Environment Grants

The environment program proceeds from two central questions: What are the American activities which do the most harm to the long-term preservation of the natural world? How can a modest grantmaking program most effectively seek to change those activities?

As we seek answers to these questions, we have come face to face with a troubling paradox: the greatest environmental threats are those that emanate from people performing lawful activities in appropriate settings with the best available machinery.

TRANSPORTATION

Nowhere is this more evident than with American transport patterns. Many Americans would guess, correctly, that the automobile is the country's primary source of air pollution. But the family car is also the major domestic contributor to greenhouse-gas buildup and ozone depletion. Automobiles cause enormous damage to water supplies through highway runoff, buried gas tanks, and do-it-yourself oil changes. They induce sprawl, which gobbles land, empties downtowns, and makes life hard for the unhappy one-third of Americans-too young or too old or too poor or too disabled-who can't drive to scattered jobs and shops and can't rely on public alternatives. The rest of us log two trillion miles a year and we do it with an average of 1.1 persons in each vehicle. Transportation may be the most important, most pervasive environmental issue in the country.

But this is where our second big question comes in: Even though a problem may be important, is there really a chance for a small grantmaking program to make much of a difference? For transportation, the answer seems to be a qualified "yes." Not many people. are actually driving better cars fewer miles, but some institutional changes have been made so that someday soon they might.

In 1990, when the Nathan Cummings Foundation embarked on its program, there was forming a small group of funders who had made analyses similar to ours and reached the same conclusion about the environmental importance of the motor car. Each of these half- dozen foundations kept its own distinctive stamp, but each one was also willing to contribute to a common enterprise. At the same time, transportation zealots from within environmental organizations and think tanks were finding each other and sharing the perception that national policy needed an overhaul. They formed a coalition called the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) and, with the help of the funders, they succeeded in creating new options for the expenditure of federal and water pollution. transportation dollars.

What was once the federal highway bill is now the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). The law now says that U.S. transportation funds can be spent for a variety of projects, not just roads, and that whatever project is finally selected can't exacerbate non-compliance with clean air standards. The challenge is to enforce these provisions, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation is working with other foundations to help STPP and its allies to rise to the occasion. In general, we pursue two strategies. One is to maintain close linkage between ISTEA funding and the Clean Air Act requirements. This we've tried to do through the establishment of the Transportation Task Force, a consortium of legal experts from the Conservation Law Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Our second strategy is to bolster the forces of transportation reform working on the state level, either through direct support to local activists (Environmental Policy and Law Center of the Midwest) or indirect support through national hub-and-spoke networks (the Bicycle Federation of America).

AGRICULTURE

After transportation, the American economic sector most guilty of long-lasting harm is agriculture. In fact, one might say that American agriculture is a short-term production success that masks a long-term ecological failure. No other sector of national life contaminates so much ground and water, and few are so toxic to their practitioners. Even more important, perhaps, is the way conventional farming radically depletes the soils and aquifers on which it relies for its abundance. For every bushel of corn grown in Iowa, three bushels of top soil are washed down toward the Gulf of Mexico.

The Foundation started off by working with a number of midwestern grantees to help farmers who want to try alternative methods. Increasingly, however, our emphasis turned to work that tries to change national policy to rearrange the financial incentives human activity at the which now penalize environmentally sound practices and reward the shoddy.

For years the most authoritative voice on the ecological (and social) effects of federal incentives has been the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska. The Foundation has been pleased to support CRA's policy work. In 1993 a portion of our grant went to defray the expenses of the National Dialogue on Sustainable Agriculture, a series of meetings, large and small, whereby small farmers and sustainable-agriculture enthusiasts from around the country began to hammer out a common platform and list of policy priorities.

We've also backed some of the urban allies of these rural reformers, with particular success on the part of the Farm Program Oversight Project of the Environmental Working Group. This small team of Washington analysts had the commonsensical notion of amassing a database to ascertain whether the Department of Agriculture was actually enforcing environmental provisions of the law where it counted, out in farmers' fields. The record was spotty at b est, and the Working Group proved adept at spreading the news. Other investigations-of both USDA and the Congress-are now underway, with three goals in mind: (1) To document how and where federal farm programs frustrate environmental protection; (2) To broaden and promote public interest and debate over the social purposes of federal support for agriculture; and (3) To provide advocates of federal policy reform with analytic tools and information needed to challenge the interests which dominate agriculture policy.

MINORITY COMMUNITIES

Perhaps the best short-term vindication for our focus area on minority communities came in February 1994, when President Clinton signed an executive order calling on agencies of the federal government to devise plans that will assure that poor people and racial minorities do not bear a disproportionate burden of harm from environmental hazards. The President's order would not have been issued without an environmental justice movement, which this and other foundations have been able to support over the past few years. We thought it important to encourage organizations in minority communities to speak in their own voices on these issues and to help those voices be heard within the broader national environmental effort.

The force of what came to be known as the "environmental justice movement" achieved a telling potency in 1993. There was new receptivity in the national government, many noted, but the movement itself was the biggest reason for its own success, particularly in the way it deployed its assets. Academics documented the inequitable harm borne by communities of color; local groups were able to cooperate on a regional basis (most conspicuously through the Southwest Network for Environmental Justice) and threats to public health. Washington-based groups proved very useful in the corridors of power (the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law).

What did these efforts have to do with the long-term health of the planet? Just this: that the empirical evidence tells us rather forcefully that environmentalism cannot be expected to encompass an effective political majority if it is perceived to be unfair. We will not be able to save the earth by fiat; democratic consent, for all its aggravations, is our only way to go.

SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES

Our final focus area was established to encourage those who "...describe and promote a sustainable society." We've learned that there are many who promote it; few who can describe it.

Over the past half decade, the word "sustainability" has entered the public lexicon. As these things happen, of course, the term has thereby lost precision. "Sustainable" now seems to have become something of a synonym for "environmentally better." Though we are not particularly interested in semantic tangles, we like the original ecosystem-based meaning of sustainable: the characteristic of a system that lives off natural income rather than natural capital.

Can men and women induce a society that allows its inhabitants to live well without depriving its great-grand-children of the inheritance of the earth? It is an unanswered and still unanswerable question. Clearly, though, such a society will need to marshal all human resources economic, intellectual, cultural, spiritual-in order to function so benevolently. The foundation has supported a variety of grantees who are beginning the complicated business of exploring what we n eed to do to go from here to there.

We can distinguish two main classes of grantees in this focus area. The first are those who are interested in examining the ways that the prices we pay for certain goods and services can reflect adequately the environmental costs they exact from us and our offspring, often called "internalizing the externalities." Of particular interest are federal fiscal policies: subsidies, procurement programs, and, above all, taxes. The World Resources Institute has an excellent small team that calculates the "real costs" of a given activity (driving, for example) and then presents an array of "green fees" by which those costs might be reflected in the price to users. Friends of the Earth has taken special aim at the federal budget, systematically going through the environmental plusses and minuses of appropriations and expenditures.

Our second class of Sustainable Societies grantees looks to the non-quantifiable aspects of life. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment organizes local and national activities so that churches and synagogues all across the country can bear witness to the need to protect God's creation. Four major "faith groups" are involved: Catholic; Jewish; mainline Protestant; and evangelical Protestant. Many of those religious activists, plus many others who might think of themselves as Buddhists, Taoists, or just plain individuals, are now participating in the Positive Futures Project, a new venture that aims to lead the environmental movement to a deeper level of analysis about the relationship of humans and the earth. those who are interested in examining the ways that the prices we pay for certain goods and services can reflect adequately the environmental costs they exact from us and our offspring, often called "internalizing the externalities." Of particular interest are federal fiscal policies: subsidies, procurement programs, and, above all, taxes. The World Resources Institute has an excellent small team that calculates the "real costs" of a given activity (driving, for example) and then presents an array of "green fees" by which those costs might be reflected in the price to users. Friends of the Earth has taken special aim at the federal budget, systematically going through the environmental plusses and minuses of appropriations and expenditures.