The Greening of the Beat-Bush Movement

By Mark Hertsgaard, Grist.org. Posted October 20, 2003.

Who says George W. Bush never did anything for the great outdoors? His running for reelection could be the best thing to happen to the U.S. environmental movement in years. The threat of four more years of Bush has provoked a significant rethinking of the movement's tactics, according to interviews with movement leaders, their financial supporters, and political advisers. Not only has it energized activists as never before, it has also produced unprecedented expressions of unity within the movement and beyond -- specifically with labor unions, feminist organizations, and civil rights groups. While the short-term goal is a new president in 2004, some environmental leaders hope the Beat Bush campaign will help these groups build working relationships that could give rise to a broad-based progressive movement in the United States.

"George W. Bush said when he was running for president that he would be the great unifier, not the divider, and damned if he hasn't been the greatest unifier of the environmental movement since I've been in it," says John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA. "And that's true within the entire progressive movement and beyond. From tongue-studded anarchists to business-oriented think tanks, we've all come to realize that Bush represents the greatest threat to all that we hold dear."

One manifestation of this new unity is America Votes, an alliance of 20 citizens groups that was organized earlier this year by leaders from environmental, labor, and women's organizations. Members include the AFL-CIO and other unions, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and MoveOn.org. The environmental movement is represented in the coalition by the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters.

America Votes will exercise electoral clout through a so-called 527 group named America Coming Together. (Organizations registered under section 527 of the federal tax code are permitted to engage in voter education and turnout work but not outright advocacy for candidates.) ACT has raised $35 million to spend on the 2004 campaign, $10 million of which was donated by George Soros, the currency trader and philanthropist. The group hopes eventually to raise $75 million.

"It's actually easier for us to work together on elections than on policy work," Deb Callahan, the executive director of LCV, says of her allies within ACT. "On a policy issue like logging or mining, we might be on the opposite side of the fence from, say, a labor union. But an election puts those kinds of differences in the background, because it presents a simple choice: Do you elect this candidate or not? And we all agree that four more years of Bush would be a disaster."

"The environmental movement traditionally hasn't focused many resources on electoral work," observes one prominent funder of environmental organizations who declined to be named. "The Sierra Club and LCV spent $16 million during the two-year cycle leading up to the 2000 election. But that's dwarfed by the annual budgets of groups who do public education and policy work, such as the National Wildlife Federation [$100 million per year] and Natural Resources Defense Council [$50 million per year]. America Coming Together gives environmentalists the prospect of real electoral impact and, for the first time, real coordination with other progressive groups."

Exactly what this new progressive unity will mean on the ground remains to be seen. The ACT groups are only beginning to find their way, cautions the funder quoted above: "To borrow a scientific analogy, this collaboration began in a gaseous state and has now progressed to a liquefied state, but it is still far from a solid state." But the groups' leaders talk about coordinating messages and communication schedules -- for example, to make sure that a given household doesn't get deluged with five pieces of anti-Bush mail on a single day and then receive nothing during the next two weeks -- and dividing up outreach responsibility for certain battleground states to assure the most efficient use of all groups' electoral resources.

And those resources, they promise, will be unprecedented. "The scale of the commitment is phenomenal," says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "Over the next 13 months, we are committed to doubling the number of volunteer activists we have in the field and the number of households we contact, and my sense is that the other organizations in America Votes are doing the same."

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