By Christine MacDonald

Amid these dreary developments, however, are stirrings of a new popular uprising at the grassroots of the environmental movement. Individuals around the country are putting themselves on the line to remind their fellow humans what the stakes are. After decades of inside-the-Beltway politicking by the nation’s largest green groups with nothing to show for it but a scattering of victories, taking to the streets in protest, they say, isn’t looking quite so unreasonable.

“We have to throw ourselves into the gears of the machine that threaten our survival. That’s the one advantage we have over the deniers and their spin doctors,” 28-year-old activist Tim DeChristopher says. “When we make sacrifices for what we believe in, all the people defending their short-term profits aren’t going to be willing to do the same. That’s how we show that we’re telling the truth.”

The former University of Utah economics student took his own advice in December 2008, turning up at a Utah auction for oil and gas leases on more than 110,000 acres of federal land. The sales were green-lighted during the last month of the Bush administration, despite the fact that the land in question bordered Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument, a wild west of ruddy plateaus, sagebrush, piñon trees and prehistoric rock art. Posing as a bidder, DeChristopher won 14 parcels, representing 22,500 acres, before officials halted the auction and escorted him out. The sales were later blocked by a federal judge following a restraining order on the leases by seven environmental groups, including the National Resources Defense Council. In February 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, under a new Obama administration, canceled leases on 77 parcels from the Utah auction, representing 130,225 acres, saying that we must explore for oil and gas “in a thoughtful and balanced way that allows us to protect our signature landscapes and cultural resources.”

But DeChristopher now faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison and fines of $750,000. Since his arrest, he’s been working full-time for Peaceful Uprising, a grassroots group he founded to raise awareness about climate change and other environmental issues in Utah. His trial date is set for June 21 in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. While DeChristopher says he has no desire to go to jail, he’d take a similar risk again in a heartbeat.

The same is true for Julia “Judy” Bonds, an Appalachian grandmother, who won the prestigious 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize but has also been the recipient of death threats, assaults and YouTube attacks for her stance against the mountaintop-removal coal mining that is laying waste to her community’s iconic landscape.

“We accept the fact that some of us might not make it through this fight,” Bonds concedes. Still, in her view, powerful change is coming. “More and more people are talking about the environment,” she says. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. But we can’t sit still on every bit of ground that we’ve gained in the last five years. We’ve got to keep pushing.”

The guy with the biggest megaphone, meanwhile, hardly fits the “radical” mold. From the elite campus of Middlebury College in Vermont, mild-mannered author Bill McKibben has launched 350.org, the first high-profile, popular effort in decades to get average citizens riled up and into the streets to demand environmental protection. “I don’t have any secret to this,” McKibben says.” There is no substitute for organizing. You have to go talk to people and get them on board.”

His global-warming awareness campaign orchestrated a day of climate action last year that led to more than 5,200 events in 181 countries. CNN called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”

In recent decades, protesting has largely become passé with the exception of growing civil unrest among the country’s conservatives known as the Tea Party movement. But in environmental circles, activists are an endangered species. These days, most agitating takes place in front of a computer screen, if at all.

“Political mobilization has just kind of died. We don’t do it any more,” says Robert J. Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

As a high school student, he was one of the estimated 22 million people who participated in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. “Ten percent of the population came out. . . . That would be 30 million people now,” he says.

He compares that 1970s-style turnout to the few hundred souls who joined him in Philadelphia last October for 350.org’s event there, and sees the stark contrast as telling.

CNN may have called the global day of action the most widespread in history, but it was also pretty thin on the ground, as have been other U.S. attempts at environmental mass mobilizations in recent decades.

“The real issue is that people aren’t all that worked up about climate change,” says Brulle, pointing to the annual Gallup public opinion polls used to track issues that most worry Americans. Year after year, the environment lags far behind economic and other issues on the list of “problems and priorities” facing the nation.

“We’ve basically become consumer zombies,” says Erik Assadourian, senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C. “It’s this terrible treadmill that we’ve gotten on, in which activism or any kind of political action isn’t included.”

Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who saved an ancient California Redwood with a 738-day tree-sit a decade ago, frets: “In Western culture, we are so addicted to comfort that we will sell out for comfort. I don’t know if we have the capacity to break our addiction in time.”

Many activists say what propels them is not hope so much as desperation, a feeling that if they didn’t act, who would?

“I find myself crying a lot. It’s overwhelming,” says Erin Brockovich, the legal researcher turned activist, whose role in winning a $333 million settlement from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in a groundwater contamination case in Hinkley, Calif., was made into a movie. “One of the things I learned in Hinkley is when you stick your finger in the dike to try and fix one problem, a thousand other problems open up.”

But, she adds: “For me, it’s simply the right thing to do. I’m going to fight to make that link that what we are doing to the environment is hurting our health.”

Environmentalists have long been criticized for a misanthropic tendency to put the welfare of plants and animals before humans. But today the dividing lines between causes and movements are in flux. Many eco-activists see human and habitat health as inextricably intertwined. Others see themselves primarily as political or anti-corporate operatives but end up waving the environmentalist banner because it just makes sense.

“Corporations destroy the environment. I really don’t see the difference,” says Jacques Servin (also known as Andy Bichlbaum) of the performance activism collective the Yes Men, which embarrassed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year with a phony press release and spoof press conference that temporarily rewrote the chamber’s position on climate legislation.

By reframing the issues, upstart groups appeal to a wider audience that includes people who would never be caught dead hugging a tree. They are part of the fastest growing segment of the environmental movement, according to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS). The center found that the number of U.S. environment and welfare organizations with $25,000 or more in gross receipts grew by 108 percent between 1997 and 2007. Besides nixing old-school definitions and dogmas, small radical groups often keep their focus local, even if their networks and concerns are global.

“We’ve been focused on national political responses for so long that we forgot locally is where politics happens,” says Brian Sloan, a campaigner with Rising Tide North America, which he says is “the largest all-volunteer climate action network in the country.”

“One of the biggest problems we have is that people have a lot of preconceived notions of how environmentalists work,” says Sloan. “Some of it is a [right-wing] smear campaign, but there’s a lot of truth, too.” He adds that he’s often had to prove that Rising Tide is not paid by or associated with any well-known national groups. “People are a lot more comfortable with us being radicals,” he says, “as long as we’re up-front about it.”

Today’s grassroots call to action is, in many ways, a sign of frustration with groups like Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, whose insider tactics have come under fire in recent years as ineffectual and even counterproductive.

“I resent it when I’m called an environmentalist these days,” says Tim Hermach, who led a major national campaign to ban logging in public lands a decade ago and was involved in insurgent efforts to change the Sierra Club’s leadership. He likens the professionals leading the club and other national environmental groups to a bunch of softball players getting creamed in a game of hardball with corporate titans. “We’re in a war,” he says. “It’s not a time to play Tiddlywinks!”

Students of the U.S. environmental movement say the decline of the activist has been induced by the nation’s leading green groups—that in the decades since the 1970s, the Big Greens have supplanted empowered citizens with environmental professionals.

In the process, the movement has grown enormously. Today it’s a bona fide economic sector, with tens of thousands of employees and assets that nearly tripled from $11.5 billion in 1995 to $31.6 billion in 2005, according to the NCCS.

But can these large, professionally run operations still be considered grassroots?

Opinion pollsters say that the public generally perceives them this way, but if you look closely, many national groups are run from the top down with little or no membership input—even if they even allow individuals to join—according to Brulle, who studies U.S. environmentalism from a sociological standpoint.

“Try to go to a meeting of the National Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund or Greenpeace. You can’t, because they don’t have them,” Brulle says.

At groups that still let individuals join, membership fees comprise a small percentage of the group’s budget. The Sierra Club, for instance, one of the country’s leading environmental membership organizations, gets only about a quarter of its funding from member dues, according to its 2008 tax return.

Increasingly, the groups that set the environmental agenda in Washington are beholden to private foundation grants, government contracts, and donations from wealthy moguls and corporations. These ties have made them reluctant to take up fights against their congressional allies and corporate sponsors even when the science clearly calls for it, critics say.

In response to these complaints, a whole new wing of the U.S. environmental movement has emerged since the 1980s, explains Douglas Bevington, forest program director for Environment Now, in his book The Rebirth of Environmentalism. Instead of aligning with politicians and corporate executives, these new groups have used publicity campaigns, lawsuits, tree-sits and other strategies to expand enforcement of the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws. They have even, at times, managed to get hard-hitting legislation introduced in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress—feats once believed to be the exclusive domain of the Big Greens with their legions of staff lawyers and lobbyists. Bevington points to the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act, changes to federal endangered species legislation spearheaded by the Center for Biological Diversity; and, on the state level, California’s Forests Forever Initiative. These efforts didn’t become law, but they came close. “These groups showed the environmental movement how to be both bold and influential,” Bevington says.

For Andy Mahler, longtime organizer of the Heartwood Forest Council, activists play a crucial role now, “when an effective story can reach hundreds of millions of people simultaneously with a message of perseverance, hope and determination.”

Most grassroots activists agreed that the most powerful act of protest is when people put their bodies on the line. But those who have taken risks and made sacrifices say it can also be enormously fun and soul affirming.

“By sticking my neck out there, I’ve grown a lot taller and realized potential I didn’t even know I had,” DeChristopher says.

Brockovich adds that once she shed labels she had let society put on her, she found an unexpected reservoir of strength. “Once you put yourself out there and you’re still standing, you really get empowered by that. And you want to do it again. I get thrown under the bus every day, and I’m still standing,” she says.

Getting all the issues under one tent is complicated and doesn’t always work. Consider the case of Jana Chicoine, cofounder and spokeswoman for Concerned Citizens of Russell. For five years, Chicoine, her husband and neighbors have been holding off a company that would build a biomass incinerator in their Western Massachusetts town of about 1,700 people. In that time, she’s become a seasoned activist, linked to a network of grassroots environmentalists around the country and abroad. However, Chicoine says she’s not convinced that global warming is such a big problem.

“I don’t know who to believe. I see a lot of scientists arguing about it and read some of those East Anglia e-mails,” she says, referring to the stolen e-mails from the University of East Anglia, home base of the Climatic Research Unit, which touched off the climategate controversy in November 2009. Climate-change skeptics have seized upon the e-mails to argue that climatologists colluded in manipulating data to bolster their case for global warming.

While Chicoine’s views put her firmly in the mainstream of the country’s growing skepticism, there is no credible debate in scientific circles today. Despite attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and errors that appeared in the panel’s 2007 report, more than 200 U.S. scientists signed an open letter in March defending the IPCC and reaffirming its central finding “that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Of course, such scientific speak doesn’t always translate well, which has complicated the work of climate activists. “Most people are not very convinced by science,” DeChristopher says. “For most folks, all the data in the world isn’t going to move people in a deep way—a human way. What we need to do is show people we believe it—that we’re talking about the biggest threat and that children’s lives hang in the balance.”

What’s needed now, he says, is “putting it on the line and acting with desperation. If you want people to believe that your house is on fire, you had better scream, ‘My house is on fire!’”

Today, it will take a new kind of movement, one that overrides pervasive apathy, says Assadourian at Worldwatch. “I don’t think we can mobilize en masse,” he says. “We’ll need to mobilize a proxy group of sorts.” Lately, he’s been giving a lot of thought to how a small but determined number of activists could use creative tactics to block all roads into the capital and shut down Washington until Congress passes climate legislation.

McKibben, in his new book Eaarth, suggests that the new protest movement won’t be about marching on Washington at all. He’s calling for “distributed public action”—local protests across the globe—each demanding that the world’s leaders take climate action. Many argue that it’s time to stop trying to convince climate change deniers and start mobilizing those people who already believe. It’s a sizable number, according to the 2009 “Six Americas” study of views on climate change by Yale and George Mason Universities. According to that in-depth examination, 18 percent of American adults describe themselves as “alarmed” by global warming. Nearly everyone in this group (99 percent) told pollsters that they would not be easily persuaded to change their minds. “Change in America has never happened because everybody got on board,” DeChristopher says. “After Congress and Copenhagen have failed, people are seeing that our leaders aren’t going to solve the problem unless we force them to.”

Christine MacDonald is an environmental journalist and the author of Green Inc., An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad. This article first appeared in E/The Environmental Magazine. source: featurewell.com.