ENVIRONMENT

LOSING GROUND: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century by Mark Dowie. (The MIT Press: $25; 317 pp.) This is a book that could also be called “The Failure of Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century.” But Dowie, frustrated by what he sees as the path to obsolescence charted by the top ten national environmental groups (“the polite, ineffectual white gentleman’s club that defined American environmentalism for almost a hundred years”), is far too hopeful and too invested to let go altogether. “The nationals,” he writes, “made two . . . near fatal blunders: one was to alienate and undermine the grassroots of its own movement; the other was to misread and underestimate the fury of its antagonists.” What gives Dowie faith is not the possibility that the “Group of Ten” will rejoin the masses, but rather that a “whole new cadre of social activists . . . will lead to a truly American political and social movement.” As a social movement, Dowie believes environmentalism has a better chance of succeeding than as a legislative/litigative initiative focused on the federal government. Dowie walks the reader through the evolution of environmentalism: from its ideological roots to the 1960s, “when poorer Americans of all colors and ethnicities suddenly realized that they were victims of environmental injustice,” to the “counter-environmentalism” of the Reagan years (a round environmentalists did not rise to), to an era of “amoral reform environmentalism co-opted and confounded by coercive harmony.” Only recently, Dowie sees signs of a “rejuvinated, angry, and decidedly impolite movement” fighting for their environment on “civil rights grounds,” bringing stronger legal cases against toxic pollution, finally giving up a “federal strategy with an allegedly friendly administration.”