Big Green

Big Green and other monikers such as 'The Group of Ten' and 'Gang Green' are terms that have been used often critically to describe the biggest environmental organizations in the United States. These are heavily-staffed, well-funded non-profit corporations each with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars a year, offices in Washington, DC and other major cities, highly paid executive directors, and a staff of lobbyists, analysts and marketers. Big Green environmental groups together raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year, most of it contributed by non-profit foundations and individual donors. Many of the Big Green groups accept funding from or partner with corporations, have representatives of major corporations on their boards of directors, and work with corporations through other organizations such as the Natural Resources Council of America. With the exception of the Sierra Club, these groups have no meaningful accountability to the thousands of individual small donors who constitute their marketing lists and who are labeled 'members.'

Environmental activists and authors including Sharon Beder Mark Dowie, Michael Dreiling, Christine MacDonald, Peter Montague , Brian Tokar , John Stauber and others whose articles and interviews are listed below have for decades criticized Big Green for soaking up the majority of the hundreds of millions of US dollars raised and spent each year on environmental activism, education and lobbying; raising this money and then often abandoning or undercutting grassroots environmental struggles for fundamental change; and for often selling out the environment and the grassroots movement through business partnerships and agreements with compromising politicians.

Corporate PR experts such as Peter Sandman, Ron Duchin of the Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin firm and E. Bruce Harrison have over the decades advised their clients on ways to divide and conquer environmental activists by finding common ground with business-oriented Big Green groups

Author and activist Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch is one of Big Green's leading critics. In 2007 he wrote, "The Group of Ten (aka: Gang Green) now manifest all the intensity of an insurance cartel... National environmental policies are now engineered by an Axis of Acronyms: EDF, NRDC, WWF: groups without voting memberships and little responsibility to the wider environmental movement. They are the undisputed mandarins of technotalk and lobbyist logic, who gave us the ecological oxymorons of our time: 'pollution credits,' 're-created wetlands,' 'sustainable development.'  In their relativistic milieu, everything can be traded off or dealt away. For them, the tag-end remains of the native ecosystems on our public lands are endlessly divisible and every loss can be recast as a hard-won victory in the advertising copy of their fundraising propaganda." 

Members of Big Green

 * Defenders of Wildlife
 * Environmental Defense Fund
 * Greenpeace
 * National Audubon Society
 * National Wildlife Federation
 * Natural Resources Defense Council
 * The Nature Conservancy
 * Sierra Club
 * The Wilderness Society
 * World Wildlife Fund

SourceWatch Resources

 * Chilling and Gassing with the Environmental Defense Fund
 * Environmental Defense and Free Market Environmentalism
 * Environmental Defense Dances With DuPont On Nanotechnology
 * Greenwashing
 * Liberal Foundations and the Environmental Movement
 * Natural Resources Council of America
 * Biosolids

Articles Critical of Big Green Environmental Groups

 * Jim Donahue, Environmental Board Games, Multinational Monitor, March 1990.
 * Peter Montague A Letter to Friends, Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly'', Number 407, September 15, 1994.
 * REVIEW - Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century by Mark Dowie, Booklist, 1995.
 * Brian Tokar, Questioning Official Environmentalism, Z Magazine, April, 1997.
 * Derrick Jensen, WAR ON TRUTH - The Secret Battle for the American Mind: An Interview with John Stauber, Originally appearing in The Sun, March, 1999.
 * Bob Burton, Chilling and Gassing with the Environmental Defense Fund, PR Watch, First Quarter 1999.
 * Alexander Cockburn, Greens, Fears and Dollars, The Nation, December 7, 2000.
 * John Stauber, "Endangered Wildlife Friends Are Here!, PR Watch, Volume 8, No. 3 3rd quarter 2001.
 * John Borowski, Say It Ain’t So, Senator Daschle - Shame on the Big Green Environmentalists, Alternatives, Fall 2002.
 * Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism - Global warming politics in a post-environmental world, Grist, January 13, 2005.
 * Michael Donnelly, The End of the Innocence...Again Behind the Green(back) Curtain, Counterpunch, May 24, 2005.
 * Mark Dowie, "The Fruit of Your Coins", Grist, May 19, 2005. (In film short, Mark Dowie plugs plan to boost funding for grassroots activism).
 * Michael Donnelly, The End of the Innocence...Again Behind the Green(back) Curtain, Counterpunch, May 24, 2005.
 * Mark Dowie, My View: Support Grass-Roots Environmentalists", The Chronicle of Philanthropy, April 20, 2006.
 * Jeffrey St. Clair, The Withering of the American Environmental Movement - The Thrill is Gone, Counterpunch, February 3/4, 2007.
 * Roddy Scheer, The Big Green Merge, E Magazine, May 21, 2007
 * Michael Donnelly, Big Green Fiddles As the World Burns - Dodging Ecocide, Counterpunch, January 19/20, 2008
 * Christine MacDonald, Green Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad (Lyons Press, 2008).
 * Joann Hari, The wrong kind of green, "The Nation", March 22, 2010.
 * Jeffrey St. Clair, "How Green Became the Color of Money: A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment (Part Two)", Counterpunch, January 7 - 9, 2011. (This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.)