On November 10, 1994, an Open Letter was sent to the leadership of the fifteen largest environmental organizations in the US. It was co-signed by people representing 400 grassroots activist organizations across the US. Other than a brief polite reply from the Sierra Club, none of the fifteen major organizations ever responded substantively to this letter.

We are responding to your “Dear Environmentalist” letter of mid-July, which you sent to the combined membership of your groups.

We would like very much to meet with you about the problems you raised. We want to talk about something your letter did not mention: the source of these problems.

Some of us are associated with national environmental organizations, while others are actively engaged in community struggles for environmental justice and democracy. We are of diverse colors and backgrounds, live in different regions, and include trade union and religious and electoral activists, as well as survivors of industrial disasters, and shareholder rights advocates.

In your letter, you wrote:

“…we have never faced such a serious threat to our environmental laws in Congress. Polluters have blocked virtually all of our efforts to strengthen environmental laws…[and] they are mounting an all-out effort to weaken our most important environmental laws.”

We know this is true. We also know that while such assaults are under way in Congress, people in neighborhoods across the country are suffering injuries to health and life — from chemicals, radiation, incinerators, power plants, clear cutting, highway building, disinvestment, and so forth. We also know that dignified jobs doing socially-useful work at fair pay are scarce and getting scarcer; that wages are declining; that democracy is too often a delusion at local, state and federal levels.

And we know that nature is under attack, that many species, ecosystems and wilderness areas have been ravaged.

What prompts us to send this letter to you is our conviction that you have not identified those subverting Congress as our real adversaries in the struggle to save our communities and the natural world: the leaders of today’s giant corporations, and the powerful corporations they direct.

We believe the Earth has never before faced such large-scale devastations as are being inflicted by handfuls of executives running the largest 1000 or so industrial, financial, health, information, agricultural and other corporations. And not since slavery was legal have the laws of the land been used so shamelessly to violate the democratic principles we hold dear.

This was not supposed to happen. It is true that the grand ideals of the American Revolution have not yet been fulfilled, and that many people are still struggling, to gain the legal rights and constitutional protection for which so many fought against tyrannical English monarchy. But for several generations after the nation’s founding, the role of corporations in both government and society was strictly limited by law and custom. A corporate charter was considered a public trust. Corporations had no rights at all except what the people chose to give them.

Ironically, however, corporations have achieved a level of constitutional protection which many citizens still do not enjoy. The leaders of giant corporations govern as monarchs of old who claimed legitimacy under divine right theory. Yet your letter never once refers to multi-billion dollar corporations such as Exxon, Philip Morris, General Electric, Union Carbide, Weyerhaueser, WMX Technologies (Waste Management).

You write of lobbies, special interests, polluters and radical property rights advocates. But the work of these lobbies, polluters and radical advocates — in Congress and in our communities — is the work of corporations that manipulate assets beyond our imaginations while hiding behind limited liability, perpetual existence, and our Bill of Rights.

To a large extent, corporations have been given these legal rights and privileges not by our elected representatives, but by appointed judges. This did not happen by accident: Corporate leaders funded scores of research, propaganda, and lobbying organizations (using pre-tax dollars, which means that corporate lobbying and propagandizing are subsidized by us). You know the list: the U.S. and state chambers of commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, The Competitive Enterprise Institute…. With “Wise Use” groups, and the help of foundations such as Olin, Scaife, Bradley and Smith Richardson, along with legal think tanks, corporate executives violate elections, buy and sell our legislators, and intimidate citizens.

We believe that it is too late to counter corporate power environmental-law-by-environmental-law, regulatory-struggle-by- regulatory struggle. We don’t have sufficient time or resources to organize chemical-by-chemical, forest-by-forest, river-by- river, permit-by-permit, technology-by-technology, product-by- product, corporate disaster-by-corporate disaster.

But if we curb or cut off corporate power at its source, all our work will become easier. …

To read the entire Open Letter, click HERE.