The Environmental Defense Fund: Fighting the System by Guarding the Lifeworld as a Defensively Funded Environment

Abstract

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) prides itself on its mission and legacy, namely, “50 years of forging solutions that help people and nature prosper.” Has this solutionist approach to struggles along the frontiers of what Habermas identified as “system” to defend “life-world” actually helped people and nature prosper? The EDF has secured a relatively small number of protected stop-gap sites around the planet, which it oversees as specially “funded defensible environments.” Yet, these interventions typically assist only certain peoples and specific locations. While it presents itself as an anti-establishment or market-resistant operation, the EDF also usually depicts its “funded defensible environments” through the frames of a complex victimology in which “the system” assaults “the life-world.” It then can step forth as a third-sector “public defender,” forging solutions through defensive legal actions meant to assure fairness and justice in environmental management through legalistic and/or market-based strategies. This analysis critically reassesses how the EDF’s practices assure human, and increasingly nonhuman, beings are accorded legal service to share in the future appreciation of Nature’s stocks, services, or systems as well as a right to redress losses to these interests with legal remedies for any despoliation or destruction of shared environmental equity in the solutions it forges.

Keywords:

• conservation politics
• ecological protection
• Environmental Defense Fund
• Anthropocene

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975).

2 Ibid., 1.

3 Ibid., 4.

4 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1998), x-xxxiv.

5 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975), 4.

6 Ibid., 42.

7 Ibid., 42-43.

8 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2008), 143.

9 Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 127-148. In this analysis, American democratic life began diminishing as “classic civic America” slipped away from a “nation of joiners and membership organizers that flourished from the 1800s through the middle of the twentieth century,” 126.

10 John Hultgren, “21st Century American Environmental Ideologies: A Re-evaluation,” Journal of Political Ideologies 23, no. 1 (2018): 54–79.

11 Ibid., 54.

12 See Martha A. Derthick, Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics, third edition (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012) for a parallel account of how public health officials turned to litigation to achieve the reforms they sought to improve the lives of millions in the U.S.

13 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957). Such developments of “transformative greatness,” in turn, also are now seen as the initial advent of the Anthropocene by many environmental activists and theorists.

14 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts or First Discourse,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) second edition, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 1–28.

15 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition (Nashville, TN: American Renaissance Books/Sam Torode Book Arts, 2009), 5.

16 Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 133-143.

17 Fred Krupp, “Fourth Wave Environmentalism Fully Embraces Business,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2018.

18 Environmental Defense Fund, “Our Story: How EDF got started,” The Environmental Defense Fund https://www.edf.org/about/our-history (2023).

19 Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 136-138. The EDF’s efforts in New York were being duplicated elsewhere around the nation during the 1950s and 1960s Indeed, “the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal agency with responsibility for regulating pesticides before the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, began regulatory actions in the late 1950s and 1960s to prohibit many of DDT’s uses because of mounting evidence of the pesticide’s declining benefits and environmental and toxicological effects…. In 1972, EPA issued a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks” See: https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/ddt-brief-history-and-status.

20 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 138-139.

21 Ibid., 137-138.

22 Ibid., 139.

23 Earthjustice, “About Earthjustice,” Earthjustice (2023) https://earthjustice.org/about.

24 Earthjustice, “About Earthjustice.”

25 For general discussion of these processes that analysis focuses directly on the EDF, see Timothy W. Luke, “The System of Sustainable Degradation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no. 1 (2006): 99-112.

26 Environmental Defense Fund, “When the Court Got It Right,” Solutions 48, no. 3 (2017): 17.

27 See K.W. Abbott, R.O. Keohane, A. Moravcsik, A. Slaughter, and D. Snidal, “The Concept of Legalization,” International Organization 54, no. 3 (2000): 401-419; and, Edward Weisband, “Verdictive Discourses, Shame and Judicialization in Pursuit of Freedom of Association Rights” (unpublished Manuscript, 2004).

28 JUSTIA, “Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984),” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/(accessed 10 January 2024).

29 Oyez, “Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.,” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1983/82-1005 (accessed 10 January 2024).

30 JUSTIA, “Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984).”

31 Oyez, “Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.”

32 Todd Garvey, “The Jurisprudence of Justice John Paul Stevens: The Chevron Doctrine,” Congressional Research Service, 26 May 2010, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R41260.pdf, (accessed 10 January 2024).

33 For more discussion, see Timothy W. Luke, “The System of Sustainable Degradation.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no. 1 (2006): 99-112. In the current political climate of 2024 with the new right-wing backlash against ESG-minded corporate processes, the mere mention of environmental, social or governance issues as consideration in business management has become nearly anathema. See Chip Cutter and Emily Glazer, “Companies Avoid Mentioning ESG, The Latest No-No,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2024, A 5-6.

34 Eugene Scalia, “Chevron Deference Was Fun While It Lasted,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2024, A 17.

35 Derthick, Up in Smoke; and Scalia “Chevron Deference.”

36 K.W. Abbott, R.O. Keohane, A. Moravcsik, A. Slaughter, and D. Snidal, “The Concept of Legalization,” International Organization 54, no. 3 (2000): 401-419.

37 See Douglas Brinkley, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (New York, NY: Harper, 2022) for more context on how the spirit of what Brinkley labels “the Silent Spring generation” of “the Long Sixties” to motivate organizations like the EDF to work with governments to ban DDT and other pesticides as acts of conservation, seeking to end the defilement of Nature.

38 J. R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2016).

39 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1971).

40 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1971). Indeed, the Earth’s rising heat in 2023 was 1.48 C above preindustrial temperatures, only .02 C less than the 1.50 C limit agreed to during the 2015 Paris Climate Summit as the level not to be exceeded to dodge the worst effects of global warming. See Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered global heat record,” Roanoke Times, January 10, 2024, B 7.

41 Environmental Defense Fund, “Our Work: Delivering Bold Climate Change Solutions,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/our-work (accessed 10 January 2024).

42 Timothy W. Luke, “The System of Sustainable Degradation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 17, no. 1 (2006): 99-112. For additional discussion of these circuits of “resourcification,” see Hervé Corvellec, Johan Hultman, Anne Jerneck, Susanne Arvidsson, Johan Ekroos, Niklas Wahlberg, Timothy W. Luke,. “Resourcification: A non-essentialist theory of resources for sustainable development,” Sustainable Development 29, no. 6 (November/December 2021): 1249-1256; and, Timothy W. Luke, “The practices of adaptive and collaborative environmental management: A critique,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 13, no. 4 (2002): 1–22.

43 Amy Greer, “I’m a rancher, and I support the Endangered Species Act,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://blogs.edf.org/growingreturns/2018/01/09/im-a-rancher-and-i-support-the-endangered-species-act/#more-8910 (accessed 10 January 2024).

44 Eric Holst, “From 15 birds to flagship status: An American conservation movement takes flight,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://blogs.edf.org/growingreturns/2017/07/25/15-birds-an-american-conservation-movement/(accessed 10 January 2024).

45 Environmental Defense Fund, “Our Work: Delivering Bold Climate Change Solutions,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/our-work (accessed 10 January 2024).

46 Environmental Defense Fund, “Mobilizing voluntary carbon markets to drive climate action,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/climate/voluntary-carbon-markets (accessed 10 January 2024).

47 Environmental Defense Fund, “Three Decades of Carbon Market Success,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/documents/EDF_Carbon_Market_Timeline.pdf (accessed 10 January 2024).

48 Environmental Defense Fund, “Our Work: Delivering Bold Climate Change Solutions.”

49 Ibid.

50 George Wald, “Environmental Traps,” Earth Day-The Beginning: A Guide to Survival (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1970).

51 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalist at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 65.

52 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2008); and, Timothy W. Luke, “Ephemeralization as Environmentalism: Rereading F. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” Organization & Environment 3, no. 3 (September, 2010): 354-362.

53 Environmental Defense Fund, “We are Environmental Defense Fund,” Environmental Defense Fund, https://www.edf.org/(accessed 10 January 2024).

54 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalist at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 28.

55 Environmental Defense Fund, “Pathways 2025,” Environmental Defense Fund, (November 29, 2017) https://www.edf.org/pathways-2025.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid. See Timothy W. Luke, “Spinning Anthropocenarios: Climate Change Narrative as Geopolitics in the Late Holocene,” SPECTRA: The ASPECT Journal 6, no. 2 (2018): 42-57. https://spectrajournal.org/articles/abstract/10.21061/spectra.v6i2.a.5/.

59 Christopher J. Bosso, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Policy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005).

60 Judith Layzer, The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press/Sage, 2015).

61 Christopher Klyza and David J. Souse, American Environmental Policy, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

62 Ronald G. Shaiko, Voices and Echoes for the Environment: Public Interest Representation in the 1990s and Beyond (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999).

63 Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century, ninth edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press/Sage Publications, 2016).

64 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2008), 56. For further discussion of these links, see Timothy W. Luke, “On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism,” Cultural Critique 31 Fall (1995): 57-81; and, Stephanie Rutherford, “Green Governmentality: Insights and Opportunities in the Study of Nature’s Rule,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 291–307.