Dear HCN,
High Country News took a
cheap shot to deliver a hot opening line in your article about
troubles in the Endangered Species Coalition (HCN, 10/16/95). You
would get the idea that the National Audubon Society just woke up
one day and fired the coalition staff out of pique. Not true. We
were forced to lay off the staff because the coalition ran out of
money. Being the fiscal agent for the coalition did not mean that
Audubon could or should fund the effort ourselves when funds
weren’t there. The coalition steering committee is responsible for
the overall funding effort.
In fact, Audubon was
already $47,000 in the red covering the coalition’s costs, and your
writer knew perfectly well that this was the case. The reality is
that the crisis had been discussed all through August, and the
staff warned in early August that layoffs were likely at the end of
the month. We finally, reluctantly, had no choice but to issue
formal layoffs with two weeks’ notice on the date
cited.
While your article is offensive to
Audubon, what is much more damaging is that it fuels the already
strong distrust of grassroots groups toward national organizations.
It falsely portrays us as callous and indifferent to wonderful
people in the movement and creates unnecessary chasms between
movement members who have the same goals and who need to hang
together now more than ever to defend against the real enemies
trying to dismantle our environmental laws. We have seen it before;
when a movement gets in trouble it turns on itself and can cripple
itself for decades. Some think this is what happened to the civil
rights movement, and it could happen to us. May the environmental
movement resist this urge. And may High Country News not feed the
kind of self-destructive anger than can destroy us from
within.
Elizabeth
Raisbeck
National Audubon
Society
The author
responds:
I don’t dispute Ms. Raisbeck’s point
that financial problems prompted the layoff of Endangered Species
Coalition staff. As legal sponsor of the coalition, however,
National Audubon was entrusted by 230 local, regional and national
conservation groups to help keep the coalition up and running at a
critical time for reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act.
Rather than route some of its own multimillion dollar budget to
support the coalition for a few months, and rather than working
harder with other groups to support the coalition, Audubon chose to
dump the staff. That came as a surprise to coalition groups. The
timing could not have been worse.
That the
Environmental Information Center and Defenders of Wildlife were
able to fund and house the coalition staff shortly after the
firings offers stark contrast to Audubon’s
action.
Ms. Raisbeck also laments that my article
fuels mistrust between grassroots and national conservation groups.
My intention was to highlight a problem that has been simmering for
some time in the conservation movement. I believe that nothing
fuels anger like denial of a problem, and that defining a problem
is the first step toward resolving it. The problem is how to
integrate focused media and political campaigns on behalf of the
environment with longer-term grassroots activism. Wrestling with
that problem will bring growth to a conservation movement that is
now in turmoil.
Mike
Medberry
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A cheap shot.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
