What is an Environmental Group?

Years ago I can remember going through a directory of environmental organizations for Canada---long enough back that it was in a hard-bound paper book---and was amazed to find that OPIRG Guelph was listed as one of the biggest ones. On paper, it had thousands of members. This was my first exposure to the way almost all national "groups" are organized. That is

they generally consist of a very small number of full-time, paid staff plus some sort of fundraising company. "Membership" generally consists of simply writing a cheque---and absolutely nothing else. 

In the case of OPIRG, since every student at the U. of Guelph had a deduction given to the group as part of their student fees, that meant that they were---at least on paper---a member of it.

At the time, this somewhat freaked me out. My naive understanding of "membership" was that you had to actually do something for the group---maybe licking envelopes, maybe making phone calls, something---and that you also had to have the ability to control the group through things like electing the leadership. Since then, I've become a little more laid-back. I've learned that the overwhelming majority of people don't really want to become engaged with their world. They just want to live private lives. That's why the majority of union members don't do anything at all for their unions unless they get called out on a strike. It's also why most citizens have never been a member of a political party. It's also why most people have never done anything to support the environmental movement beyond cutting a check for Green Peace or the Sierra Club. Part of me still wishes we were all good citizens who felt a burning need to be actively engaged, but the fact of the matter is that most people don't want to do this. And to be perfectly honest---beyond the fact that this would be an extremely tedious way to live---a lot of these folks are doing really good stuff already. The world needs scout leaders, hockey coaches, poets, artists, master gardeners, etc, as well as activists.

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Also years ago, I was involved with four Green Party of Ontario riding associations that organized several Grand river watershed congresses. One of the tasks we took upon ourselves to do was identify every single environmental organization---of any type at all---that we could find in the watershed. These ranged from local chapters of large groups with broad appeal to the entire public---like Ducks and Trout unlimited; through very specific localized groups with general interests---like the Six Nations Against Pollution (SNAP); to very small groups that didn't even have a name but were organized around someone's kitchen table to deal with some very specific, local problem. We ended up with a database of hundreds of groups. And when we hired a space and held the first congress, and asked all the groups to send at least one person if they could, they filled the hall.

This exercise taught me something else. It might be that the largest, most visible, and, well-funded organizations may have very small memberships, but there are a very large number of invisible, poorly-funded organizations also with very small memberships that are out there doing great things in their local community.  

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I was recently given a scholarly paper by a long-time acquaintance of mine, Robert Case:  the Oral History of the Wellington Water Watchers. (You can download your own copy here.)  He co-authored the paper (with Leah Connor) as an attempt to create a record of this group while people's memories are still fresh. He's a professor and there was a grant involved, so it's an academic document---which ensures that the general public will find it less than a "ripping yarn". But I still found it very interesting for a couple of reasons.

Dr. Robert Case, image c/o University of Waterloo website. 

First of all, it is an attempt to write down the history of one of those "kitchen table" organizations that I found when we were organizing the watershed congresses. It goes right back to an incident where the founder, Mark Goldberg, noticed tractor trailers heading out of the Nestle bottling plant just outside of Aberfoyle. Goldberg is a professional environmental consultant, which means that he knows how to do things like dig up the extraction permit that the company has with the provincial government, which meant that he was able to learn about the size of their organization. He was concerned.

Mark Goldberg. Photo from the Innovation Guelph website.
Used under the "fair dealing" provision of the CopyRight Act.

This led to conversations with others, and eventually he brought James Gordon into the group. While Goldberg understood the science and the regulations, Gordon had a higher community profile and understood how to get people enthused about an issue. (Artists sometimes have that gift.)  

James Gordon. Photo by Trina Koster.
Image c/o James Gordon's "electronic press kit".

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The second thing that I found interesting was that this wasn't just your regular, run-of-the-mill kitchen table group. Wellington Water Watchers is also a "unicorn" in that it was able to mobilize and engage an enormous number of members. The paper identifies the different tactics it went through to raise awareness and then talks about a decision to start selling memberships.

"It wasn't like we had to do fundraising or anything like that. I think we actually started a membership. I can't remember how all of that went originally but through membership came a fee, came some fundraising to pay for events, you know the minutia." (founding volunteer)
"We had a post office box where you could send in your ten dollars become a member and we had quite a few people join," another founding member recalled, "I think about a thousand people." (p-15)

This is an incredible statement. If true, it means that Wellington Water Watchers was able to sign up a relatively huge number of people in a quite small geographic area. And it did it without spending a lot of money on professional fund raisers. Getting a thousand people to pony up $10 and send it to a post office box is incredibly difficult. I know, because I spent a fair number of hours working a membership list fundraising for the Green Party---and I was able to issue tax receipts worth 75% of the donations!

The only way this sort of thing happens is when there is a tremendous groundswell of anger towards an issue and no one has gotten around organizing these people before.

I know this because many, many, many years ago---before I'd done much activism at all---I was president of a local Taijiquan club and ran afoul of a slum landlord. The roof leaked like a sieve, the heat was pretty much nonexistent, and people started quitting the club because of the mess. I couldn't get a hold of the landlord because he lived in Kingston and wouldn't take phone calls. In desperation, I photocopied a sheet of paper inviting people to come and talk about the landlord and shoved them in the mailboxes of all the apartments in the building. I put up some folding chairs and made a big batch of tea.

I was amazed. The training hall was packed with extremely angry people. It turned out that this same guy owned not only this building, but many of the ones that were between Wyndham and Suffolk. He had bought the buildings with only a tiny down payment and he was trying to pay off all his debt with rents---leaving nothing at all for minor inconveniences like maintenance. People were so angry that, among other things, they all immediately agreed to withhold their rent. The result was that he lost the buildings and the tenants at least were able to save some money that they used for deposits on their next homes. (The rental situation wasn't ideal at that time, but it was nowhere as bad as it is now.) Better landlords bought the buildings, fixed them up, and the city moved on.

But what I learned is that when people are really, really concerned about an issue, starting a community group isn't a slog so much as an exercise in "surfing the wave".

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This is an interesting time for environmentalism all over the world. But in Guelph especially there are some especially interesting things happening. We have a lot of environmental organizing happening in this town. We have an exceptionally strong Green Party presence in the city. It was able to elect an MPP and give a candidate for MP a very strong second-place finish. We also have several members sitting on City Council. There are also two very visible protest groups working in the city: "Extinction Rebellion" and "Fridays for the Future". They have been able to get people out for regular Friday events for several months already. We also have people organizing lobbying efforts for "The Green New Deal". They have been able to fill very large halls for two events this year. Finally, there is also a monthly group that meets at Saint Ignatius for the "Citizens Climate Lobby". (I don't know much about them because I've never been able to justify the time to go out to one of their events.)

There is a "thing" in chemistry where you can create a solution that is "supersaturated". That's when you have managed to dissolve more of a substance into a solvent than the solvent can actually hold. This is not a stable state, and if you drop a tiny crystal into the liquid, it will quickly turn into a solid mass of crystals. In politics this situation can also exist. I'm of the opinion that Guelph is quickly reaching the point where it is "supersaturated" with regard to environmental awareness. If that's the case, we might very well find ourselves in a situation where almost over-night we find ourselves with a drastic change in governance followed by radical changes in how we all live our lives. I suspect that much the same thing is happening all over the world---we have just arrived at this point a little bit before everyone else.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!