Ross Mayhew, Don Lycette, and fellow shellers,

I was asked to provide some documentation for my assertion that Big Oil
provides much of the funding for most of the top ten environmental groups.

Just to catch everyone up on the context and why this might be germane to
the list: someone complained about misguided local restrictions on shelling
in Florida and blamed (incorrectly, I thought) environmentalists, pointing
out (correctly, I thought) that polluters and developers acted with
impunity although they were truly responsible for destroying natural
populations.

In my response, I wanted to briefly give some sense of why I believe the
term "environmentalist" can be so laden with misunderstandings. I'm no
expert in green politics but I think I understand enough to grasp some of
the Big Picture. (Just as most of us aren't thoroughly familiar with the
ontogeny and phylogeny of mollusks, we can recognize that it's pretty darn
important to the development of the shells).

I'm taking the time to word-process some passages from the book "Washington
Babylon" by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein (Verso, 1996). The book
is an equal-opportunity savaging of Democrats, Republicans and all the
Washington denizens who make the bloody sausages called policy. Some may
quarrel with Cockburn and Silverstein's interpretation or tone. Most of you
may never have heard such a discussion at all; it's a world largely
invisible to those who rely solely on the mainstream press. Nevertheless,
what they focus on is just as essential to understanding what's going on
with environmentalism as internal anatomy is to differentiating look-alike
shells.

My intention is not to discourage people from action when they read this
but rather to be able to ask better questions (sort of like scientists do)
and to find ways of defending our environment that will be more effective.


*********** (let me know if there are any format problems)

Aside: Shaking the Tree- Greens and Foundations (p. 210 ff)

        Back at the start of the century John D. Rockefeller remarked that
"Not even God himself can keep me from giving my money to the University of
Chicago." The old bandit's investments duly paid off, and platoons of
economists, jurists and academics hymned the free market and invoked
inexorable laws which require that some be rich and many be poor.
        Philanthropy and its purposes remain the same as when John D.
dispensed millions to winch the family name out of the mud. Today the
environmental movement receives about $40 million a year from three oil
companies which operate through front groups politely described as private
foundations. The top two are the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) and Oryx Energy.
(The latter has vast holdings of natural gas in Arkansas, and thoughout the
oil patch). The Pew family once entirely controlled the two companies and
still has large holdings in both of them; Oryx sharebolders recently sued
the Pew operation for insider trading.
        In 1948 the family set up the Pew Charitable Trust with an
endowment now totaling $3.4 billion....
        The necessity of buying liberals impressed itself on the family
rather late, in the 1980s. But since then it has more than made up for lost
time. Today, Pew Charitable Trusts (now seven in all) represent one of the
largest donors to the environmental movement, investing about $20 million a
year. But this does not tell the full story of coercion through money. At
the head of the Pew environmental sector sits Joshua Reichert. Reichert and
subordinates Tom Wathen and John Gilroy allocate Pew money, such as the
$1.5 million spent in 1995-6 to buy off vigorous defenders of the
Endangered Species Act and ensure a revised and neutered law. They also
help direct the donations of other foundations mustered in the
Environmental Grantmakers Association, which collectively doles out more
than $350 million a year. Pew never goes it alone. It always works in
coalitions with these others, which means no radical opposition to its
environmental policies can get any money. (Notable exceptions include the
Turner Foundation, and smaller opponents of the Pew Cartel such as Levinson
and Patagonia).
        Meanwhile, the Pew Trusts' endowment is wisely invested in the very
corporations that a vigorous environmental movement would adamantly be
opposing. In its initial National Forest Campaign, Pew demanded that
recipients of grant money agree to focus their attention on government
actions; corporate wrongdoers were not to be named. This extreme plan was
modified after some recipients balked.
        The Charitable Trusts' money increases with the fortunes of timber
firms, mining, oil and chemical companies and arms manufacturers. The
annual yield from these investments far exceeds the dispensations to
environmental groups. Take just one of the seven Pew trust funds- the Pew
Memorial Trust. This enterprise made $205 million in "investment income" in
1993 from such stocks as Weyerhaeuser ($16 million), the mining concern
Phelps Dodge ($3.7 million), International Paper ($4.56 million) and
Atlantic Richfield, which is pushing hard to open the Arctic to oil
development ($6.1 million). The income yield from rapacious companies
accruing to Pew in this single trust is twice as large as its total grants,
and six times as large as all of Pew's environmental dispensations.
        Next of the big three in environmental funding is an oil company
known as Cities Services (Citgo), which endowed the W. Alton Jones
Foundation, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the merger frenzy of the
1980s, Occidental Petroleum ultimately took over Cities in a move that
saved Ivan Boesky from financial ruin. Alton Jones maintains an endowment
of $220 million, and in 1993 gave out $15.7 million in grants. According to
its charter, the purpose of the foundation is two-fold: to preserve
biological diversity and to eliminate the threat of nuclear war {sound
familiar to National Public Radio listeners?}. Alton Jones gives about $14
million a year to environmental causes and uses the same engulf-and-neuter
tactic as Pew. This apostle of peace has maintained very large investments
in arms manufacturers such as Martin Marietta ($3.26 million), Raytheon
($1.32 million), Boeing (1.38 million) and GE ($1.4 million).
        Alton Jones's portfolio has also gained bulk from bonds floated by
Charles Hurwitz's Scotia Pacific Holdings Company, a subsidiary of Maxxam,
which is currently embarked on the project of cutting down the Headwaters
Grove, the largest patch of privately-owned redwoods in the world. {Anyone
on the list familiar with the devastation to the downriver and adjacent
marine environment?} Its 1993 statement to the IRS also revealed $1.4
million in Louisiana-Pacific stock, the largest purchaser of timber from
publicly-owned federal forests.
        Alton Jones has a position (just under a million in stock) in FMC,
the big gold mining enterprise which will soon sponsor dosing an endangered
salmon habitat at the Beartrack Mine in Idaho with cyanide, a project
greased by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Picking up revenue from FMC's
salmon destruction with one hand, in 1993 Alton Jones gave about $60,000 to
protect the endangered salmon in the same area. The grants went to the most
compliant organizations, such as the Wilderness Society and Pacific Rivers
Council. At a crucial moment last January, these two groups demanded that a
federal judge suspend an injunction they had, to their great alarm, just
won. This injunction shut down FMC's Beartrack Gold Mine, from which it
expects to make $300 million courtesy of the 1872 Mining Act, whose reform
the Clinton administration carefully avoided. When the Wilderness Society's
attorneys asked Judge David Ezra to rescind the injunction, he was outraged
though had no alternative but to comply. FMC's stock promptly soared,
yielding extra money for Alton Jones.
        The last of the big three is the Rockefeller Family Fund, run by
ex-Naderite Donald Ross, who as of the last filing with the IRS in 1993 was
picking up $130,000 a year plus another $20,000 in benefits. The
relationship of the Family Fund to oil money scarcely needs stating. Though
the Fund dispenses a relatively puny $2 million a year in grants, it
exercises great influence by dint of Ross's leadership of the Environmental
Grantmakers Association. The Fund also functions as a staff college for
foundation executives. John Gilroy and Tom Wathen, both of Pew, learned
their trade under Ross's tutelage.
        The Rockefeller Family Fund, in its 1993 IRS filing, held $3.5
million in oil and gas stocks....
        The Fund also maintains hefty investments in mining companies,
including ASARCO, an outfit with a notorious environmental rap
sheet.....The Fund's money is also in FMC and Freeport-McMoRan, whose
worldwide operations are on the cutting edge of ecocide and which has a
financial partnership with the genocidal Indonesian generals....
        As of 1993 Ross's outfit had a strong position in Weyehaeuser, the
largest private timberland-owning company in North America. The possibility
of double-dealing endemic to all foundations with the ability to influence
federal policy is nicely illustrated here. The Rockefeller Family Fund was
the lead architect of the campaign to protect ancient forests on public
lands in the Northwest. Any reduction- actual or prospective- of timber
available on public lands sends up the value of privately-held timber
tracts. The Fund made a killing out of buying Weyerhaeuser stock low and
selling it high, before large-scale logging began again on public lands.
The Family Fund was nicely covered because it also had holdings- $237,000-
in Boise Cascade, which is the largest purchaser of federal timber sales in
the Northwest. Indeed, last year Boise Cascade bought the Sugarloaf tract
of 900-year-old Douglas fir trees in southern Oregon's Siskiyou National
Forest and is now logging it, courtesy of a released injunction engineered
by a deal between the Clinton administration and environmental groups
funded and closely supervised by Donald Ross. Ross was the man who hired
the Democratic Party hack Bob Chlopak (another former Naderite) to oversee
the conversion of a tough national movement to fight Clinton to the death
on old-growth forests into a supine coalition which swiftly draped itslf in
the white flag of surrender....

Munich in the Redwoods (p. 244 ff)

        ...Pew entered the world of environmental funding cautiously. In
1994, Pew staffer Tom Wathen rejected a modest grant proposal by a broad
swath of greens saying, "I like it, but my board's very conservative and
they'd never approve it." The proposal was for a campaign to end the
logging of native forests on public lands.
        Yet the big foundations no longer function simply as dispensers of
cash to green groups. At the Environmental Grantmakers Association's 1992
retreat on an island in Puget Sound the Association's president, Donald
Ross, boasted that the foundations were quite capable of running their own
environmental campaigns. "I think funders have a major role to play," Ross
said. "And I know there are resentments in the [environmental] community
towards funders doing that. And, too bad. We're players and they're
players."....
        [Description of the betrayal of efforts to shield old-growth
forests in the Northwest through the interventions of operatives of the W.
Alton Jones Foundation]
        ...The salvage rider mandated that the Forest Service sell 5
billion board feet of timber (twice the amount sold in 1993), contained
sufficiency language which exempted all of those sales from compliance with
environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act, and shielded them
from any possible court challenges brought by environmentalists....
        Nothing could better illiustrate the shattered condition of the
green lobby- when the most egregious assault yet on American environmental
laws came before the Senate, not one senator could be roused to oppose it.
Not one.
        ...A quarter-century after the first Earth Day the corporate
counter-attack launched in the late 1970s is nearly complete. As citizens
virtuously warehouse their newspapers, seek redemption in glass and
aluminum and recycle their direct mail pleas from mainstream environmental
groups into properly labeled receptacles, they may be too busy acting
locally to notice the national picture.