When the Bear Eats You: Lessons from a Chastened Environmental Justice Organization

Written by Stephen Eisenman

AN UNFAIR FIGHT

Probably the most famous line from the cult classic, The Big Lebowski is spoken by “The Stranger” played by Sam Elliott. Sitting at the bar of a bowling alley, bottle of sarsaparilla in hand, he shares with The Dude (Jeff Bridges) some cowboy wisdom: “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you.”

The line seems at first like a visceral re-wording of the truism: “sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” But there’s nothing true about it. In a direct contest between a person and a bear, the former has little chance of winning. A more accurate maxim would be: “In very rare circumstances, you eat the bear, but far more often, he eats you.” U.S. environmental justice organizations have acted, until recently, as if they are as likely as not to consume the bear, even though they get eaten all the time by corporations big and small, governments, foundations and bigger non-profits. To fight and win, they need to organize and establish a bigger and more diverse popular base. They also need better messaging, and lots of cooperation and coordination.

THE ”BIZ”

In 2017, my wife Harriet Festing and I co-founded an environmental justice non- profit, Anthropocene Alliance or A2. We call it “the biz,” in ironic recognition of the way non-profits are expected to be organized and run, as if they were retailers eager to develop new product lines and increase market share. Indeed, after just a few years, with Harriet’s leadership, we had become “the nation’s largest coalition of frontline communities fighting for climate and environmental justice.” Today, we have over 430 member-communities in all 55 U.S. states and territories. Most of them are predominantly working-class, non-white or Indigenous. That’s unsurprising. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he famously answered “because that’s where the money is.” We work with marginalized and at-risk communities because that’s where the environmental abuse is.

In eight years, A2’s staff has grown to 22, and our budget to about $3 million. Because Harriet and I moved last year to the city of Norwich (U.K.), to help take care of elderly parents, she recently stepped down as Executive Director, and I resigned as (unpaid) Director of Strategy. Our able new ED is Arif Ullah, formerly leader of South Bronx Unite, one of our A2 community members. He’s both a steady hand and committed to environmental justice.

Though the biz is still tiny by NGO standards, we can boast of outsized accomplishments: the dispersal of millions of dollars (through subgrants and grant-writing assistance) to hundreds of mostly small, community-based organizations fighting floods, fires, mining, and air and water pollution. Some funds have been used to create green infrastructure projects: retention ponds, bioswales and rain gardens. Through our partners, the Environmental Protection Network and Thriving Earth Exchange, A2 has provided technical support to dozens of pollution-impacted communities. And we helped a small number of communities obtain government buyouts of flooded or contaminated homes. (Getting such relief is a long and arduous process.) A2 has also offered community leaders online platforms to meet, learn, commiserate and develop common strategies to combat environmental injustice.

FEAR OF FAILURE

Despite these accomplishments, Harriet and I are nagged by a sense that A2 failed under our leadership. Most of our members are still suffering the same hardships they have for decades. In Pascagoula and Gloster, Mississippi, for example, huge petrochemical and biomass facilities continue to poison residents and shorten lives. Developers are building massive housing and commercial complexes beside the homes of low-income folks on the Florida, Georgia and Carolina coasts, flooding them as well as destroying rare, native habitats. Mountaintop removal for coal mining is still practiced in West Virginia, despite its horrendous environmental consequences. (A2 community-member Coal River Mountain Watch is fighting to stop the destruction, but it’s not clear they can, or that we can effectively help them.)

Air pollution remains at dangerous levels for A2 members in many parts of California, 75 years after the crisis was first fully documented. Mining and logging operations in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and elsewhere in the southwest create toxic dust, contaminated water and increased wildfire risk for indigenous people and everybody else. A2 communities in New York and New Jersey are fighting to protect rare parks and wetlands from development and contamination—they are facing long odds.

On the national and international level, the situation looks just as bleak, or worse. Consider the following ten examples:

  1. Global temperature has risen 1.5 degrees since 1850. We’re expected to reach 1.9 degrees of warming by 2019. It isn’t just getting worse; it’s getting worse faster.
  2. Global carbon emissions continue to rise, reaching a record level of 422.7 parts per million. Last year’s increase of 3.75 ppm was the largest ever in a single year.
  3. U.S. has cumulatively emitted more CO2 than any other nation and continues to be the largest per capita emitter. There is little sign of change; backsliding is likely.
  4. Research indicates that the U.S. is losing natural carbon sequestration capacity due to reckless agriculture and timber harvesting. If trends continue, carbon capture from trees, soils, grasses and wetlands is expected to fall 30% in the next 15 years.
  5. Wildfires are increasing in number and intensity globally and in the U.S., especially in the boreal or coniferous forests of the U.S. west.
  6. Air pollution in the U.S. is getting worse, due to heat and those same wildfires. The former raises ozone levels (smog), and the latter increases both ozone and particulate pollution. Together, they increase deaths from cancer, heart attack and stroke, destroy animal habitats, and reduce species diversity.
  7. Passage of the Clean Water Act (1972) reduced pollution of “surface waters” and “navigable” waterways. But its restriction to “point source” pollution means that agricultural and highway runoff is excluded from control. Trump’s repeal of the “Polluted Water Rule” and PFAS standards, combined with several Supreme Court rulings has further reduced the effectiveness of environmental regulation.
  8. Flooding due to sea-level rise and more intense storms (both impacts of global warming) are increasing dramatically in almost every coastal area in the U.S.
  9. Higher temperatures, pollution, and other toxins are an increasing driver of death and disease among Black, Latino, Native American and lower-income people in “frontline” or so- called “environmental justice” communities.
  10. The diversity of life on earth is decreasing due to continued loss or degradation of habitat. (The rate of loss is less clear.) The sheer number of non- human animals is also dramatically declining. The clearest example is global insect loss. This is particularly pronounced in temperate areas that have significantly warmed in winter.

To make matters worse, public concern about the grave danger of greenhouse gases and other pollutants has begun to wane. Fossil fuel giants, in collaboration with government allies, especially in the U.S., have rejected near scientific unanimity about the risks, and are promoting more, not less fossil fuel exploration, drilling and consumption. For professional environmentalists, all this adds up to a very difficult challenge. But for poor and marginalized people subjected to environmental ravages for decades, it’s a frontal attack. The bear is eating them, and environmental organizations seem powerless to intervene.

“ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE”

In the U.S., poor people, especially Black, Latino and Indigenous folks have for decades been forced by discrimination and poverty to live on the wrong side of the tracks, close to rails, highways, factories, power plants, mines, landfills, and waste disposal facilities. Redlining and high housing costs have prevented access to clean air and water, parks, beaches and nature preserves. Since the 1980s, this disparity has spawned a broad movement for “environmental justice.”

The term first gained prominence in a 1987 report from the United Church of Christ, Racial Justice Commission, and then in Robert Bullard’s book, Dumping in Dixie (1990). The fact that Black and other historically marginalized communities suffered disproportionately from pollution led President George H.W. Bush, (hardly a civil rights champion), to established in 1992, an Office of Environmental Justice at EPA.

At about the same time, Beverly Wright established Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, at Dillard University, an historically Black college in New Orleans. Bullard in the meanwhile, championed the struggle against “environmental racism,” which he defined as

...any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. It also includes exclusionary and restrictive practices that limit participation by people of color in decision-making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies.

At first, large and wealthy universities, as well as mainstream environmental organizations watched the growth of the environmental justice movement mostly from the sidelines. But with the rise and increased acceptance of identity-based politics in the first decade of the new millennium, that changed. Gradually, environmental justice was assimilated to the wider movement for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and took on some of its specialized jargon, including such terms as “BIPOC,” “disempowerment”, “equity,” “intersectionality,” “Latinx,” “neocolonialism,” “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”

Along with the new vocabulary came bureaucratization. Research centers and environmental organizations big and small expressed support for “EJ” and produced advisory councils, grant programs, working groups, career guidance, conferences, guidebooks, interagency task forces, risk assessments, toolkits, blogs, training courses, strategic plans, and action plans.

Foundation funding for EJ initiatives increased markedly; that’s what allowed A2 to get off the ground. From the beginning, we recognized that floods and toxic contamination impacted poor and non-white communities more than rich ones. That’s where we would focus our efforts. But we didn’t begin to call ourselves an “environmental justice” organization until it became clear that funders and peer organizations expected that branding. We were glad to join, and if possible, help lead the movement.

On the eve of President Trump’s first accession to power in 2017, a former official at the Department of Justice’s Natural Resources Division, was sanguine about the future of the environmental justice movement: “The [Trump] administration may plan to cut budgets and ... reduce authorities, but [environmental justice] is well ensconced in the career people in the federal government...It’s not a law thing as much as it is a social thing.” Eight years later, that confidence has been belied by events, including the mass firing of “career people.” Though President Biden enshrined his environmental justice agenda in laws, they have been undermined by Trump’s executive orders, a pliant Republican Congress, and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

BLITZKRIEG

Trump’s Executive Order in January 2025, eliminating Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative” was morally shocking but politically unsurprising. Biden’s program, announced exactly four years before, aimed to direct 40 percent of certain federal investments to disadvantaged communities impacted by pollution. Over 500 federal programs across 16 agencies were involved in dispensing Justice 40 funds— hundreds of billions of dollars—to improve water and air quality, remediate contaminated

soils, prevent flooding and fires, develop clean energy systems, create sustainable transportation networks, and offer workforce training for new jobs in the green economy. Though the numbers seem large, they are not considering the scale of the crisis and the size of the disparity in pollution exposure in poor versus wealthy communities. Nevertheless, it was a start.

Unfortunately, the slow speed of the rollout -- partly the consequence of delays in passage of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation (scaled-down to become the Inflation Reduction Act)—meant that the program only really got up to speed by the time of the 2024 election season. Since then, Trump’s executive orders, funding freezes, OMB directives (essentially, a blacklist), Congressional recissions, a government-shutdown and mass layoffs, mean that even grants already awarded under Justice 40 may never be dispersed.

An OMB memo to federal agencies requires them to report any grantees in their portfolios whose work involves immigrants, foreign aid, climate change, abortion, gender ideology, equity or environmental justice.

Some blame for the current fiasco must go to the previous administration, and not only for their slow and halting program rollout. Even if they’d tried, Biden’s team couldn’t have created a program more likely to be halted by a Republican administration. The 40 per cent number looks like—indeed is—a quota, long a bugbear of conservative politicians who decry “reverse discrimination” or “discrimination against white people.” Moreover, by deploying the term “environmental justice” in its program descriptions, Biden’s team endorsed a parochial jargon that was always contentious. In the hands of the Trump’s racist advisor Stephen Miller and OMB Director and Christian Nationalist Russel Vought, EJ became a reviled token of “the enemy within”. They defunded it on day one.

By June 2025, just six months into Trump’s second term in office, environmental justice groups—indeed all environmental organizations—were set on their heels. Some forged alliances with civil liberties organizations in preparation for an onslaught against their non-profit status. Others, purged potentially offending jargon from their websites, press releases, and white papers and tried to carry on as before. A few of them removed from their websites the photos and even names of their leaders, staff and community members, fearful they’d be targeted by hostile government officials, right-wing media, or racist vigilantes. Though the worst eventualities have not yet come to pass—the IRS for example, has not gone after the tax-exempt status of charitable organizations— it’s clear that environmental justice organizations were unprepared for this dramatic reversal of fortune and remain on their back feet; they have not yet forged a new, collective strategy to advance their cause.

PATH FORWARD: ORGANIZE

Environmental injustice is a form of violence. It displaces, sickens and even kills targeted populations—working class, Black, Latino, Indigenous and immigrant. The current administration in Washington is using every weapon it possesses—fiscal, regulatory, political, ideological—to ensure this majority population suffers the worst possible environmental injury. It implicitly argues that whatever harms they experience are their own fault for not being rich or well-connected. It also claims explicitly, that creating profit for some of the already largest and richest corporations in the world is the nation’s highest calling. These ideas are grotesque and deserve the sternest possible rhetorical and practical rebuke.But how can it be delivered? That’s the question every environmental justice organization needs to ask and answer.

When A2 was launched in 2017, in the early months of the first Trump administration, the writing was on the wall. Trump had pulled out of the Paris climate accords, denounced the science of climate change, and encouraged drilling for oil in the arctic and offshore. He installed toadies at EPA and Interior and denounced the (non-existent) Green New Deal as a “Green new scam”. But seen from a wider perspective, the U.S. president seemed an outlier, bucking both national and international momentum toward de-carbonization and environmental protection. Today, as suggested earlier, Trump is riding a national and global wave of environmental retrenchment. What may have been prudent strategy in 2017—stay the course—is no longer valid. In the face of authoritarianism if not fascism, more radical measures must be taken.

Anticipating a Republican sweep, Harriet and I formulated a response in Spring and Summer, 2024. Our plan was to reorient A2 from service provider to movement builder. Though grant writing, technical assistance, and mitigation and adaptation strategies would remain within our portfolio, our main goal would be to undertake local, state-wide, and national organizing for environmental justice. Only a mass movement, we believed—one
that engages the U.S. working class—can stop the mad rush to climate and environmental catastrophe. That meant we had to help our community-members begin, or in some cases accelerate, the hard work of creating a broad, community base to build power. We faced immediate obstacles.

Some staff members were resistant. They were either unfamiliar with community organizing work, doubted its value, or judged it beneath them. Our response was to encourage them to reconsider their posture, offer them training in community organizing, or let them go. (We did all of the above.)

Some community leaders too balked; they had achieved a certain level of local respect and influence and saw no advantage in forming collaborations with other leaders and groups in their state. That was fine—we couldn’t possibly begin to organize everywhere, all at once. Slow but steady growth was the way forward. That’s when we asked Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN, with whom we had been working since later 2022, to help us accelerate our organizing program. The result was the hiring of a Director of Community Organizing, an Organizing Manager and state-level, or on- the -ground organizers to work with the most committed A2 members. We helped members establish State Organizing Committees (SOCs), the goal of which was to identify and coordinate the work of CBOs, create state-level campaigns, determine strategies and build the popular base necessary for success.

The work has progressed slower than we’d like and the results are not yet clear. Some of our paid organizers—tasked with the difficult work of coalescing a harried, distracted and sometimes disaffected community—lack essential organizing know-how. (Our trainers themselves need training.) The best organizers need to conduct thoughtful conversations with community members, not simply try to persuade them to join a group or support an initiative. Sometimes called “meaning- making” or “deep canvassing,” this approach requires time and commitment. But once a liaison between a canvasser and community member is established, further community outreach is facilitated, and real collaboration and activism can begin.

Equally important is for organizers to avoid political or environmental purism or sectarianism. Some individuals may care deeply about protecting wild animals, while others couldn’t care less about animals but are concerned about air pollution. Some may worry about the negative impact of environmental contaminants on Black people living in a fence line community; others about flooding in a white, middle-class subdivision. An effective organizing campaign finds ways to bring all parties together under a single tent to help advance a common environmental justice agenda. Not everybody will be immediately helped; but everybody will feel they have been heard; and they know their turn will come.

Successful movements provide participants a sense of home, as Anand Giridharadas has argued. A2’s founding Executive Director, Harriet Festing was adept at that, well before we established our first SOC. Though her meetings with community leaders were mostly virtual, she was quick to establish with them a warm rapport. During a meeting about an environmental concern, Harriet was always careful to ask after the health and well-being of the person she was speaking to—often it was another woman of similar middle-age or older. This often led to extended conversations, sometimes with phone or text message follow ups, about an ill spouse or family crisis. Business meetings might start off with essential gossip—small talk, anecdotes and storytelling that build trust and intimacy, even a sense of home. That’s especially valuable when conflicts arise between members and difficult conversation are needed. Finally, we at A2 have found that swag helps. The donation or even sale (at a cheap price) of organization T-shirts, buttons, and posters, helps people feel part of something bigger and more powerful than themselves. That perception of power can be the beginning of real power.

There are reasons to hope that an organized, grassroots movement—what may be called the environmental proletariat—is on the cusp of formation. Other organizations are engaged in work similar to A2’s, and public support for Trump and the Republican Party are fast declining. The president’s tariffs, oil drilling, and expulsion of immigrants, far from reviving the economy or lowering prices, are having the opposite effect. Inflation—the third rail of American politics—and working class precarity are rising concerns everywhere.

For the environmental justice movement to “eat the bear” (while at the same time protecting real bears!) it must take a hard look at itself and current political circumstances. Environmental organizations must shift away from internal concerns to focus on public ones and seek to gain power. Initiatives to bulk up internal infrastructure must give way to outreach and collaboration; competition must surrender to cooperation; policy planning to mass organizing. The way forward is difficult, but the growing vulnerability of Trump’s authoritarian regime suggests there are opportunities that may be seized. If environmental groups organize on the ground, collaborate, and cooperate, they may quickly regain lost ground and begin a new movement for environmental justice. There’s no time to lose.

Stephen Eisenman is an emirtus professor of art history from Northwestern University, and more recently co-founder and strategic director of the Anthropocene Alliance. He writes regularly for Counterpunch.