in effective communication is that people have to make their own decisions” (91).
The organization of CU Ecopledge provides a good example of this sort of communication. Each week, Sara, the organizer, meets with several of her most dedicated volunteers and leaders and walks them through the issues at hand and through the processes of organizing. A critical element of these meetings is the training that Sara provides. She trains her leaders individually (instead of en masse) so that she can effectively communicate with each of them based on their experiences. She then trains those leaders how to train other people using that element of individualized training. In this way, the leaders of the group learn to effectively communicate with the rest of the group, and at each level there is a personal communication about the issues at hand and methods to make things better. This means that the person being trained has ample opportunity to ask questions about the subject matter and more fully understand the organization and its goals.
Education is essential component of communication, especially in the realm of environmental organizing. Often people organize to find solutions to problems that directly affect them—higher wages, better treatment by landlords, or public transportation—but people organizing for the environment often do not know what the problems are. The target corporations for Ecopledge are especially discreet about their environmental impact, and substantial research is required to learn what environmental problems need to be addressed and how they ought to best be addressed. The information then acquired must be delivered to all people in the organization.
Another form of education occurs when concerned people simply get together and talk about what is on their minds. If the organizer is in the midst of such a conversation, he or she comes to understand the individuals better by listening to them share their viewpoints. Furthermore, those individuals engaged in the conversation have a chance to clarify their own thoughts, build relationships with one another, and develop motivation for action.
St. Olaf’s Ecopledge spent its first semester with very little education, focusing solely on easy to understand campaigns—Pepsi’s negligence of recycled plastic or BP Amoco’s desire to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). To its shame, the lack of clarity in Ecopledge’s campaign with BP Amoco meant that several letters to the editor and opinion articles brought up the fact that Ecopledge members had driven cars to a protest at an Amoco gas station. The messaging for the campaign was not “Stop using oil!” but “Stop ANWR drilling!” But these messages were mixed up by members of the organization and consequently by the media. To help with this problem, Ecopledge for spring semester will have several volunteers dedicated to researching Ecopledge’s target corporations and reporting to the group with their findings.
The carnivore restoration group Sinapu, at Colorado University, spends a large majority of its time educating its members and the public about wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions. It sponsors trips to wolf centers, invites wolves to the campus, performs population studies in the Rockies—all for the primary goal of education. They focus too much on education to the exclusion of action, but this group understands the importance of a well-educated populace if changes in favor of the wilderness are to be made.
Community
A good organization provides not only results, but also a sense of purpose and community for its members. When a group is a community in which its individuals understand one another and how to work with one another, everyone is more fulfilled and more action can take place. It is my opinion that in any group setting that is wishing to foster community and commitment to a common purpose, personal interaction is essential.
In a smaller group, this is not so difficult to accomplish. During the fall semester at St. Olaf, fellow Ecopledge leader Justin Johnson and I made it our goal to spend some one-on-one time with each of the members. This greatly increased the commitment of many of those individuals, and we were able to establish strong relationships with our members, which in turn produced a relaxed but invigorating atmosphere during our regular meetings.
In the larger organization of Ecopledge at CU, the element of personal contact becomes more difficult. The organization develops a simple and informal hierarchical structure. Sara, the organizer, meets regularly with her fifteen interns and several dedicated volunteers. These people then plan and coordinate events throughout the semesters, and one of them regularly coordinates an effort to make telephone calls to the eight hundred potential volunteers to see if they can help out in any way. The telephone call allows for a personal communication with the volunteers; this fosters relationships between the volunteer making the call and the volunteer receiving it. CU Ecopledge also had specific events designed to enhance community: weekend retreats to the mountains, unnecessary scrambles to flood the campus with posters, parties together on Friday nights, etc.
Leadership Development
Activities like those just mentioned indirectly create leaders for an organization. The people attending have a better look inside the organization, understand better its principles and goals, and will automatically be in leadership roles when they meet with other members of the organization. Developing leadership should not just be such a passive experience, but rather an active one. Good communication and a strong community will greatly aid the development of leaders, but specific training is also required.
The best way for people to learn is by doing it themselves. When I first learned to make media contacts for press releases, about 20% of my training was another activist telling me what to do and the other 80% me actually doing it. Training means being made comfortable with an activity. I already knew how to talk and what I should tell the press when I called them, but it was important for me to learn to be comfortable with talking on the phone to news editors.
Steinbeck offers insight into the training of leaders when Mac says to Jim, “I’ll train you, and then you can train new men. Kind of like teaching hunting dogs by running them with the old boys, see?” (30). It is necessary to establish power through a strong organization if environmental action is to occur. But what action can a strong organization take?
Alinksy’s Tactical Rules
Before digressing into specific tactics and examples, I here record Alinsky’s thirteen rules on tactics, which summarize the most important aspects of environmental organizing.
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
(Alinsky, 127-130)
Working with the Government
I have never done any activism that required interaction with the government, so I will just touch on this topic. I see three main ways of dealing with the government: local intervention, statewide or national lobbying, and committee work.
By local intervention, I mean direct contact of city or county officials, appearances at council meetings, calls for public meetings about environmental dilemmas, and the like. Paul Wellstone’s book How the Rural Poor Got Power describes the actions of the Organization for a Better Rice County (OBRC). It details the actions taken by OBRC to deal with problems such as a lack of senior transportation in Faribault, MN, or a decreasing housing allowance for recipients of welfare. In many cases, the local administration became scared of the growing power of OBRC and gave in to the organization’s demands.
State-wide or national lobbying is different than that which is on a local level, because it often is farther away and necessitates less direct action by the populace. Tactics that fall into this category are phone calls, letters, and emails to state or national congressmen, governors, the President, etc. As a rule of thumb, the more the merrier; if a congressional office receives one hundred calls on an issue instead of only one, it is much more likely to act. Also in this category of lobbying are groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, which work with national officials on environmental issues.
Environmental issues can be tackled regionally in city, county, or state sponsored conservation boards or environmental boards. Often these committees are made up of citizen volunteers who understand the local environments. For example, there is an Environmental Commission in the city of Chanhassen, a suburb of Minneapolis. This group watches over new developments in the city, ensuring the preservation of unique wetland habitats and other important ecosystems. It also works to promote environmental awareness (through such unique campaigns as “Revenge of the Green Pond Scum,” which worked to prevent eutrophication of drainage ponds), corporate responsibility for the environment (e.g. by offering environmental awards to businesses), and various other volunteer and education initiatives. My mother serves on this Environmental Commission and says that it is a good way to protect the environment, especially since the commission reports directly to the city council and is able to serve as an advisory panel for upcoming projects.
Working with Corporations
The government and its agencies are not the only people vying to trample the sacred lands of our nation: corporations too can employ thousands, if not millions, and have much potential for harming (or helping) the environment. Often they are found to be harming more than helping, and this is where the environmental organizer steps in. The profit-driven corporation has much at stake if it does not please its customers, and this can provide strong leverage for asking corporations to change.
Ecopledge uses strategies along this line of reasoning. First and foremost, the Ecopledge itself has been signed by over one hundred thousand people agreeing that they will not “work for, buy from or invest in the companies listed on Ecopledge boycott list.” The first statement of the Ecopledge, that signers will not work for a boycotted corporation, works especially well because Ecopledge’s support base is largely college students with flashy resumes—people who corporations want to hire. This, in addition to a traditional boycott, can be very effective. Alinsky writes, using the example of a department store, that the power of a boycott “comes when the picketed department store sees a number of its customers going across to its competitors” (151). Ecopledge followed this exactly in the case of plastic soda bottles: first it asked Coca-cola to increase the recycled content in its bottles, and once that company had agreed, Ecopledge threatened to boycott Pepsi if it did not follow suit, forcing it to also use more recycled plastic. (Pepsi’s bottles are now made with 10% recycled material.) Neither Pepsi nor Coca-cola was put onto Ecopledge’s boycott list, which gives support to Alinsky’s ninth rule: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself” (129).
In addition to the boycott, Ecopledge applies pressure to corporations via phone calls, letters, and media events. Phone calls work when a company has a customer complaint department just waiting to hear from its customers. This provides an easy target for a mass of people to call in all at once, flooding the phone lines about whatever issue is pressing at the moment. St. Olaf Ecopledge used this tactic with the Pepsi campaign mentioned earlier, and was able to place over a hundred calls within an hour. Each caller asked for written documentation of Pepsi’s position on recycled plastic, and each received a letter, forcing the corporation to spend more time with our complaint. However, the call-in tactic can backfire as well. St. Olaf Ecopledge was working to ask Dell to provide a computer recycling program to its customers, and had planned a call-in day. We soon learned the customer relations people who we were calling were actually working for a telecommunications company hired by Dell to handle phone calls, and they know nothing about computer recycling. After two hours of telephone hide-and-seek, we reached an executive at Dell who knew something about this issue, but at that point any energy for the call-in had waned, and our campaign flopped.
I am unsure of the benefits of letter writing. In the scheme of environmental organizing against corporations, letter-writing seems to be one of the most tedious and ineffective tactics. I have never seen any organizer thrilled about the idea of writing letters. A phone call is much more personal and allows for a digression not allowed in a letter. A widely publicized protest, media stunt, or other memorable event hits closer to a corporation’s soul (if they can even be said to have one) than either a letter writing or phone calling campaign. I will group these under the head of “media event.” Corporations rely on public image to sell products. In a world where many companies make similar products, advertising and marketing are what sell products. Consider the television advertisements during the Super Bowl—thirty seconds of airtime sell for around $2 million. Environmentalists can use advertising and publicity against corporations by tarnishing their public images and raising awareness about corporate policy regarding environmental issues. Like a commercial, a media event must be able to grab the attention of the public and make them, and more importantly, the targeted corporation, remember the campaign. Unique, crazy ideas tend to provide the best material for a media event, and tend to draw coverage from the press, which is essential for communication with corporations, who take interest in their branding if it is splashed across several newspapers and television screens.
Saul Alinsky writes vividly about several of his best media events: inner-city blacks protesting in front of the suburban home of an unjust white landlord, two hundred ill-treated blacks farting during an orchestra performance in Rochester, New York, and the never-performed “shit-in” that would have occupied all of the bathrooms of the O’Hare Airport for a day. These demonstrations follow precisely two of Alinksy’s most important rules, “Never go outside the experience of your people” and “Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy” (127).
Returning to the example of the Pepsi campaign, St. Olaf Ecopledge performed a media stunt in front of the local post office, congregating with about seventy students to mail plastic bottles back to Pepsi with labels saying, “Recycle this bottle into a new bottle.” Students dressed up as plastic bottles, wearing plastic wrap and home made Pepsi logos. Others took off their shirts in the chilly air and wrote on themselves, “Not recycling is cold.” Local newspapers provided favorable coverage for us, and gave Pepsi a bad image. Shortly after our event, Pepsi conceded to Ecopledge’s demands for more recycled content in its bottles. The absurdity of sending empty Pepsi bottles back to their makers, in addition to the costuming of several students and the fact that Ecopledge had collected over one thousand bottles, had brought much attention to the event. In the end, the most creative tactic wins out, and wins victories for the environment.
Conclusion
People become environmentalists for many reasons, whether they imagine themselves to be creatures of the forest or want to fight for just treatment of our mute environment. When they come together in groups, having a common cause, they are able to wield great power, and they are able to make changes for the benefit of the environment. The tactics are many but the voice is one, and this gives us hope.
Bibliography
Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1971.
Des Jardins, Joseph R. Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Inc., 1993.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays of Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.
Petulla, Joseph M. American Environmentalism: Values, Tactics, Priorities. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1980.
Steinbeck, John. In Dubious Battle. New York: Random House, 1936.
Wellstone, Paul. How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grassroots Organizer. Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1978.