The blurring identities of Audubon and other environmental groups are only one symptom of deep troubles within a movement whose growth threatens whatever purity of purpose it once had and, paradoxically, whatever effectiveness it craves. The organizations’ popularity, which took off during the Reagan years, brought a huge influx of members and donations, saddling the groups with gargantuan overheads and staffs. “They have become so big, so top-heavy, that to keep the apparatus running they have in many ways become like the institutions they battle,” says John Mitchell, a contributor to Audubon magazine, the society’s flagship.
One similarity is a near-frantic search, through image consultants paid six-figure fees, for the “right” public face (bye-bye egret, hello blue rectangle). Style has assumed such importance because when it comes to substance, the groups have become as indistinguishable as sparrows, flocking around every nouveau green issue from ANWR to ozone holes. Those issues are important on their own terms but also as magnets for new members. “The big groups make policy decisions based on their fund-raising campaigns rather than the other way around,” says Amos Eno of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, part of the Interior Department. “The big issue in Congress now is the Clean Water Act and wetlands preservation, and the big groups are just not there. It’s not the stuff of fund-raising appeals.” Audubon president Peter Berle lists wetlands as a society concern, but none of the green giants has been very visible on the subject.
Audubon aspires to 1.2 million members (up from about 500,000 today) in five years. But to what end? “To increase our effectiveness at bringing about change through the government process,” says Berle. Size, it might be argued, translates into more money for lobbyists, more letters to legislators and, especially, more money for court battles - the scene of many green victories. But “if you are small,” argues Nathaniel Reed, a former Audubon director who served as assistant secretary of the Interior from 1971 to 1977, “you are forced to ask what you want to do and to do it very well.”
Two recent victories support his view. The Environmental Defense Fund (150,000 members) pioneered a market-oriented approach to pollution that became the backbone for the acid-rain provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act reauthorization. And an alliance between NRDC (168,000 members) and California utilities to emphasize energy conservation rather than higher kilowatt sales will do more to mitigate the greenhouse effect than all the bills going nowhere in Congress. These successes had nothing to do with flooding legislators with letters and everything to do with the brains and energy of NRDC and EDF staffers.
To rejuvenate the society’s image, Berle fired Les Line, for 25 years the editor of Audubon, and last March named as interim editor Malcolm Abrams, former managing editor of the supermarket tabloid Star. Abrams says he’d like to use writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Bernstein, and warned that Audubon cannot “present itself as a journal about remote pristine landscapes, or turtles in fields of pansies” (the May cover). Longtime admirers such as William Least Heat Moon, author of “Blue Highways,” see this as “People-ization” that may turn it into “a glittering piece of trash.” Frequent contributors worry about being politically correct on environmental issues and in tune with the society’s positions as Audubon becomes a house organ.
The great green hope of the movement may lie less with the big nationals than with local groups. Audubon’s 512 chapters continue to mix it up, often successfully, with developers and polluters. (And many had the sense to reject the blue flag and keep the egret.) It has almost gotten to the point where the environmental agenda will succeed despite, not because of, the large national groups.
