Big Green

Big Green and an earlier moniker 'The Group of Ten' are terms used to describe the biggest environmental organizations in the United States, heavily-staffed, non-profit corporations each with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars a year, offices in Washington, DC and other major cities, highly paid executive directors, and a staff of lobbyists, analysts and marketers. Big Green environmental groups together raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year, most of it contributed by non-profit foundations and individual donors. Many of the Big Green groups partner with corporations and have representatives of major corporations on their boards of directors.

Environmental activists and authors including Mark Dowie, Peter Montague, Brian Tokar and others whose articles andinterviews are listed below have criticized Big Green for soaking up the majority of the money raised for environmental activism, abandoning or undercutting grassroots environmental struggles, and selling out the environment and the grassroots movement to business interests and compromising politicians.

Corporate PR experts such as Ron Duchin and E. Bruce Harrison have over the years advised their clients on ways to divide and conquer environmental activists by finding common ground with business-oriented Big Green groups

Author and activist Jeffrey St. Clair is one of Big Green's leading critics and in 2007 he wrote, "The Group of Ten (aka: Gang Green) now manifest all the intensity of an insurance cartel... National environmental policies are now engineered by an Axis of Acronyms: EDF, NRDC, WWF: groups without voting memberships and little responsibility to the wider environmental movement. They are the undisputed mandarins of technotalk and lobbyist logic, who gave us the ecological oxymorons of our time: 'pollution credits,' 're-created wetlands,' 'sustainable development.' In their relativistic milieu, everything can be traded off or dealt away. For them, the tag-end remains of the native ecosystems on our public lands are endlessly divisible and every loss can be recast as a hard-won victory in the advertising copy of their fundraising propaganda." [1]

America's Biggest Environmental Organizations - "Big Green"

• Defenders of Wildlife
• Environmental Defense
• Greenpeace
• National Audubon Society
• National Wildlife Federation
• Natural Resoures Defense Fund
• The Nature Conservancy
• Sierra Club
• The Wilderness Society
• World Wildlife Fund

SourceWatch Resources

• Liberal Foundations and the Environmental Movement
• Natural Resources Council of America

Articles Critical of Big Green Environmental Groups

• Jim Donahue, Environmental Board Games, The Multinational Monitor, March 1990.

• Peter Montague A LETTER TO FRIENDS, RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #407], September 15, 1994.

REVIEW - Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century by Mark Dowie, Booklist, 1995.

• Brian Tokar, Questioning Official Environmentalism, Z Magazine, April, 1997.

• Derrick Jensen, WAR ON TRUTH - The Secret Battle for the American Mind: An Interview with John Stauber, Originally appearing in The Sun, March, 1999

• Bob Burton, Chilling and Gassing with the Environmental Defense Fund, PR Watch, First Quarter 1999.

• Alexander Cockburn, Greens, Fears and Dollars, The Nation, December 7, 2000.

• John Borowski, Say It Ain’t So, Senator Daschle - Shame on the Big Green Environmentalists, Alternatives, Fall 2002

• Michael Donnelly, [http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly05242005.html The End of the Innocence...Again

Behind the Green(back) Curtain], Counterpunch, May 24, 2005.

• Mark Dowie, [http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/05/19/mark_dowie/ The Fruit of Your Coins

In film short, Mark Dowie plugs plan to boost funding for grassroots activism], Grist May 19, 2005.

• Mark Dowie, MY VIEW: SUPPORT GRASS-ROOTS ENVIRONMENTALISTS, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, April 20, 2006

• Jeffrey St. Clair, The Withering of the American Environmental Movement - The Thrill is Gone, Counterpunch, February 3/4, 2007.

• Roddy Scheer, The Big Green Merge, E Magazine, May 21, 2007

• Michael Donnelly, [http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly01192008.html Big Green Fiddles As the World Burns -

Dodging Ecocide], Counterpunch, January 19/20, 2008

• Michael Donnelly, [http://www.counterpunch.org/donnelly05242005.html The End of the Innocence...Again

Behind the Green(back) Curtain], Counterpunch, May 24, 2005.

• Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, [Grist http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/ The Death of Environmentalism - Global warming politics in a post-environmental world], Grist, January 13, 2005.

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