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  • The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear
  • Randolph Haluza-DeLay
The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear By Douglas Bevington Island Press. 2009. 285 pages. $35 paper.

It's become a commonplace to critique environmentalism—American environmentalism at least—as dominated by big, national organizations which have become overly professionalized, policy-focused and disconnected from the populace. A well-circulated essay in 2004 purported the "death of environmentalism." Counter claims from environmental groups and data from environmental sociologists (most notably a symposium eventually published in Organization & Environment in 2006) disputed the "death" prognosis. In The Rebirth of Environmentalism, Douglas Bevington claims that environmentalism had already been "reborn" as grassroots biodiversity groups. [End Page 1439] Others claim the rebirth in small, grassroots organizations that combine social justice with with environmental sustainability. Al Gore and his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, would be on the public consciousness a few years later. Polls show personal environmental awareness has remained relatively high for decades, especially when compared to the waxing and waning of other social issues. Yet the same decades have seen increasing levels of environmental degradation cascading from local to global impact.

Scholar-activist Bevington argues that environmentalism was very sick at the hands of the professionalized compromisers of the major organizations. The remedy was the ascendance since the mid-1980s of small, litigation-focused groups fostered in the Earth-First! culture of direct action. The book is really three case studies. As a detailed examination a portion of contemporary American environmental activism, it is compelling. But it is not a sufficiently systematic examination of the "death and rebirth" thesis or the American environmental movement as a whole.

Bevington claims that these grassroots biodiversity groups are a profound shift in American environmental advocacy. He begins with the criticisms of big environmentalism. The three case studies represent, he says, three approaches to contest Big E, or at least the strategies they primarily employed. These approaches are "Nevermind the Nationals" (the Headwaters redwood forest campaigns in northern California), "Transforming a National" (campaigns about logging in national forests as a battle inside the Sierra Club), and "Becoming a National" (the Center for Biological Diversity and litigation over endangered species). Right from the introduction, Bevington sets up his protagonists as "outsiders" to mainstream environmentalism. That litigation is an outsider strategy is well argued; I was skeptical but ultimately convinced. Readers will learn much about being an activist. There is danger, and there are injuries and death. The book clearly shows the political pressures and counter-pressures against government agencies and politicians, and the frustration of activists with the capital-state partnerships that inhibit productive environmental improvements.

It is in the theory realm that the book weakens considerably. Bevington is coauthor of a valuable article on the (ir)relevance of social movement theory to activists. Here, he makes very little connection to any of that theory, and it shows. For example, in recounting how the Center for Biological Diversity board was primarily made of Center staff, a footnote is all that mentions potential problems with this arrangement. Furthermore, no connection was made to the previous case, in which the Sierra Club grassroots and Sierra staff battled over board elections and the direction of the organization. Bevington indicated he would use six dimensions well-studied in social movement research to analyze the cases. But these six factors-strategy, tactics, organization, funding, movement culture, political conditions—are used haphazardly, and little of the existing research is discussed. The book's subtitle and final chapter promise to adapt insights from this study to climate activism, but the atheoreticalness of the previous cases give little advice to apply. The book has nary a mention of another salient "new" environmental movement in the United States, that of environmental justice. [End Page 1440]

As social science, the book also falls short. There is no discussion of methodology, even in an appendix. Bevington did interviews, but we don't learn how many or with whom. He is an activist, but doesn't explain to what extent he may have been a participant-observer in any of these cases. There does...

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