The Wrong Kind of Green

[Paul Mobbs]

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This article concentrates on climate, but I think it goes for other types of 
work too (e.g., Biffa's sponsorship of CAT, or the various "green awards" 
targeted at local conservation projects).

It's a parallel story for political parties too, and their present problems 
with the electorate.

To summarise, "If you sup in the pig sty, you'll smell like a pig!"

P.


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari

The Wrong Kind of Green
By Johann Hari

This article appeared in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 4, 2010


Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for 
policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway 
global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only 
real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though 
they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal? 

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation 
International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to 
protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in 
human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight 
are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying 
science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; 
sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals 
trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking 
the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of 
Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and 
say, "Do you see that chimney sticking up? That's where my house was... I had 
to [abandon it] six months ago." I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and 
watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have 
stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, "The 
water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left."

While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American 
green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, 
trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many 
were on a different path--one that began in the 1980s, with a financial 
donation.

Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy 
individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental 
destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving 
vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air 
and water pollution. But Jay Hair--president of the National Wildlife 
Federation from 1981 to 1995--was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source 
of revenue: the worst polluters.

Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to 
conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine 
places. Yes, by the late 1980s it had become clear that they were dramatically 
destabilizing the climate--the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that 
didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their 
wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from 
them, and in return his organization and others, like The Nature Conservancy 
(TNC), gave them awards for "environmental stewardship."

Companies like Shell and British Petroleum (BP) were delighted. They saw it as 
valuable "reputation insurance": every time they were criticized for their 
massive emissions of warming gases, or for being involved in the killing of 
dissidents who wanted oil funds to go to the local population, or an oil spill 
that had caused irreparable damage, they wheeled out their shiny green awards, 
purchased with "charitable" donations, to ward off the prospect of government 
regulation. At first, this behavior scandalized the environmental community. 
Hair was vehemently condemned as a sellout and a charlatan. But slowly, the 
other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups 
swelled--so they, too, started to take the checks.

Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how 
deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work 
for Conservation International in 2006. She told me, "About a week or two 
after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organization's 
media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project 
they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that 
the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the 
most polluting plant in the whole country.... But nobody in that meeting, or 
anywhere else in the organization, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. 
You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, 
and that was it."

She soon began to see--as she explains in her whistleblowing book Green Inc.--
how this behavior has pervaded almost all the mainstream green organizations. 
They take money, and in turn they offer praise, even when the money comes from 
the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, 
when it was revealed that many of IKEA's dining room sets were made from trees 
ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund leapt to the company's 
defense, saying--wrongly--that IKEA "can never guarantee" this won't happen. 
Is it a coincidence that WWF is a "marketing partner" with IKEA, and takes 
cash from the company?

Likewise, the Sierra Club was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox 
bleach, who said that if the Club endorsed their new range of "green" 
household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The Club's 
Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of 
interest--but took it anyway. Executive director Carl Pope defended the move 
in an e-mail to members, in which he claimed that the organization had carried 
out a serious analysis of the cleaners to see if they were "truly superior." 
But it hadn't. The Club's Toxics Committee co-chair, Jessica Frohman, said, 
"We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, the 
committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than 
its competitors' or good for the environment in any way.

The green groups defend their behavior by saying they are improving the 
behavior of the corporations. But as these stories show, the pressure often 
flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green 
groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation 
groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; 
they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that 
support them."

It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm 
among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, 
and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty 
International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the 
Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take 
funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is 
preposterous--yet it is now taken for granted.

This pattern was bad enough when it affected only a lousy household cleaning 
spray, or a single rare forest. But today, the stakes are unimaginably higher. 
We are living through a brief window of time in which we can still prevent 
runaway global warming. We have emitted so many warming gases into the 
atmosphere that the world's climate scientists say we are close to the 
climate's "point of no return." Up to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, all sorts 
of terrible things happen--we lose the islands of the South Pacific, we set in 
train the loss of much of Florida and Bangladesh, terrible drought ravages 
central Africa--but if we stop the emissions of warming gases, we at least 
have a fifty-fifty chance of stabilizing the climate at this higher level. This 
is already an extraordinary gamble with human safety, and many climate 
scientists say we need to aim considerably lower: 1.5 degrees or less.

Beyond 2 degrees, the chances of any stabilization at the hotter level begin 
to vanish, because the earth's natural processes begin to break down. The huge 
amounts of methane stored in the Arctic permafrost are belched into the 
atmosphere, causing more warming. The moist rainforests begin to dry out and 
burn down, releasing all the carbon they store into the air, and causing more 
warming. These are "tipping points": after them, we can't go back to the 
climate in which civilization evolved.

So in an age of global warming, the old idea of conservation--that you 
preserve one rolling patch of land, alone and inviolate--makes no sense. If 
the biosphere is collapsing all around you, you can't ring-fence one lush 
stretch of greenery and protect it: it too will die. 

You would expect the American conservation organizations to be joining the 
great activist upsurge demanding we stick to a safe level of carbon dioxide in 
the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm), according to professor and NASA 
climatologist James Hansen. And--in public, to their members--they often are 
supportive. On its website the Sierra Club says, "If the level stays higher 
than 350 ppm for a prolonged period of time (it's already at 390.18 ppm) it 
will spell disaster for humanity as we know it." 

But behind closed doors, it sings from a different song-sheet. Kieran Suckling, 
executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, in Arizona, which 
refuses funding from polluters, has seen this from the inside. He told me, 
"There is a gigantic political schizophrenia here. The Sierra Club will send 
out e-mails to its membership saying we have to get to 350 parts per million 
and the science requires it. But in reality they fight against any sort of 
emission cuts that would get us anywhere near that goal."

For example, in 2009 the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the 
Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of 
pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety"--a change the Sierra 
Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the EPA to 
take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is 
"compatible with human safety": restore us to 350 ppm. Suckling explains, "I 
was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it 
should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA 
do it, they would probably intervene on EPA's side. They threw climate science 
out the window."

Indeed, the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel, David Bookbinder, ridiculed 
the center's attempts to make 350 ppm a legally binding requirement. He said 
it was "truly a pointless exercise" and headed to "well-deserved bureaucratic 
oblivion"--and would only add feebly that "350 may be where the planet should 
end up," but not by this mechanism. He was quoted in the media alongside Bush 
administration officials who shared his contempt for the center's proposal.

Why would the Sierra Club oppose a measure designed to prevent environmental 
collapse? The Club didn't respond to my requests for an explanation. Climate 
scientists are bemused. When asked about this, Hansen said, "I find the 
behavior of most environmental NGOs to be shocking.... I [do] not want to 
listen to their lame excuses for their abominable behavior." It is easy to see 
why groups like Conservation International, which take money from Big Oil and 
Big Coal, take backward positions. Their benefactors will lose their vast 
profits if we make the transition away from fossil fuels--so they fall 
discreetly silent when it matters. But while the Sierra Club accepts money 
from some corporations, it doesn't take cash from the very worst polluters. So 
why is it, on this, the biggest issue of all, just as bad?

It seems its leaders have come to see the world through the funnel of the US 
Senate and what legislation it can be immediately coaxed to pass. They say 
there is no point advocating a strategy that senators will reject flat-out. 
They have to be "politically realistic" and try to advocate something that 
will appeal to Blue Dog Democrats.

This focus on inch-by-inch reform would normally be understandable: every 
movement for change needs a reformist wing. But the existence of tipping 
points--which have been overwhelmingly proven by the climate science--makes a 
mockery of this baby-steps approach to global warming. If we exceed the safe 
amount of warming gases in the atmosphere, then the earth will release its 
massive carbon stores and we will have runaway warming. After that, any cuts 
we introduce will be useless. You can't jump halfway across a chasm: you still 
fall to your death. It is all or disaster.

By definition, if a bill can pass through today's corrupt Senate, then it will 
not be enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. Why? Because the bulk of 
the Senate--including many Democrats--is owned by Big Oil and Big Coal. They 
call the shots with their campaign donations. Senators will not defy their 
benefactors. So if you call only for measures the Senate could pass tomorrow, 
you are in effect giving a veto over the position of the green groups to the 
fossil fuel industry.

Yet the "conservation" groups in particular believe they are being hardheaded 
in adhering to the "political reality" that says only cuts far short of the 
climate science are possible. They don't seem to realize that in a conflict 
between political reality and physical reality, physical reality will prevail. 
The laws of physics are more real and permanent than any passing political 
system. You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, "Sorry, the swing 
states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years."

A classic case study of this inside-the-Beltway mentality can be found in a 
blog written by David Donniger, policy director of the climate center at the 
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), after the collapse of the Copenhagen 
climate summit. The summit ended with no binding agreement for any country to 
limit its emissions of greenhouse gases, and a disregard of the scientific 
targets. Given how little time we have, this was shocking. Donniger was indeed 
furious--with the people who were complaining. He decried the "howls of 
disaster in European media, and rather tepid reviews in many U.S. stories." He 
said people were "holding the accord to standards and expectations that no 
outcome achievable at Copenhagen could reasonably have met--or even should 
have met."

This last sentence is very revealing. Donniger believes it is "reasonable" to 
act within the constraints of the US and global political systems, and 
unreasonable to act within the constraints of the climate science. The greens, 
he suggests, are wrong to say their standards should have been met at this 
meeting; the deal is "not weak." After fifteen climate summits, after twenty 
years of increasingly desperate scientific warnings about warming, with the 
tipping points drawing ever closer, he says the world's leaders shouldn't be 
on a faster track and that the European and American media should stop 
whining. Remember, this isn't an oil company exec talking; this is a senior 
figure at one of the leading environmental groups.

There is a different way for green groups to behave. If the existing political 
system is so corrupt that it can't maintain basic human safety, they should be 
encouraging their members to take direct action to break the Big Oil deadlock. 
This is precisely what has happened in Britain--and it has worked. Direct-
action protesters have physically blocked coal trains and new airport runways 
for the past five years--and as a result, airport runway projects that looked 
certain are falling by the wayside, and politicians have become very nervous 
about authorizing any new coal power plants [see Maria Margaronis, "The UK's 
Climate Rebels," December 7, 2009]. The more mainstream British climate groups 
are not reluctant to condemn the Labour government's environmental failings in 
the strongest possible language. Compare the success of this direct 
confrontation with the utter failure of the US groups' work-within-the-system 
approach. As James Hansen has pointed out, the British model offers real hope 
rather than false hope. There are flickers of it already--there is an inspiring 
grassroots movement against coal power plants in the United States, supported 
by the Sierra Club--but it needs to be supercharged.

By pretending the broken system can work--and will work, in just a moment, 
after just one more Democratic win, or another, or another--the big green 
groups are preventing the appropriate response from concerned citizens, which 
is fury at the system itself. They are offering placebos to calm us down when 
they should be conducting and amplifying our anger at this betrayal of our 
safety by our politicians. The US climate bills are long-term plans: they lock 
us into a woefully inadequate schedule of carbon cuts all the way to 2050. So 
when green groups cheer them on, they are giving their approval to a path to 
destruction--and calling it progress.

Even within the constraints of the existing system, their approach makes for 
poor political tactics. As Suckling puts it, "They have an incredibly naïve 
political posture. Every time the Dems come out with a bill, no matter how 
appallingly short of the scientific requirements it is, they cheer it and say 
it's great. So the politicians have zero reason to strengthen that bill. If 
you've already announced that you've been captured, then they don't need to 
give you anything. Compare that to how the Chamber of Commerce or the fossil 
fuel corporations behave. They stake out a position on the far right, and they 
demand the center move their way. It works for them. They act like real 
activists, while the supposed activists stand at the back of the room and 
cheer at whatever bone is thrown their way." 

The green groups have become "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, 
regardless of how pathetic the party's position is," Suckling says in despair. 
"They have no bottom line, no interest in scientifically defensible greenhouse 
gas emission limitations and no willingness to pressure the White House or 
Congress." 

It will seem incredible at first, but this is--in fact--too generous. At 
Copenhagen, some of the US conservation groups demanded a course of action 
that will lead to environmental disaster--and financial benefits for themselves. 
It is a story buried in details and acronyms, but the stakes are the future of 
civilization.

When the rich countries say they are going to cut their emissions, it sounds 
to anyone listening as if they are going to ensure that there are fewer coal 
stations and many more renewable energy stations at home. So when Obama says 
there will be a 3 percent cut by 2020--a tenth of what the science requires--
you assume the United States will emit 3 percent fewer warming gases. But 
that's not how it works. Instead, they are saying they will trawl across the 
world to find the cheapest place to cut emissions, and pay for it to happen 
there.

Today, the chopping down of the world's forests is causing 12 percent of all 
emissions of greenhouse gases, because trees store carbon dioxide. So the rich 
governments say that if they pay to stop some of that, they can claim it as 
part of their cuts. A program called REDD--Reducing Emissions from 
Deforestation and Forest Degradation--has been set up to do just that. In 
theory, it sounds fine. The atmosphere doesn't care where the fall in emissions 
comes from, as long as it happens in time to stop runaway warming. A ton of 
carbon in Brazil enters the atmosphere just as surely as a ton in Texas.

If this argument sounds deceptively simple, that's because it is deceptive. In 
practice, the REDD program is filled with holes large enough to toss a planet 
through.

To understand the trouble with REDD, you have to look at the place touted as a 
model of how the system is supposed to work. Thirteen years ago in Bolivia, a 
coalition of The Nature Conservancy and three big-time corporate polluters--
BP, Pacificorp and American Electric Power (AEP)--set up a protected forest in 
Bolivia called the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project. They took 3.9 million 
acres of tropical forest and said they would clear out the logging companies 
and ensure that the forest remained standing. They claimed this plan would 
keep 55 million tons of CO2 locked out of the air--which would, in time, 
justify their pumping an extra 55 million tons into the air from their coal 
and oil operations. AEP's internal documents boasted: "The Bolivian 
project...could save AEP billions of dollars in pollution controls."

Greenpeace sent an investigative team to see how it had turned out. The group 
found, in a report released last year, that some of the logging companies had 
simply picked up their machinery and moved to the next rainforest over. An 
employee for San Martin, one of the biggest logging companies in the area, 
bragged that nobody had ever asked if they had stopped. This is known as 
"leakage": one area is protected from logging, but the logging leaks a few 
miles away and continues just the same.

In fact, one major logging organization took the money it was paid by the 
project to quit and used it to cut down another part of the forest. The 
project had to admit it had saved 5.8 million tons or less--a tenth of the 
amount it had originally claimed. Greenpeace says even this is a huge 
overestimate. It's a Potemkin forest for the polluters.

When you claim an offset and it doesn't work, the climate is screwed twice 
over--first because the same amount of forest has been cut down after all, and 
second because a huge amount of additional warming gases has been pumped into 
the atmosphere on the assumption that the gases will be locked away by the 
now-dead trees. So the offset hasn't prevented emissions--it's doubled them. 
And as global warming increases, even the small patches of rainforest that 
have technically been preserved are doomed. Why? Rainforests have a very 
delicate humid ecosystem, and their moisture smothers any fire that breaks out, 
but with 2 degrees of warming, they begin to dry out--and burn down. 
Climatologist Wolfgang Cramer says we "risk losing the entire Amazon" if 
global warming reaches 4 degrees.

And the news gets worse. Carbon dioxide pumped out of a coal power station 
stays in the atmosphere for millenniums--so to genuinely "offset" it, you have 
to guarantee that a forest will stand for the same amount of time. This would 
be like Julius Caesar in 44 BC making commitments about what Barack Obama will 
do today--and what some unimaginable world leader will do in 6010. In 
practice, we can't even guarantee that the forests will still be standing in 
fifty years, given the very serious risk of runaway warming.

You would expect the major conservation groups to be railing against this 
absurd system and demanding a serious alternative built on real science. But 
on Capitol Hill and at Copenhagen, these groups have been some of the most 
passionate defenders of carbon offsetting. They say that, in "political 
reality," this is the only way to raise the cash for the rainforests, so we 
will have to work with it. But this is a strange kind of compromise--since it 
doesn't actually work.

In fact, some of the big groups lobbied to make the protections weaker, in a 
way that will cause the rainforests to die faster. To understand why, you have 
to grasp a distinction that may sound technical at first but is crucial. When 
you are paying to stop deforestation, there are different ways of measuring 
whether you are succeeding. You can take one small "subnational" area--like 
the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project--and save that. Or you can look at an 
entire country, and try to save a reasonable proportion of its forests. 
National targets are much better, because the leakage is much lower. With 
national targets, it's much harder for a logging company simply to move a few 
miles up the road and carry on: the move from Brazil to Congo or Indonesia is 
much heftier, and fewer loggers will make it.

Simon Lewis, a forestry expert at Leeds University, says, "There is no 
question that national targets are much more effective at preventing leakage 
and saving forest than subnational targets."

Yet several groups--like TNC and Conservation International--have lobbied for 
subnational targets to be at the core of REDD and the US climate bills. Thanks 
in part to their efforts, this has become official US government policy, and is 
at the heart of the Waxman-Markey bill. The groups issued a joint statement 
with some of the worst polluters--AEP, Duke Energy, the El Paso Corporation--
saying they would call for subnational targets now, while vaguely aspiring to 
national targets at some point down the line. They want to preserve small 
patches (for a short while), not a whole nation's rainforest.

An insider who is employed by a leading green group and has seen firsthand how 
this works explained the groups' motivation: "It's because they will generate 
a lot of revenue this way. If there are national targets, the money runs 
through national governments. If there are subnational targets, the money runs 
through the people who control those forests--and that means TNC, Conservation 
International and the rest. Suddenly, these forests they run become assets, 
and they are worth billions in a carbon market as offsets. So they have a 
vested financial interest in offsetting and in subnational targets--even though 
they are much more environmentally damaging than the alternatives. They know 
it. It's shocking."

What are they doing to ensure that this policy happens--and the money flows 
their way? Another source, from a green group that refuses corporate cash, 
describes what she has witnessed behind closed doors. "In their lobbying, they 
always talk up the need for subnational projects and offsetting at every turn 
and say they're great. They don't mention national targets or the problems 
with offsetting at all. They also push it through their corporate partners, who 
have an army of lobbyists, [which are] far bigger than any environmental 
group. They promote their own interests as a group, not the interests of the 
environment." They have been caught, he says, "REDD-handed, too many times."

TNC and Conservation International admit they argue for subnational 
accounting, but they claim this is merely a "steppingstone" to national 
targets. Becky Chacko, director of climate policy at Conservation 
International, tells me, "Our only interest is to keep forests standing. We 
don't [take this position] because it generates revenue for us. We don't think 
it's an evil position to say money has to flow in order to keep forests 
standing, and these market mechanisms can contribute the money for that."

Yet when I ask her to explain how Conservation International justifies the 
conceptual holes in the entire system of offsetting, her answers become 
halting. She says the "issues of leakage and permanence" have been "resolved." 
But she will not say how. How can you guarantee a forest will stand for 
millenniums, to offset carbon emissions that warm the planet for millenniums? 
"We factor that risk into our calculations," she says mysteriously. She will 
concede that national accounting is "more rigorous" and says Conservation 
International supports achieving it "eventually." 

There is a broad rumble of anger across the grassroots environmental movement 
at this position. "At Copenhagen, I couldn't believe what I was seeing," says 
Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organization that sides with indigenous 
peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land. "These groups are 
positioning themselves to be the middlemen in a carbon market. They are 
helping to set up, in effect, a global system of carbon laundering...that will 
give the impression of action, but no substance. You have to ask--are these 
conservation groups at all? They look much more like industry front groups to 
me."

So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creeping corporate corruption, 
some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image 
of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet. They are 
supporting a system they know will lead to ecocide, because more revenue will 
run through their accounts, for a while, as the collapse occurs. At 
Copenhagen, their behavior was so shocking that Lumumba Di-Aping, the lead 
negotiator for the G-77 bloc of the world's rainforest-rich but cash-poor 
countries, compared them to the CIA at the height of the cold war, sabotaging 
whole nations.

How do we retrieve a real environmental movement, in the very short time we 
have left? Charles Komanoff, who worked as a consultant for the Natural 
Resources Defense Council for thirty years, says, "We're close to a civil war 
in the environmental movement. For too long, all the oxygen in the room has 
been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost 
nothing.... We need to create new organizations that represent the 
fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals."

Some of the failing green groups can be reformed from within. The Sierra Club 
is a democratic organization, with the leadership appointed by its members. 
There are signs that members are beginning to put the organization right after 
the missteps of the past few years. Carl Pope is being replaced by Mike Brune, 
formerly of the Rainforest Action Network--a group much more aligned with the 
radical demands of the climate science. But other organizations--like 
Conservation International and TNC--seem incapable of internal reform and 
simply need to be shunned. They are not part of the environmental movement: 
they are polluter-funded leeches sucking on the flesh of environmentalism, 
leaving it weaker and depleted.

Already, shining alternatives are starting to rise up across America. In just 
a year, the brilliant 350.org has formed a huge network of enthusiastic 
activists who are demanding our politicians heed the real scientific advice--
not the parody of it offered by the impostors. They have to displace the 
corrupt conservationists as the voice of American environmentalism, fast.

This will be a difficult and ugly fight, when we need all our energy to take on 
the forces of ecocide. But these conservation groups increasingly resemble the 
forces of ecocide draped in a green cloak. If we don't build a real, 
unwavering environmental movement soon, we had better get used to a new 
sound--of trees crashing down and an ocean rising, followed by the muffled, 
private applause of America's "conservationists." 


- -- 
"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government,
nor are we for this party nor against the other but we are
for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom,
that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness,
righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity with
God, and with one another, that these things may abound."
(Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice')

Paul's book, "Energy Beyond Oil", is out now!
For details see http://www.fraw.org.uk/ebo/

Read my message board, "Ecolonomics", at:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ecolonomics/

Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations
3 Grosvenor Road, Banbury OX16 5HN, England
tel./fax (+44/0)1295 261864
email - mobbsey at gn.apc.org
website - http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/index.shtml
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