I left off my Part 2 post with the claim that environmental groups adopted a shallower ecology as they became more mainstream. I will continue to discuss this below, and focus on a more radical fringe environmental group.

With wider supporter bases, the largest and most influential organizations—The Group of Ten—tended toward demureness while working with the US government, which in many cases meant acceding to the demands of corporations; none of the Ten showed up to protest the controversial dumping of toxic PCBs in Afton, North Carolina.  When The Group of Ten began to cooperate with (or behave more pragmatically towards) extractive industries, generally the more lucrative variety, many activists found themselves looking for more adversarial policies, and abandoned their positions for more “active” ones.  Many of these people may have considered themselves liberal members of the environmental groups before, but given the dynamics of mainstream discourse, the splinter groups became much more radical.  Here are some examples of frustrated people leaving mainstream groups: David Brower was fired from the Sierra Club and ended up forming Friends of the Earth and two other grassroots organizations; David Foreman quit his job at the Wilderness Society and co-founded Earth First!; Rick Sutherland declared the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund independent of the Sierra Club to litigate more freely in the name of the environment.

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