Comments John Stauber has made

This is no screed, just a statement of fact...

Here is some background reading:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Big_Green

This link above will take you to a an article on the edited wiki SourceWatch titled "Big Green".  The article contains various critiques of the big non-profit environmental corporations, critiques over the years from writers and activists including Mark Dowie, Jeffrey St. Clair, Brian Tokar, Peter Montague, me and others.

My statement is no screed, it's just a fact.  The biggest challenge facing the green movement is how to create powerful change starting at the grassroots.  The huge national and transnational environmental organizations that have been built since 1970, when I was a highschooler organizing the first Earth Day, have spent billions of dollars over the past almost 40 years, and yet the green movement is politically weak and disorganized. Indeed, they are feared little by polluting corporations who have learned well how to communicate, coopt and even fund them.  Politicians and lobbyists understand their weaknesses and especially their failure to educate and mobilize at the grassroots.

We need to redirect money and resources away from the top and to the grassroots, building infrastructure and democratic power at the local, congressional and state level.  The lobby organizations based in DC should be accountable to that structure, not view the grassroots as simply a fundraising an online petition pool.

No existing top down group, whether government, big business or non-profit advocacy corporation, is going to allow itself to be democratized. Power doesn't dissolve itself.   It will take activists and funders with a fundamentally democratic vision, faith in populist organizing, and an ability to collaborate,  to create new vehicles for social change that can meet the massive challenges of climate, energy, poverty and corporate domination of civil culture and political policy.  Marrying together the best tactics of the new 'netroots' with the wisdom and skills of grassroots organizing -- that's the way to go if we are going to move greens from whining to winning.On Top heavy? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 3 Responses