Whatever you want to say about Brock Evans, the Audubon Society's second-in-charge, you gotta admire his spunk. Getting arrested on a muddy logging road is usually not as simple as walking up to the gate at a nuclear weapons complex or crossing the line at some downtown Washington, DC embassy. As Brock and ex-Congressman Jim Jontz, the Western Ancient Forest Coalition's Executive Director, recently discovered at a protest near the Sugarloaf timber sale in Southern Oregon, those Freddie cops have a mean streak when it comes to demonstrators.
Fortunately, the Freddies are none too smart about these matters, and they managed to mace a 72-year-old woman, beat up a network cameraman and chain 92 of us to trees for over eight hours, thereby guaranteeing us mega headlines. Although Jim and Brock were treated more harshly than some of the other demonstrators, they never complained. Nominations for a Buckaroo Prize are in order.
Is this a trend? Are more Washington DC bigshots going to follow Andy Kerr, Brock and Jim Bob into the pokey? Let's hope so. We hippies have been left holding the bag out in the woods for over 15 years now, and without some new blood, we risk becoming isolated politically. We desperately need the little old ladies in tennis shoes, the business owners and other mainstream folks to help demonstrate that most Americans strongly believe that it is immoral to plunder our forests for the benefit of a few greedheads wearing suspenders on Wall Street. For this to happen, we need to get our own act together and stop playing guerrilla camo soldier at every action. Remember, we are building a non-violent citizen movement, not an army. This behavior tends to scare most folks away at a time when we need them the most.
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Speaking of hippies, the world's largest hippie organization, Greenpeace USA (not to be confused with Greenpeace International, which brought you the Brent Spar and Murora French Nuclear Testing campaigns) had their annual board of directors election a few months back. With the help of a few current and former Greenpeace staffers, I ran for one of the two empty seats as a petition candidate and lost by five votes. Call me a loser if you want to, but as I wrote in my ballot statement, something is very wrong about the way things are being run over there on 14th Street NW. An organization that built its reputation on frontline activism is now entrenched, ineffective, and worst of all, has fallen victim to the dogma of knee-jerk political correctness.
While membership enrollment and donations continue to roll off a cliff, Greenpeace (GP) has cut program staff and budgets to the bone. For the first time in its history, they have no one working on Nuclear Weapons. Only two campaigns remain.The first is a very fuzzy effort to organize the fishing industry from the inside. The second is what they call a Chlorine Campaign, which from my point of view is just a jobs program for senior staff members who don't know how to do anything else.
But the real problem is this: Member surveys conducted by outside consultants have consistently shown that people support the work GP is doing on tropical rainforests, ancient forests in the US and Canada, and protecting wildlife and wildlife habitat. So get this, with something like a 24-million dollar budget (7 million available for program work) and over 1,200 employees (300 in non-canvassing positions), there is not a single person working in the US on any of these issues. Small wonder, it seems, that no one wants to give them any money.
I met with GP Executive Director Barbara Dudley in Washington DC last month to discuss these and other issues. She admitted to me that they could raise more money by addressing these core conservation issues, but she felt that other groups were doing a good job on forests, and that Greenpeace could only handle the work they were currently doing. She questioned the effectiveness of their work on forests in the US, and doubted that there was anything that they could do, except maybe sign on to letters.
The annual cost of keeping the three very capable staff members who covered their Tropical Rainforest Campaign, their Tongass National Forest Campaign, and their Ancient Forest Campaign was a scant $150,000; chump change compared to GP's total budget. These campaigners helped to shut down a pulp mill in Alaska, had one canceled in Costa Rica, and helped defeat the worst piece of anti- wilderness legislation in years, the Baucus-Burns bill, which would have destroyed six million acres of wildlife habitat in Montana. And of course there is Clayquot Sound, Brazilian Mahogany, and Siberia, where Greenpeace International is still doing excellent work.
When the first round of budget cuts were planned in 1991, the GP board saw fit to fire then-director Peter Bahouth because, as I was told by one board member, "someone had to take responsibility." Yet under Dudley's management, even more drastic cuts were made to offset the lack of donations. Her response was to blame it on the stagnant economic conditions. Using the same logic that the board applied to Peter Bahouth, Dudley should have been fired two years ago. Meanwhile, Peter is one of the best friends the forest ever had, and manages the $450 million Turner Foundation, helping hundreds of grassroots groups throughout the USA.
Here is a telling statistic: In 1991, there were 208 separate phone listings for the GP Washington, DC office. After four successive years of 40 percent annual budget cuts, program staff layoffs, the dissolution of the Action Resources Department, the cancellation of entire campaigns, an abandonment of most high profile direct actions, closing canvass offices, selling off equipment, the Greenpeace magazine being scrapped, and staff training all but eliminated, there are now 210 listings in the DC office. Contrary to what Dudley is saying publicly, GP is concentrating power in Washington, firing anyone who doesn't kowtow to the bureaucracy, stifling creativity, and running the organization into the ground like a bloated supertanker.
Sound like I'm still a candidate for the Board of Directors? You bet your ass! I'm running again next year, and will run every year after until someone in there gets the message. Here is my platform for getting the good ship off the rocks:
*Shut down the Washington DC office. Since GP has only two campaigns to lobby on, they should be able work out of the canvass office. Move the administration to an area that is less expensive to live and work. The move would signal a change in direction.
*Put more campaigners in the field. GP should take advantage of the many canvass offices around the country by putting campaigners in there with the canvassers, who would love to have the company, and would provide valuable volunteer assistance for programs.
*Cut administrative overhead. There are too many people with the word Director or Coordinator in their title. You've got Regional Executive Directors, Campaign Directors, Diversity Coordinators, as well as many redundant administrators, accountants, lawyers and what-have-you. This is not what most people would expect from Greenpeace, nor should it be. Changing this situtation won't be easy or popular and will require leadership, but it is absolutely necessary.
*Reorganize the campaign departments. Does anyone else think that having an "Energy and Atmosphere" department is a little vague? How about "Ocean Ecology" or "Chlorine"? If you can't cover all the bases, then don't carve up the entire globe into empires run by $45,000 a year department heads. Too much power is concentrated this way. Department heads are always too busy to help the canvass staff and other campaign workers with new ideas. Simply talking about letting the local offices get out and do more is easier than doing it, but it has to happen.
*Get a sense of humor. Do I have to explain this one?
*Go on the offensive! Rather than whine about the loss of few lousy Democrats, get out there and make some waves. Greenpeace has the ability to go straight to the public and it can't measure its sucess by what goes on in Washington. Research and coalition building are good, but sometimes you have to make people nervous.
*Be more spontaneous. Not every problem has a rational solution. Not all gains are incremental. Greenpeace has to take risks. Some of the best ideas still come at 2:00 am Greenpeace was always more about good ideas and guts than money and power.
(This platform should insure that I will never be elected.)
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Anyway, hearing that Ted Turner was about to put $350 million into his family foundation, I called Peter Bahouth to see if this meant we could submit larger grant proposals. "Naw," he said, "They still gotta be three pages."
It was bad enough that certian environmental groups were taking money made from colorizing movies and the World Wrestling Federation, but now they will be getting money from Bugs Bunny. Given the anti-hunting sentiments of many Warner Brothers cartoons, this can only be seen as a gain by animal rights activists.
The man without a bioregion now has an email address. It's RUCKUS@igc.apc.org Keep those cards and letters coming.
Happy New Year