The blog 3 QUARKS is running extracts from Jim’s next book. Here is the first. Wise words from 50 years of managing political and environmental campaigns, and doing staff work in all kinds of settings from a Cabinet secretary’s front office to local planning boards. 10 proverbs on Politics When someone says, “I’m not getting …
WHY DOES YOUR TOWN NEED LAND-USE ADVOCACY? In many urban areas today, just driving to the store for milk is a time-consuming hassle; communities nationwide are disfigured by nearly identical vistas of Taco Bells, McDonalds, Dollar Stores and Dairy Queens. This overdevelopment and sprawl has resulted in part from citizens not being involved in community …
– HANDBOOK: HOW TO STOP BAD PROJECTS IN YOUR COMMUNITY Read More »
Every grassroots campaign needs a basic call-to-action that clearly and dramatically summarizes your issue. You cannot have a serious campaign without one. Your alert should be compelling, well-written, accurate, and persuasive; and must contain a wealth of information condensed into one page. Your alert should give a brief background explaining what you want people to …
– EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGNS USE ONE-PAGE ALERTS & SIGN-ON LETTERS Read More »
Neoliberalism, embraced mostly by and for rich people, naturally would have local, financially interested people play a vital role in arriving at decisions about the business use of public assets. The Alinsky approach tries to ensure that people with vested financial interests and rampant conflicts-of-interest are completely excluded from deciding the outcome of federal land …
– Why Polluter’s Victims Hate Enviros More Than Polluters Read More »
There are some larger and little discussed issues around the growing trend that seeks to resolve all conflict with partnerships, roundtables, win-win and consensus processes. These approaches have not just suddenly appeared in a vacuum. America’s fundamental assumptions about the political decision-making process itself are being systematically reshaped by a new political theory called neoliberalism, …
– What Al Capone, Saul Alinsky’s Mentor, Taught Him Read More »
When the laws regulating forest practices, endangered species, clean air, and water were put on the books, it was well before the 1990s when our society became enthralled with neoliberalism which elevated economic utility and job creation above all in matters of public policy. Public resource managers now face local political pressure to base every …
All successful environmental campaigns resemble one another. All unsuccessful ones fail in their own unique way. From company personnel officers to politicians, those who attend to official “complaints” say that people who present grievances and complaints almost never state the exact relief they seek. But agencies, legislators, and the entire American political process are organized …
The vast majority of environmental campaigns are businesslike and seldom create personal confrontations, but for some issues and in some areas of the country, public meetings on environmental issues can occasionally subject activists to bullying and personal threats. The overwhelming majority of personal threats, while unnerving, never result in physical harm. Fortunately, there is an …
– Confronting Goons and Bullies In Public Meetings Read More »
One of the best ways to stop a project that threatens to ruin your neighborhood is to prove it might harm some species of plant or animal threatened with extinction. After years of making these arguments, you learn the habits and idiosyncrasies of other species, sometimes rather obscure ones. Environmental advocacy is weaponizing biology to …
When we lived on the coast of Oregon, we had to constantly fertilize the poor, sandy soil to maintain a garden. Also, the area received very high rainfall—100 or more inches on the coast where we lived and 200 inches in the coastal mountains that began at the edge of town, so nutrients were continually …