Against counterproductive wonkery

A wise man once observed that “ignorance never yet helped anybody.” Truer words were never spoken, except for the time he also said that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Or put another way: “Practice without theory is blind; theory without practice is sterile.”

I am reminded of these sayings from scripture (as it were) anytime I hear talk of “raising awareness” or “educating the public.” Education is always a good thing, but too often educational methods are not sound from the standpoint of what people need to know to act effectively in the world.

So recently we learned that the Colcom Foundation is setting up a $1 million fund to “educate the public” about the environmental impact of natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The first issue that arises here is that the Colcom Foundation is an old-money organization with a creepy Malthusian agenda, founded originally by Richard Mellon Scaife’s deceased (and sometimes-estranged) sister Cordelia May. Unlike Richard Mellon Scaife and the foundations he controls, Cordelia May and her foundations were and are favorable to ecological concerns; but like Richard Mellon Scaife, their fondness for Planned Parenthood is borne not of concern for women’s rights, but of alarm at the fecundity of the lower orders. Colcom has sent money to racist anti-immigrant organizations like the so-called Federation for American Immigration Reform. Snakelike anti-immigrant operatives — throwbacks to the “blood and soil” ideology of a more frightening age — have operated on the fringes of the environmental movement for years, and they attempted a (thankfully unsucessful) takeover of the Sierra Club in the recent past. Before any environmental activist or organization applies for any of this money, they need to seriously consider whether taking it will tar them for all time.

This fairly important point aside, let’s assume good faith and acknowledge that it is OK to take money from jagoffs so long as you don’t act like one. What kind of environmental work should be funded by foundations? And here I am talking of the legitimate do-gooder ones, not just the creepy ones like Colcom.

It seems to me that we need less of what usually passes for “education” among the “white paper activism” crowd. (I’ll be nice and not name names, though a lot of people who end up reading this probably have seen enough to know what I’m talking about, and you can let ‘er rip in the comments thread.) There are already enough studies about the dangers of fracking, for instance — enough to make headway with the people we need to reach, anyway. It is true that the industry is responding with a barrage of their own agitprop, all of it either misinformation or appalling feel-good bullshit like the Range Resources commercials with happy rural landowners collecting their royalty checks. But it will not do for us to respond with media statements of our own — mass “education” campaigns that maybe get people the information, but don’t include a plan for what they can do. The industry already controls the legislature and the governor’s mansion, in addition to most of the borough and township supervisors and county commissioners in the areas it needs to do the drilling. Three-quarters of the people could know the real facts about ecological damage, but if they don’t do anything about it, it doesn’t matter.

Yet the happy fact is that they are starting to do something about it, even if they are late in the game and not good at coordinating with one another. It is not only in places like Pittsburgh — a dense city where any kind of natural resource extraction seems ridiculous on its face, and where there is also a ready-made progressive voter base — that people are beginning to rise up. They are considering drilling restrictions in tiny towns like St Marys. The industry has bought off a handful of landowners, but the overall mood of most people in these areas is wary of the ecological consequences of this industry. It is their drinking water, after all. It is all very NIMBYistic and behind the curve, because all of the critical decisions have already been made in Harrisburg. Yet these people deserve some support in what they’re doing, even if they seem like a doomed peasant revolt that might drive the exploiters out of their own town, but get overwhelmed when they pop up again elsewhere, because the peasants can’t coordinate.

How is it that the people waging this fight can’t get the consistent support of people with experience in big fights? When was the last time you heard of a large environmental organization dropping one or several skilled organizers onto the ground in places like this, helping to get people moving, keep their spirits up, and link up with people all around the state who are doing the same thing? Even the likes of Sam Smith and Joe Scarnati would be obliged to listen to their constituents at least as much as their campaign contributors, if only their constituents were speaking with an organized voice.

It’s hard to blame the environmental organizations, except insofar as they haven’t built a base in a way that counts, and that is a fault common to the progressive forces in all social sectors. They don’t have the money to field organizers, and to the extent they can chase down some money from the foundations, it is not for organizing work. It is for more studies, more white papers, more “advocacy” and more meetings with politicians who the “advocates” hope would listen to reason if only they had the facts — when in the real world, it is power that counts, and in the absence of organized people, the money of the vested interests translates into the only real power. By and large the grantmaking staff of the do-gooder foundations are well-meaning liberals, but the people among them who understand organizing are as rare as the endangered Indiana bat, and any experienced organizer in the universe of progressive non-profits has multiple stories about what happens in the rare instance when you’re able to score some grant money to do real organizing, and the foundation people then stick their noses into your program.

So, if any of those same foundation people ever end up reading this for some reason, here is the message: it’s time to start funding real organizing. The people in the Marcellus Shale region already know that something is wrong, and they are taking action, if blindly. Fund an organizing program that will send some trained organizers their way — or better yet, a program that will hire some of the better natural organizers from among the people in the affected areas to do this organizing full-time. There is plenty of research to be done, too, but it is not of the “big picture” kind; we already know enough about that for our purposes. We need people who know how or will learn how to scrutinize environmental impact statements; how to dig through property records and zoning regulations; how to do the nitty gritty work of following the money in campaign contributions from the natural gas drilling outfits to politicians at both the state and local level. Research, in other words, should be campaign-driven.

You’ll note that I haven’t gone into detail about what this movement should demand; I won’t be that prescriptive, especially since movements are dependent on democratic initiative, so people are going to have to work some of that out for themselves, with the leadership of organizers. But it’s not hard to imagine a movement that aims to place strong curbs on drilling, with strong right-to-know provisions and enforceable protections for the drinking water and wildlife. I’m not so utopian as to think we’re going to halt drilling altogether, even though that is what we ought to do, in conjunction with massive government investment in alternative sources of energy. But we can do better than we’re doing now, even in the short term.

One thing that definitely ought to be doable is enacting a severance tax. Once again, the masses are already there, and the politicians in the pocket of the Marcellus Shale Coalition are far out of step with the public. There are going to be arguments about where the severance tax money should go, with Republicans in the central part of the state agitating in their usual racist code language about how taxes from shale gas extraction in the hinterland shouldn’t go into the General Fund and thus get distributed to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Some eventual concessions to rural demands — say an allocation of a portion of the money to environmental remediation in affected areas — will no doubt eventually be necessary if the tax has any hope of passage, since the people who are going to need to stand up and fight if we are going to win this at all are, by and large, in those affected areas. But a real social movement that embraces this demand can prevail even in the face of Corbett/Scarnati/Smith servitude to the drilling companies.

Let’s recall the “Severance Tax Ticker” from the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, which I first referenced back in June. At that time, the failure to enact an extraction tax had cost Pennsylvania $55.2 million.

As of this writing the ticker is at $116.8 million, and there are going to be people reading this months after the fact who can click through and see an even higher and more scandalous figure.

If we do not act now — and act in the fashion I have described — then the natural gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale are going to do the same thing to Appalachia that the coal companies did: they will take vast natural resources from beneath the earth, along with multiple millions of dollars in profits, and they will leave nothing behind for the people who live there apart from a permanently-wrecked environment.

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