As a reporter at The New York Times in the 1970s, Philip Shabecoff lobbied to cover the environment before it was even an official "news beat." After nearly 15 years of environmental reporting, he left the paper in 1991 to publish the environmental news daily, Greenwire. He's also authored two books on the environment, including Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century (Island Press, 2000), a detailed description of the history of the movement and a prescription for its future. In 1990, Shabecoff won the American Library Association's James Madison Award for leadership in expanding freedom of information and the public's right to know. Shabecoff argues in Earth Rising that "the chief obstacle to getting the environmental story to the public lies not with environmentalists, but with the media."

Colleen O'Connor: How did you manage to land one of the nation's first jobs covering the environment?

Philip Shabecoff: I've always been interested in the environment -- the outdoors, the woods and the camping. I was a Boy Scout. When I came back to America after being away for most of the 1960s as a foreign correspondent, I was assigned to the Washington bureau. I said I wanted to cover the environment. The editors of the Times said, "No, it's not important enough, you have to do other things." So I did other things, including covering the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations. When I came out they said, "What do you want to do now?" I said, "I want to cover the environment." They said, "Okay, okay, but you've got to cover other stuff, too, because the environment isn't important enough." Then Ronald Reagan became president and appointed James Watt to head the Interior Department and Ann Buford to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and they tried dismantling environmental protections, and it became a hot political issue. So my editors said, "Okay, Phil, now you can cover the environment full-time," and I did. I did it for 14 years at the Times, but there were a couple of editors who thought I was writing too much about what the economy was doing to the environment and not enough about how environmental regulation was hurting the economy. Which it wasn't, but they thought so, and they were listening to people who thought so. So they took me off the beat, and I quit, and founded Greenwire.

Colleen O'Connor: How do you rate media coverage of the environment today as compared to 20 years ago?

Philip Shabecoff: When I started covering the environment in the 1970s there was only a handful of environmental reporters. Now there are a lot of them. The Society of Environmental Journalists has well over a thousand members, and the quality of coverage has gotten much better. Unfortunately the quantity has not. Most media are paying less attention to the environment story than ever, for a number of reasons. Environmental news tends to be a downer. Bad things are happening to the environment. It's not info-tainment. Advertisers don't really like it. They don't like anything that criticizes industrial and commercial activity. Most media managers still don't understand the environment story, the significance of it, and don't like it and try to stay away from it. In the 1980s environmental journalism was the fastest growing sector in American journalism, but I think that's history.

Colleen O'Connor: Was that growth a reaction to the anti-environmental policies of the Reagan years?

Philip Shabecoff: Exactly. There were also a lot of mega-stories like Chernobyl, Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez. These are front-page stories -- drama that the media likes to cover. They don't like to cover some of the long-range stuff. Sometimes when I used to write a story like global warming, my editors would say, "Another story about the end of the world, Shabecoff? You wrote last week about the end of the world."

Colleen O'Connor: What's the nature of the environmental movement today? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Philip Shabecoff: It's a very diverse movement, united by a certain set of principles and values. The major one is that humans are an inextricable part of the entire natural community, but what they are doing is destroying that natural community through their economic activities, population growth and technologies, and that something has to be done about it. So morality is on the environmental movement's side. Environmentalism is widely supported by the American public. Poll after poll shows that two-thirds of Americans consider themselves environmentalists. The majority say they're willing to sacrifice economic gain for more environmental protection. Another strength of the movement is that it has attracted very dedicated people who have become increasingly professional -- in law, in science, in politics and lobbying.

These are formidable strengths, but there are a number of weaknesses. It's not a united movement at all, and groups are frequently at odds. Further, they have not been able to translate the support of the American people into a political gain or even into having the American people change their own destructive patterns of consumption and waste. The reason for this is that they've not reached out to Americans at the local level. I think also that some of the transcendental fire that characterized the early environmental movement has gotten somewhat dimmer over the years.

Colleen O'Connor: What comes to mind when you talk about this is forest activist Julia "Butterfly" Hill. She had that transcendental flame.

Philip Shabecoff: She does, and it certainly hasn't disappeared -- the Earth First! movement has an element of that in it. Personally, I think that the radical environmentalists have not accomplished all that much, and may have set up a disaffection for environmentalism among many Americans. But you're right. The people sitting in the tree or chaining themselves to a riverbed that's about to be dammed -- that sort of passion is important and seems to be missing in a lot of the environmental movement today.

Colleen O'Connor: I know social sustainability is also important. You believe we can't have economic and environmental sustainability without it.

Philip Shabecoff: One of the failures of the environmental movement is the failure to recognize that the destruction of natural resources and the systems that support life on earth springs from the same flaws in our society -- from social institutions and systems that cause other injustices, particularly racial and economic injustice. The flaws of the economic and political systems that lead to disappearing land and polluted water and skies are ones that keep people in poverty, keep people of color suppressed, and lead to assaults on immigrants. The environmentalists never seem to have understood the relationship between what they are doing and the broader drive for social justice in this country and around the world. The environmental justice movement is mostly people of color, mostly poor people, who address the fact that the worst environmental pollution is heaped upon the poor. Because they are poor, because they are people of color, they are politically neutered. Corporations can get away with doing these things because they know they will not face political or economic reprisals.

Colleen O'Connor: So what happened when the environmental justice people reached out to the mainstream groups?

Philip Shabecoff: The mainstream movement said, "Hey, you're right. We're going to correct this." But essentially the people seeking environmental justice have had to go their own way. There are reasons from both sides why they have not gotten together. But the main failure has been on the part of entrenched environmental groups, not to act upon the fact that social injustice is environmental injustice as well. Unless they start dealing with these basic flaws in our social structure they're not going to be able to achieve their goal of saving our habitat for the future. They're certainly not doing it now. You can see they're losing ground because they have not been able to influence the political and economic structures in this country.

Colleen O'Connor: This seems like a huge, if not impossible, task!

Philip Shabecoff: Until national and community movements are in alliance they're not going to be able to generate any political power. The environmental movement groups have to devote much more resources to politics than they now do. They need to be able to reach the level of political clout that the trade-union movement had at the peak of its power. The way they're going to have to do this is the old-fashioned way, by organizing, by recruiting, training and deploying an army of organizers to send out there. They also need to develop a much better ability to communicate with the public. The environmental groups are not particularly good at getting their message across, except on specific issues, but not in the broader political context of what is happening to the environment.

Now, there's no way the environmental movement as presently constituted can do this. They don't have enough people and organizational skills to do it, and certainly don't have the financial wherewithal to do it. There's a growing number of voices from within and without the movement that environmental groups are going to have to become entrepreneurial.

Colleen O'Connor: You call them "green capitalists." Is there a good example of this?

Philip Shabecoff: There was one major operation. The National Resources Defense Council supported an effort to create the Bronx Community Paper Company in association with a local community group. It looked very promising. They raised lots of money from state, city and federal governments, and a couple big corporations said they were willing to invest. But that fell apart for a number of reasons, including failures within the South Bronx community to agree on this and support it sufficiently. But I think it can be done. Some people think that instead of just more lawyers and lobbyists, the environmental movement is going to need more MBAs and investment bankers in the future. They're going to need to become richer and more powerful than they are now to solve the problems of the 21st century.

Colleen O'Connor: One environmentalist you interviewed says the movement is "winning battles but losing the war." You suggest that lack of cooperation between grassroots organizations and national environmental groups is a fundamental problem.

Philip Shabecoff: My view is that the national groups really need the local organizations to achieve their goals. They have all sorts of skills -- political skills, street smarts, organizational skills that the nationals don't have, as well as a lot of knowledge about what is really happening with the environment in the field. They're much more determined to win because they have to -- it affects their children, their schools, their homes. They cannot afford to lose, whereas the national environmentalists are often willing to compromise far too much.

Colleen O'Connor: In writing about environmentalism and the world's religions, you quote an article in The Los Angeles Times that says: "Churches, temples and synagogues across the land are seizing the environment as a top-priority concern." Is the environmental movement effectively leveraging this interfaith religious movement?

Philip Shabecoff: No, they are not. I think it's a major mistake. I'm not quite sure I understand why. The national environmental groups have become much more institutionalized and professionalized. So far, the idea of religion and spirituality has not assumed any sort of major role within those organizations.

Colleen O'Connor: That's odd, because there's a whole eco-theology movement.

Philip Shabecoff: There is, but that's another part of the general environmental movement, not part of the mainstream national groups. So far the eco-theologists -- who have made some very moving and eloquent statements about the responsibility of humanity to the creation -- have begun to address the laity on this issue. But we have an administration in Washington now that seems intent on letting the destruction of God's creation go forward without hindrance, and you don't hear the churches speak out or march on Washington or conduct pray-ins or anything.

Colleen O'Connor: How can the environmental movement change our behaviors?

Philip Shabecoff: David Orr, head of environmental studies at Oberlin College, says our environmental problem is a prior failure of mind. Most people are not educated to understand the stakes involved in the degradation of our environment and what needs to be done about it. The media are not giving the American people enough information to educate people and make them want to take positive action. So the environmental movement has a huge task in front of it or else we're going to be in very serious trouble by the end of this century, with environmental conditions so bad they could erode our democratic institutions and our liberties.

At the moment the environmental community lacks the resources, energy, will and money to do this. But we're talking about the 21st century. Think about the difference between the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the 20th century, and how far we've gotten on the environment. At the beginning it meant saving some public lands and some trees. By the end it had become a mass social movement concerned with all aspects of the degradation of our habitat. Looking at what has happened over the last century, we can hope -- and maybe expect -- that we will grow and learn and become concerned and strong enough to address these ills.

Colleen O'Connor is a freelance writer based in San Francisco, Calif.