The Green Backlash 10 Years On - Superb, Long Article By David Helvarg

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"When The War Against the Greens first appeared in the spring of 1994, there was a widespread media perception that the environmental movement had pretty much peaked with the mass rallies of Earth Day 1990, and that environmental regulation was now hurting the American economy. Despite polls showing that 76 percent of Americans considered themselves green, the New York Times environmental reporter was promoting the Wise Use/Property Rights backlash as "the third wave" of environmentalism.

"I think that the movement is maybe one of the most important and interesting movements to arise in environmentalism in a long time," he claimed, "because they are prying into the environmental issues that we've all grappled with for two decades. Is there really global warming? Is there really an ozone problem? Does toxic waste cleanup really represent the best use of public financing?" He went on to portray the anti-enviro backlash as a bottom-up citizen movement. "The Property Rights groups I know have no corporate funding at all. They're mom-and-pop community environmental groups," he claimed, and, because he was from the New York Times, other reporters believed him. ABC's Nightline reported, "For a lot of people in this country, the environmental movement has gone too far. What's more, they're organizing into a powerful nationwide coalition (called Wise Use), and their battle cry is, 'The environmental movement has become an environmental disaster.'"

In going for the counterintuitive story of a citizen uprising against what then Texas pest exterminator&emdash;now House majority leader&emdash;Tom DeLay called "the jackbooted EPA Gestapo," the mainstream media failed to do their own investigative reporting. Rather they acted as a transmission belt for more conservative media outlets. Following the Earth Day rallies of 1990 in which some twenty million Americans participated, a series of semihysterical stories and reports on "eco-terrorism" were issued by the Heritage Foundation, the National Review, Human Events, Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Their consistent theme was the threat posed by environmentalism and its "anti-human agenda." With the collapse of communism then taking place, the Republican

Right and its captive media had, for the first time in forty-five years, lost a single unifying enemy to keep religious conservatives, gun advocates, antigovernment conspiracy buffs, and free-market advocates marching to the same beat. Replacing the red menace with the green menace and embracing a pro-industry backlash disguised as a citizen army seemed like sound strategy. Eventually the cachet that the Wise Use movement brought to this historic juncture would be folded into a larger "culture war" targeting not only "environmental extremists" but "feminazis"; gay rights; liberal Democrats; and, after 1992, all things associated with the name Clinton. Shortly after my book came out, the Republican Party won a narrow off-year election victory, retaking the House of Representatives under the leadership of Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich. Interpreting their victory as a mandate for radical change, they began an effort to dismantle what they saw as the "New Deal regulatory state" established under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although Gingrich's Contract with America never explicitly mentioned the environment, many of his followers had by then created a kind of white-sound feedback loop. They held public hearings at which industry fed them a stream of Wise Use mom-and-pop victims of environmental regulatory abuse, until they began to believe their own rhetoric."

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http://www.tidepool.org/original_content.cfm?articleid=132057

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. That's why they attacked Clinton.

They needed a common enemy to smear in order to promote their ideology!