Environmental nonprofits lack a compelling vision for promoting global sustainability, and without such a vision, they will fail to galvanize the support essential to protecting the earth from irreversible damage.
The current grand vision that has been promoted for years—that only through coordinated, unified, international global action can the world solve the problem of climate change—is intellectually bankrupt.
This has been a painful realization. After all, much of my professional life’s work has been devoted to finding and articulating such a vision.
Until recently I led communications for the first American environmental think tank, the Worldwatch Institute, as great a platform as any from which to communicate environmental visions.
That was in fact our mission—to explain to the public, to business, to nonprofits, and to policy makers what conservation steps to take and why it was so urgent to take action.
But when donations became stagnant, when grants dried up, when publication sales were in decline, we began to question that vision. Rather than take a serious look at revising it, though, we moved right ahead and started promising results.
Like many nonprofits, Worldwatch in recent years has been pushed by grant makers to show it is making a difference. But when the mission is to create a sustainable world, it’s hard to show results.
It is time for our sake and the planet’s to discard grandiose vision and mission statements. They are too big, too remote, and too disconnected from our daily world and work to be of much use.
And yet environmental organizations still have a chance to maintain credibility in the face of a spectacular failure to achieve their grand visions. To begin with, think tanks like the Worldwatch Institute should no longer purport that their work is creating a sustainable world. And no organization should claim to be “solving global warming.”
If there is a winning message, it is that progress must be made piece by piece, wherever and whenever it can be made, rather than waiting to achieve a global consensus. Just make it real and about the specifics needed to advance an environmental agenda in each place, and make as much progress as you can, rather than waiting to achieve a global consensus.
This is a radical departure from the previous assumption of environmentalists, that coordinated international action was the only way. But only organizations that reject this premise will keep their credibility and in so doing place themselves at the forefront of the environmental movement.
All signs point toward this more distributed approach to solving the world’s problems: the popularity of getting information out via social media, the wave of populist movements, and the increasing irrelevance (or fecklessness) of world institutions. This new position could underpin a rich and compelling story to tell to individual donors, institutional donors, the media, decision makers, and the public.
By ceasing to describe the vision in such broad terms, the vision would become more compelling because it would be more real.
By making the goals easier to achieve environmental organizations would make it more likely that donors would believe their support could make a real difference. They would make pitches to grant makers more focused and thus more likely to be perceived as delivering on measurable results. They would make themselves more credible to the news media and to the public, both of which are deeply cynical about the potential for global cooperation or global solutions.
A less grandiose vision also would connect staff members more closely to their daily work. We don’t work for nonprofits just to have a job or because we abhor the capitalist system. We do it because we like the idea of our labor contributing to a greater good. Without a connection from the mission to our daily life’s work, that motivation is lost.
When I worked as a journalist, I learned always to measure the claim against the reality. By now, it should be clear: The claims of environmental organizations do not measure up against the reality.
If the claim is that the environmental movement is helping to save the planet, the reality is that the environmental movement is devoid of a path forward. Everybody who works at environmental groups knows it. And those who watch from the outside can sense it.
It takes enormous humility to point out when our claims do not match the reality. To keep deluding others on that point is a survival instinct. To keep deluding ourselves is another thing altogether.
Russell Max Simon was director of communications at the Worldwatch Institute until August.
Editor’s note: See a letter from the executive director of Worldwatch Institute in response to this column.
