ConserveLand Blog

Just 5 days after the disastrous Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, 250,000 people congregated on the Mall in Washington DC for the 40th Anniversary Earth Day celebration.
While oil and gas surged from the broken pipe in the Gulf destroying marine ecosystems, killing dolphins, turtles, birds and other creatures and oozed destructively toward shore, I watched a sea of 250,000 people gather in front of the Earth Day stage. I waited in expectation for protests against off shore drilling to begin, especially when White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Secretary, Nancy Sutley took the stage.
Talk about a colossal missed opportunity for the environmental community to send an important; “no off shore drilling” message to national media and the government! Not a peep out of the Sierra Club, Earthjustice or even Greenpeace about off shore drilling, or from the quarter million attendees, or the speakers on stage. The silence was deafening. What has become of the environmental movement?
Cyber activism, in my view, along with the usual accurate complaints about a lack of fair balanced media coverage, and the industry supported money-flush anti-environmental organizations, is a huge contributor to the dying environmental movement.
All national environmental organizations now rely on websites and email blasts to rally activists. Sure it’s cheaper and saves trees by reducing paper use, but to me websites are like retail stores; they are totally dependent on walking-in business. Email blasts are “outbound” or “outreach” efforts, but many people ignore them because the message always asks for money and therefore smacks of a fundraising ploy.
The other problem with the email blast is when they ask you to click on an icon to send your legislator a message asking them to vote on a particular environmental issue, do they not understand that we get multiple requests like this almost daily? How many times does a legislator need to receive an email from the same person about the same issue but from several different environmental groups? How many times do we as activists have to act on the same request but from a different organization? After a while you can’t remember what you responded to or for which group. It’s ridiculous.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few legislators’ Aids what it’s like on the receiving end when email blasts come in. Both independently responded, “We can tell when a special interest blast comes in and we acknowledge it, but we also know that it comes from a national environmental organization and not our constituents. It doesn’t count nearly as much as when constituents show up in our office or write us a personal letter.”
The most damaging part of cyber activism to the “movement”, in my opinion, is when activists respond to e-alerts they think their job is done; their conscious is clear; they did their part and therefore there’s no more sweat equity required. It has minimal impact on the legislator, especially if they get sizable campaign donations from an opposing group.
The end result, when you need to get a huge turnout at a legislator’s in-district office while they are home or at a serious environmental disaster site for a protest, no one shows up. Or you hold the 40th Anniversary Earth Day event on the Mall in Washington DC during the worst oil spill in history and out of a quarter of a million spectators no one protests. It’s time to slap the Defibrillator on the environmental movement.