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Some segments of the politicized environmental movement are suffering cash flow problems as donor institutions and individuals shift their support to other endeavors. There's some soul searching going on to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. This essay, Rethinking Green Philanthropy, by a pair of long time activists is an example. [via: Conservation News]
Green philanthropy in the United States is in trouble. And not for just the obvious reasons of the downturn in the stock markets... Have we noticed that we have been losing most of the political and ecological battles over the last ten years while we continue to approach grantmaking in the mode of 10, 20 and 30 years ago?The authors, Peter M. Lavigne and David W. Orr, blame the donors, accusing them of being myopic and fickle, supporting short term targeted interventions and shifting their priorities with current fashion rather than investing heavily in organization and infrastructure. Painfully, major institutional donations are drying up.
... beginning about 5 years ago, some major national funders stopped their environmental programs completely. The most obvious examples include the shutdown of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, and the closure of the Rockefeller Foundation’s environmental program, which stopped funding environmental issues in favor of global health and trade issues...the Moriah Fund, a relatively small but important and innovative funder, closed its environment program.So, they propose stealing a page from the enemy play book....cutbacks in funding due to the stock market collapse that are, in some cases, exacerbated by single stock endowments. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation[3] and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation[4] are the most prominent examples. The Turner Foundation is unendowed and dependent on Ted Turner's annual gifts to the Foundation. Turner’s Foundation shut down for 2003 and 2004 due in large part to the loss of value of AOL-Time Warner stock holdings.[5] Many others experienced substantial endowment losses, causing cutbacks of 20-50% in annual grantmaking. Some of the more mainline and middle of the road foundations have shifted environmental funding to social services and hunger programs to try to fill a small portion of the gap left by huge cutbacks in federal and state agency budgets.
...big new sources, that could potentially fill some of the new and existing gaps, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation[6], are skirting around the edges of environmental issues and either are not funding them directly or are severely self-limited in their reach. The new Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation[7] has a huge environmental program now underway and they are giving the vast majority of their initial funding to two huge multinational organizations - Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund.
...many foundations, large and small, are responding to the cutbacks by severely limiting their giving guidelines and/or going to "by invitation only" grant programs. The Henry P. Kendall Foundation is an example of this. The Kendall Foundation in January 2002 adopted a “by invitation only” approach to grantmaking, dropping its focus on seeking broad ranging new initiatives.
... the environmental grantmaking community barely supports research and idea generation. We fund policy papers and policy research grudgingly, if at all, and only around the edges of ‘more muscular’ project grants. Most environmental foundations deliberately exclude the world of ideas from their grantmaking guidelines – how many times have you seen books, films, and education in the lists of what we do not fund? We do not fund ideas and we especially do not fund marketing and slogans to sell ideas.
Finally, and critically important, funds for new innovative programs - those where the best, more comprehensive and systemic solutions are often found - are the first to be cut as fund trustees and program officers retreat to the familiar during tough economic times.
Contrast this with what the anti-environment, market driven, and anti-government right wing foundations are doing to drive environmental protection off the public policy agenda.These paleo-environmentalists clinging to the failed methods of long ago aren't helping the environment. They admit this but blame others. It's the fault of donors and opponents. They think this is a team sport and that they are losing because management hasn't provided them with resources, fans haven't supported the team, and the other guys have nicer uniforms. They have lost track of the objective of environmental care in their zeal to defeat opponents.They make general support plentiful; often in block grants to think tanks and advocacy organizations. They fund extensive public policy research and writing in large and small organizations. They fund slogans and community organizing – Tax and Spend; Bleeding Hearts; Eco-terrorists. Effective soundbites.
Individual right wing funders and corporations also give plentifully to 501c (4) and other political action venues that then translate the research and slogans into both public policy makers and, perhaps more importantly, into noisy and effective public policy messengers. They send people on the road and support them in their policy seeding.
It's time to mature. Those who criticize the paleo-environmental movement and its initiatives aren't "anti-environment" or "anti-government" though they are often market oriented and argue with increasing effectiveness that this is a superior way to achieve environmental preservation and remediation. This has exposed a fundamental defect in the paleo-environmental movement: it isn't now and never was concerned with the environment, it was concerned with advancing a political vision that championed a regulatory state and just used the environment as a wedge issue to help their political cause.
The vast majority of the public is concerned about the environment and see political visions as embarrassing side issues, harmful but impossible to avoid. They see regulations and markets as tools for achieving environmental care when used well. The fact that public support has swung away from regulatory approaches and organizations wedded to those approaches is an indication that they expect to achieve better environmental care using other tools and groups. This is a victory for the environment, something we should applaud rather than lament.
While there is increasing support for market approaches in the general public and more modern environmental groups, even among academics, it would be a mistake to become wedded to markets as it was to do so with regulations. They are both tools and both have uses. A dynamic approach with sufficient scale and scope to achieve effective, long term preservation will not only use both tools but change as situations require. For example, the earlier discussion of ecosystem services noted that markets don't currently have good information and so don't fully value such services. There is a case for a short term regulatory bridge to a longer term market solution. To do good environmental management both tasks must be performed; establish regulatory policy and establish information gathering and communication services to drive markets on a long term basis.
The unfortunate situation that we are now all experiencing is the context of the Bush administration's highly effective efforts to roll-back regulatory process based environmental protections, drastically cut funding programs for environmental work. All this while state governments across the country cut environmental staff and enforcement budgets and nonprofit environmental protection organizations are slashing staff and programs at the time they are most needed. The few traditional sources for green research and public policy education in the federal environmental and land management agencies have been largely cut off or severely limited by Bush administration policies designed to keep green groups from these sources. For the first time in decades we face a context of worsening water pollution indexes, continued loss of wetlands, increasing loss of wildlife habitat and increased impacts on human health - at the very time we are cutting and eliminating programs designed to address those issues.The problem is that environmental impacts are not being effectively managed by the current programs, institutions and organizations. And though they are insufficient to the task they are also onerous for society. Something is broken in the approach and doing it more and harder isn't a compelling argument. Demands for more money and tighter rules aren't interesting or attractive because they don't make a convincing case that they will work though they do make it clear that it will hurt, a lot, and society isn't in the mood for what increasingly looks like quack cures for chronic ailments sold by hucksters more concerned with protecting their jobs than doing useful work.
The writing is on the wall. At the federal, state and local level both government and private decision making and funding organizations are increasingly rejecting the paleo-environmentalists. All of these decision makers are concerned about environmental preservation and remediation and are moving ahead with programs to do so. It is a huge blunder to cling to partisan political commitments rather than what should be the primary concern; environmental care. Over time power will switch from one party to another and the platforms of those parties will change. Those concerned with the environment need to be able to work with whoever is in power to achieve long term non-partisan objectives. All of society is affected by environmental quality and it is stupendously stupid to alienate what averages out to be half of society by aligning with a single party and squandering resources needed for environmental care on political activism.