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Changing Issue Representation Among Major United States Environmental Movement Organizations*

Posted on: Tuesday, 21 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Johnson, Erik

ABSTRACT

Histories of the environmental movement have emphasized the importance of a shift in focus from those issues traditionally associated with the movement, such as resource and wildlife protection, towards "new" quality of life issues, such as environmental pollution and its human health effects. Here, time- series data between 1970 and 2000 on the issue agendas of fifty leading environmental movement organizations (EMOs) are used to empirically assess the veracity of this hypothesized shift. Results indicate that while there is dramatic growth in the salience of new environmental issues, those issues traditionally associated with the environmental movement continue to dominate the collective agendas of major EMOs. Further, new environmental issues are most likely to be represented in organizational fields composed of smaller EMOs on average.

The selection and problematization of issues are central to the mobilization, development and, ultimately, success or failure of a social movement, as well as individual social movement organizations (SMOs). In addition, the issues to which SMOs attend have potentially important public policy implications. Perhaps more so than for any other contemporary movement, changing issue representation holds a central theoretical position in analyses of U.S. environmentalism.

Scholars suggest that the shift in focus away from issues of resource and wildlife protection towards the "new" quality of life issues, such as environmental pollution and its human health effects, represents the most significant transformation in the twentieth century environmental movement. The extent of this qualitative shift is so dramatic that many analysts conceive of the development of a distinct movement (e.g. Dalton 1994; Hays 1987). Changing issue representation is thought to have broadened the scope and constituency of the environmental movement and contributed to growth in both new and existing environmental organizations (McLaughlin and Khawaja 2000; Mitchell, Mertig, and Dunlap 1992), as well as the development of an extensive public policy system (Andrews 1999; Petulla 1988).

Despite its theoretical importance, the extent to which new environmental issues are represented among national environmental movement organizations (EMOs) remains an empirically open question. To my knowledge, there have been no efforts to systematically document changing issue representation and the ascendance of new environmental issues. The many excellent histories that have been written on the United States environmental movement primarily have been qualitative-historical, relying on media and first person accounts to document change (e.g. Dowie 1997; Gottlieb 1993); case studies of a few of the largest national environmental organizations (e.g. Dunlap and Mertig 1992; Mitchell et al. 1992); or focusing on only one aspect of the environmental movement, such as toxics (Szasz 1994), environmental justice (Bullard 1990), or forest protection (Nash 1967). To what extent have major EMOs incorporated new environmental issues on their issue agendas? Have these new issues re-focused the attention of major EMOs away from traditional issues of resource and wildlife protection? Finally, are new environmental issues more likely to be represented in certain types of EMOs relative to others?

The single largest impediment to quantitative analyses of issue change, and agenda-setting more generally, has been the lack of available temporal data on issue representation (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Burstein 1991). Here, content analysis of self-reported organizational activity descriptions from the Encyclopedia of Associations are used to trace issue representation within fifty major EMOs over the past thirty years. In addition, I explore the distribution of issues across five distinct organizational fields that compose the environmental movement to assess whether these issues have diffused broadly or predominately within certain segments of the movement. I begin by describing the importance of examining change in issue agendas among national organizations, contextualizing this discussion with historical accounts of the mobilization and refocusing of the environmental movement. I then provide a theoretical approach, building on new-institutionalist theory, in which to couch analyses of issue change among major EMOs before presenting empirical analyses.

Theory

The Importance of Issue Selection for (E)MOs

The mix of issues to which social movement organizations (SMOs) attend has important implications for public policy outcomes. In most public agenda-setting models, SMOs operate as issue generating organizations that identify and problematize new issues and push for their inclusion on the limited space of government institutional agendas (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Rochon 1998; Andrews and Edwards 2004). The adoption of issues by (environmental) movement organizations is, thus, an important precursor to understanding agenda-setting processes on broader public agendas.

The selection of issues to which movement organizations attend also has important implications for the development and survival of individual SMOs. Scott (2002) notes that "Organizations such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace gain legitimacy from the broader environmental movement, but carve out limited goals around which to mobilize attention and resources" (p. 35). By identifying specific issues "around which to mobilize attention and resources," social movement organizations establish niches within the broader organizational environment. If that niche is resource and opportunity rich, organizations prosper. If the issue niche which SMOs identify is relatively sparse, they will either be forced to find a new niche (i.e., shift their issue focus) or suffer the consequences.

There is no shortage of environmental problems; however, EMOs formed to address these issues do have access to finite pools of resources and must choose to devote these resources to certain issues at the expense of others. Early EMOs in America, for instance, were organized almost exclusively around the protection of natural resources and wildlife.1 During the 1960s and 1970s' cycle of protest (Tarrow 1998), the environmental movement entered a distinct and extensive mobilization period characterized by growing concern for "new" or "second generation" quality of life issues (Brulle 1995; 2000; Dunlap and Mertig 1992; Gottlieb 1993; Hays 1987). Within years, a movement that was largely defined by issues of natural resource and wildlife "conservation" is thought to have re-oriented to the human health effects of pollution and other quality of life issues.

These new issues are thought to have proliferated largely as a result of the formation of "a whole new breed of environmental organizations" (Mitchell et al. 1992). At the same time, however, recent histories of the environmental movement strongly suggest that periods and instances of mobilization around quality of life concerns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are antecedents of modern mobilization (Gottlieb 1993; Melosi 2001). It seems likely that major EMOs formed during earlier mobilization periods provided important abeyance structures (Taylor 1989), contributing to the rapid proliferation of these issues after the 1960s. The first organization within my sample to focus on the issue of pollution (the Air and Waste Management Association), for example, was founded (1907) as part of the Progressive Era urban reform movement in the United States.2

While so-called quality of life issues are thought to have become heavily represented within the environmental movement, including on the agendas of large and institutionalized national EMOs, there is strong evidence suggesting that at least some new environmental issues have not been embraced by the "majors." In particular, there often have been strained relations between the majors and local activists organized around issues of toxic contamination and environmental justice, in part due to the perceived unresponsiveness of the majors to local issues and concerns (Bullard 1990; Cable and Cable 1995; Szasz 1994).

Collectively, the research reviewed here leads me to expect that new environmental issues will be represented in a greater proportion of major EMO issue agendas over the observed time period, while traditional environmental issues will be mentioned less frequently. Further, new environmental issues will come to dominate the collective issue agendas of major EMOs, relative to traditional issues. Finally, I expect those new environmental issues most strongly identified with grassroots strands of the environmental movement (i.e., toxics and environmental justice) to be represented less broadly than other new environmental issues.

Focus on Major National EMOs

Though clearly not representative of the environmental movement as a whole, there are good reasons to believe that major national EMOs are an appropriate locus of study. First, issue diffusion among the majors may be of more practical importance than diffusion among national EMOs generally. The majors are significantly larger than the average EMO and control substant\ial amounts of resources. As such, they disproportionately represent and speak for the environmental movement in public policy and media arenas. Organizations with more resources are significantly more likely to participate in congressional hearings, for instance, than comparatively smaller organizations (Leyden 1995). Certainly, scholars have tended to imbue developments within the majors with particular significance and often treat them as emblematic of developments within the environmental movement generally. Analyses of the environmental movement regularly rely on information from an even more restricted group of large national EMOs (often the big 10 or 12) than is analyzed here, even when illustrating developments within the grass-roots strands of the environmental movement. For example, the Handbook of Environmental Sociology, in discussing grassroots mobilization, focuses considerable attention on major national environmental organizations included in analyses presented here: the Citizens Clearinghouse to Hazardous Waste, Sea Shepard Conservation Society, Earth First!, and the Rainforest Action Network (Mertig, Dunlap, and Morrison 2002:469-75).

The adoption of issues by major EMOs can also be expected to set the stage for adoption by other national EMOs, since the adoption of an innovation by a central organization typically raises rates of adoption among the remaining members of the field. Relatedly, issue selection by national EMOs may have important implications for grassroots organizational activities, as substantial portions of sub- national EMOs are affiliated with (i.e., chapters of) national organizations (Andrews and Edwards forthcoming; Kempton et al. 2001). This is not to say that a small group of major national EMOs provide a centralized source of direction for, or accurately represent, the environmental movement as a whole. Nor should results presented here be generalized to the movement as a whole. Portions of the grassroots environmental movement, for example, have frequently entered into direct conflict with many of the national EMOs included in this study over the relative priority devoted to different environmental problems. Results do, however, represent real changes in the issue focus of major U.S. national environmental movement organizations.

Patterns of Change: New Institutionalist Perspective

To understand the changing patterns of issue representation within the environmental movement, I draw on new-institutionalist theory in organizational analysis, particularly the work of Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983), who show how organizational appeals to institutionally accepted norms of structure and behavior can result in the homogenization of form and practice. The concept of organizational fields is central to understanding the trend towards homogeneity in issue representation or other organizational attributes. Organizational fields are the "collection of organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life" (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:148). They bound populations of reference organizations, typically those that produce similar products or services in some limited geographic area. Actors within a field share common systems of meaning and cognitive frames that help to define social relationships and guide interactions.

The tendency towards homogeneity in organizational form and practice within fields is thought to result from three general mechanisms.3 Most germane to this research has been the growing accumulation of evidence documenting instances of mimetic isomorphism. That is, in an effort to reduce uncertainty and enhance legitimacy, organizations frequently model themselves after other similar, though presumably more legitimate, organizations. While mimicry of entities outside an organizational field may occur, research has consistently found that organizations primarily pattern themselves on other organizations within the same field. Firms, for example, mimic other firms in the same industry (Fligstein 1985; 1990), and states adopt policies that mimic those of other states (Knoke 1982; Soule and Zylan 1997). Social movement scholars similarly have demonstrated that protest tactics diffuse primarily, and most rapidly, among actors who belong to a common social category (McAdam and Rucht 1993; Soule 1997). If it is the case that EMOs reference other organizations in the same field, to determine which issues are normatively approved when making decisions about issue representation, we should expect to find that issues diffuse primarily within organizational fields as opposed to between fields.

Data Collection and Methods

To answer the motivating questions of this research, it is necessary to identify and collect time-series data on the issue agendas of major EMOs, as well as to group them in organizational fields. Major EMOs were identified based on previous research that evaluated the significance of environmental organizations on factors such as size and perceived political influence (Brulle 1995; 2000). These organizations include, among others, what are commonly referred to as the "big ten" environmental organizations. Both highly institutionalized issue advocacy organizations (e.g. Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club) and more confrontational, loosely structured direct action groups (Earth First!, Clamshell Alliance) are included in the sample (complete list available upon request).4 Collectively, these major EMOs exhibit a wide range of tactics, discourse frames, organizational structures, and constituencies.

The Encyclopedia of Associations (Gale Research Inc.) was used to collect detailed time-series data on the issue agendas of these major EMOs. The Encyclopedia is gaining widespread appeal as a source of data on social movement organizations (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Johnson and McCarthy 2004; Minkoff 1999; Nownes 2004). Published annually since 1974, and intermittently before that, the latest edition contains information on more than 22,000 national associations.

Issue representation of EMOs was identified through a content analysis of self-reported descriptions contained in the Encyclopedia. For each year an organization was in existence between 1970 and 2000,5 it was recorded whether the organization indicated that it attends to the traditional environmental issues of natural resources, wildlife, and energy and/or the "new" environmental issues of pollution, human health, toxics, nuclear energy, and environmental justice (see Appendix). Initial coding also revealed a significant fraction of organizations in the most recent period that attend to issues of sustainable development; therefore, organizational entries were coded for the presence (absence) of this issue throughout the observed time period. Sustainable development does not easily fit with the old/new issue dichotomy elaborated here, drawing instead from both streams with a core message that focuses on keeping the volume of human extraction of natural resources (old) and the emission of pollutants (new) in balance with nature's regenerative capacities (Sachs 1993:17). Because it links traditional and new environmental priorities within a single, over- arching framework, sustainable development is one very promising direction modern environmentalism has taken.

Though offering detailed, historical information on a range of organizations, there are some important limitations to the Encyclopedia as a data source (see Minkoff 1999). First, due to space limitations, it is likely that there is some under-reporting of issues. This source cannot detect, for example, the diversity of activities actually undertaken by the local divisions of major national EMOs. It is likely, however, that organizations report those issues which are most salient and central to their agendas. My analyses are necessarily limited to these central agendas and serve as an important complement to in-depth case studies of major EMOs.

There may also be a lag between organizational issue change and reporting, if organizations fail to accurately update their entries from year to year. This suggests some caution in interpreting the timing of issue agenda changes reported here (implying that actual changes in issue representation may occur somewhat earlier than reported). There is no reason, however, to believe this lag affects absolute magnitudes or overall patterns of change.

Constructing Organizational Fields

Operationalizing the somewhat elusive concept of organizational fields has proven a challenge in new-institutionalist analyses. An organizational field refers, conceptually, to "a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside of the field" (Scott, 2002:129). Though the definition of organizational fields emphasizes interaction and shared meaning systems, its operationalization has typically relied on geographic boundaries and a loose conception of "likeness" based on the product organizations produce (e.g., all community colleges, all fast food restaurants) rather than empirical assessments of, for example, organizational perceptions (Fligstein and Dauber 1989:93).

Here, organizational fields are defined based on systematic analysis of the primary discourse frames invoked by major EMOs. Discourse frames are cognitive "schemata of interpretation" that organize past experiences and guide future action (Snow et al. 1986). Invocation of similar discourses by major EMOs indicates shared meaning systems, perceptions and assumptions about what is important, and how the world operates. As well, it defines patterns of interaction among organizations and structures how those organizations perceive and respond to environmental stimuli. EMOs which invoke similar discourses tend, for example, to share foundation connections (Caniglia and Brulle 1\199).

Using detailed information from organizations themselves, Brulle (1995; 2000) has classified major EMOs according to the primary discourse frame which they invoke: conservationism, preservationism, deep ecology, political ecology, and reform environmentalism.6 There is loose consensus in the academic literature on the existence of these different strands within the environmental movement (Dowie 1997; Dunlap and Mertig 1992; Nash 1967; Oelschlaeger 1991). Further, the temporal construction of these fields corresponds to standard accounts of the environmental movement's development in the United States, as reflected in the founding patterns of their incorporated EMOs.

Table 1 presents summary information on each of these organizational fields for our sample of 50 majors, including: a description of the dominant discourse, sample EMOs, mean organizational founding dates, and summary data on 2000 membership, budget, and staff levels.7 Clearly, the older fields of conservation and preservation contain the largest EMOs. The fields of deep ecology and political ecology have developed most recently and are not only smaller in terms of the total number of organizations which constitute the field but are composed of EMOs that are much smaller, on average. The field of reform environmentalism, most "typical" of modern environmentalism, falls in between these two extremes. This holds for all three measures of organizational size: budget, staff, and membership.

Results

The hypothesized shift in the issue representation of the environmental movement is assessed in a number of ways. First, data are presented on the proportion of major EMOs that attend to a variety of traditional and new environmental issues. This is followed by assessing the total relative share of attention to new versus traditional environmental issues. Next, the percentage of major EMOs which attend only to traditional or new environmental issues, or to a combination of these issues, is presented in time- series format. Finally, evidence on the distribution of issues across organizational fields is presented.

Table 2 shows the proportion of major national environmental movement organizations identifying particular issues as salient at ten year intervals between 1970 and 2000. Columns do not sum to 100 percent as organizations may identify more than one issue as pertinent. Issues are grouped into the rough designations of "old" and "new" and ranked within these designations, based on the magnitude of change between 1970 and 2000 in the proportion of major EMOs that identify issues as salient (final column), with issues undergoing more change listed first.8

Table 1. Mean Characteristics of Major Environmental Movement Organizations (2000), by Organizational Field

Table 2. Proportion of Major Environmental Movement Organizations Attending to Various Issues, 1970-2000 (Ws in parentheses)

Throughout the observed period, natural resources remain the dominant issue area, by far the issue most likely to be included on a major EMO's agenda. Though wildlife remains second only to natural resources as the most commonly included issue on the agendas of major environmental organizations, there is a 10 percent decline between 1970 and 2000 in the proportion of organizations that address wildlife issues as a primary area of organizational concern. This is the greatest observed decline in the proportion of organizations that attend to any issue.

While traditional environmental issues, especially natural resource concerns, are the most commonly represented, or unifying, issues within the environmental movement, there has been a large increase in the proportion of national EMOs attending to "new" environmental issues. The issues of human health (.15), toxics (.13), and pollution (.11) experience comparably large overall increases in organizational attention. Pollution is the "new" environmental issue most likely to be included on the agenda of major national EMOs, though it remains significantly less likely to be included than either wildlife or resource issues. Combining the distinct, but related, issues of human health, toxics, and pollution into one category, I find that at no point do more than one-third of EMOs attend to them. This is comparable to the representation of wildlife issues in the most recent period, but remains considerably less than for natural resource issues.

Like the issue of toxics, environmental justice has been most closely associated with grassroots political action. Unlike toxics, however, major EMOs have failed to significantly address the social distribution of environmental costs. Only 4 percent of the majors currently identify environmental justice as a core issue, whereas by 2000 almost 20 percent list toxics as a central area of organizational concern. The environmental justice issue developed somewhat later than toxics, in the mid-1980s, so it is possible this grassroots issue has not yet diffused to national organizations. The environmental justice movement has also tended to identify with the civil rights movement rather than the environmental movement. This may also help to explain the relative failure of environmental justice issues to be adopted by major national EMOs.

Nuclear issues, unlike all other "new" environmental issues, have witnessed a decline in organizational attention over the time period examined. This decline may be attributable, at least in part, to the relative success of the movement in this arena; no utility has ordered a new nuclear reactor in the United States since 1978, and interpretive schema ambivalent or hostile to nuclear issues have promulgated among the media and public alike (Adair 1996; Gamson and Modigliani 1989). We might expect these declines to continue unless proponents of nuclear energy prove successful in efforts to revive the industry in the United States by, for example, successfully re- framing nuclear energy as a viable and environmentally friendly (CO2 free) energy alternative.

The hybrid issue of sustainable development experienced the largest increase between 1970 and 2000 of any issue in the proportion of major EMOs that identify it on their agendas. No organizations identified this issue prior to 1970. Fully one-fifth of major EMOs do so in 2000, making sustainable development the third most common issue represented (tied with the issue of pollution, after natural resources and wildlife respectively).

Overall, the traditional issues of natural resources and wildlife clearly remain the unifying and orienting issues within the movement. Most major EMOs still attend to natural resource issues, and many continue to focus on wildlife. In fact, no other issues maintain attention from more than 20 percent of the majors. Older issues do not lose much ground in terms of the proportion of major environmental organizations attending to them, despite the increased attention to the new environmental issues of toxics, health, and pollution as well as sustainahle development among major national environmental organizations.

Figure 1. Percentage of Major Environmental Movement Organizations Attending to New Issues, Traditional Issues, or Both, 1970-2000

Figure 1 provides an alternative method of analyzing the rise of new environmental issues, displaying in time-series format the percentage of major EMOs that attend only to traditional environmental issues, to new environmental issues only, and to a combination of both traditional and new environmental issues. This figure addresses how widely the increased attention to new environmental issues has been distributed among major EMOs. That is, do a small number of major EMOs continually expand their focus to include a greater number of new issues, or does the increase in new environmental issue representation characterize the sample as a whole? If new environmental issues have come to dominate, we would expect to find increasing proportions of major EMOs to focus on new environmental issues, exclusively, or on some combination of new and traditional issues.

At the beginning of the observed period, close to 90 percent of major EMOs attend solely to traditional environmental issues, and just over 10 percent of organizations attend only to new environmental issues. From 1970 to 1983, the percentage of organizations that attend solely to traditional environmental issues steadily declines to 60 percent, remaining relatively stable after that point. The proportion of organizations that attend solely to "new" environmental issues, meanwhile, has remained relatively stable since 1975, fluctuating between 13 and 20 percent. Finally, the proportion of major EMOs that attend to both traditional and new environmental issues grows from zero percent at the beginning of the observed period to just over 22 percent by 1983, a level which is maintained into the present day. This suggests that while new environmental issues are increasingly represented on the agendas of major EMOs, they do not achieve broad representation within the movement. That is, sole attention to traditional issues is the dominant format of major EMO issue agendas, though a few organizations diversify their agendas to include new as well as traditional issues, and a smaller percentage specialize in new environmental issues.

Combined, these results tell a consistent story that provides only mixed support for the hypothesized major transformation in issue representation of the environmental movement. Early in the period under observation, the collective issue agendas of major EMOs are dominated by traditional environmental issues: resource protection, wildlife, and energy related issues continue to be the primary focus of the majors. Most focus on these issues exclusively, and more than 80 percent of all issues mentioned are traditional environmental issues. Although new environmental issues are increasingly represented within the movement over time, they nevercome to dominate the agenda. Never do more than 20 percent of major EMOs attend to any one new environmental issue. Of all the issues mentioned in major EMO self-descriptions, never are more than one-third "new" environmental issues. Finally, never do a majority of major EMOs focus on new environmental issues, either alone or in conjunction with traditional issues.

Table 3 disaggregates change in the issue attention of environmental majors by organizational field to determine the extent to which issues diffuse broadly across the movement, or in a more segmented fashion.10 Each panel displays the proportion of major EMOs in five organizational fields that identify an issue as salient in a given year. Results for the deep ecology and political ecology fields should be interpreted with caution as both fields contain a small number of organizations, and percentages are, thus, highly variable.

Natural resources (Panel A) is a common orienting issue across organizational fields, with between 20 and 100 percent of organizations concentrating on the issue throughout the observed period. This issue is most strongly linked with the older fields of conservation and preservation; more than 88 percent of preservation and nearly two-thirds of conservation organizations list natural resources as a significant area of organizational concern throughout the period of observation. Around 50 percent of reform environmentalism and deep ecology organizations attend to natural resource issues. Political ecology organizations display a more variable pattern, though many of these organizations also attend to natural resource issues. This issue is broadly represented across organizational fields and most fields have increased attention to natural resource issues over time.

Table 3. Proportion of Major Environmental Movement Organizations Attending to Issues (Panels A-H) by Organizational Field, 1970- 20003

Attention to wildlife issues across organizational fields is displayed in Panel B. Though a large majority of EMOs in the preservation (75 percent) and conservation (60 percent) fields listed wildlife as a salient issue in 1970, these fields have decreased attention to this issue over time. Notably, offsetting some of these losses in representation, reform environmentalism organizations have increasingly adopted wildlife as an issue, from about 8 percent in 1970 to 20 percent by 1983. A minority of deep ecology organizations (17 percent) focus on wildlife issues, while no political ecology organizations do so. This issue remains highly identifiable with the older conservation and preservation fields, despite declines, and has diffused somewhat among reform environmentalism organizations.

The issue of energy, Panel C, is the one traditional environmental issue that is not represented primarily within the conservation and preservation fields. Instead, the field of reform environmentalism has the largest proportion of major EMOs identifying energy issues as salient. Significant proportions of organizations in both the conservation and preservation fields do adopt the issue starting in the late 1970s (at least partially in response to the Arab oil embargo), though attention declines again in the early 1990s. No deep ecology or political ecology organizations attend to energy issues. The issue of energy is most salient for reform environmentalism but fails to diffuse to the movement broadly, despite fleeting attention by the conservation and preservation fields.

In contrast to natural resource and wildlife issues, which are dominated by the conservation and preservation fields, the new environmental issues (Panel D-G) are virtually absent from the agendas of conservation and preservation organizations. Never does more than one major conservation or preservation organization in the sample attend to any new environmental issue. Instead, new environmental issues are predominately represented within the reform environmentalism and, to a lesser extent, political ecology fields.

Roughly one-fifth of major reform environmental organizations attend to pollution issues during the 1970's, and fully one-third do so from 1985 to 2000. There is also a steady increase in the representation of human health issues among reform environmentalism organizations during the 1980s to around 20 percent, though political ecology organizations are most likely to identify human health issues on their agendas, with two-thirds of the EMOs in this field attending to this issue from 1982 to 2000.

Toxics (Panel F) and nuclear (Panel G) issues are primarily attended to by EMOs from the reform environmentalism and political ecology fields. There is a steady increase in the percentage of reform environmentalism organizations attending to toxics issues and elevated levels of attention to nuclear issues from 1982-1989. Approximately one-third of political ecology organizations attend to toxics, while interest in nuclear issues among this field has withered in recent decades. Finally, sustainable development (Panel H) is primarily associated with the younger organizational fields: reform environmentalism, deep ecology and political ecology. In the most recent time period, however, two preservation EMOs (the Earth Island Institute and Sierra Club) do also indicate that they attend to this issue.

In all, there seems to be some support for the hypothesis that issues are more likely to diffuse within than between fields. The traditional issues of natural resource and wildlife, though highly represented across organizational fields, have been and continue to be most salient to conservation and preservation organizations. Conversely, the rise of organizational interest in "new" environmental issues can be attributed primarily to changes in the fields of reform environmentalism and, to a lesser extent, political ecology. Only rarely are new environmental issues represented on the issues agendas of major EMOs from the fields of conservation, preservation, or deep ecology. The issue agendas of major conservation and preservation EMOs appear to be relatively fixed and focused on issues traditionally associated with the movement. The newer fields, particularly of reform environmentalism, have comparatively flexible issue agendas that have evolved over time to give more collective emphasis to both a broader array of new environmental issues, as well as resource and wildlife issues.

Conclusion

Histories of the environmental movement have emphasized the shift in focus from protection of natural resources and wildlife to "new" environmental quality of life issues, such as pollution and human health. This shift is associated with the revival of the environmental movement in the 1970s, as foundings of new EMOs proliferated and older ones expanded their issue agendas. Systematic empirical evidence of this shift has been lacking however, with analyses based on media and first person accounts of developments within the movement, case studies of only a very few of the largest environmental organizations, or of single issues within the movement such as toxics or nuclear pollution.

In this paper, for the first time, the changing representation of various issues on the agendas of major EMOs in the United States is systematically documented. In particular, I focus on the dynamic between traditional and new environmental issues and the representation of these issues within five different organizational fields that together comprise the U.S. environmental movement. The results presented here indicate that, indeed, there was a tremendous surge in EMO attention to "new" environmental issues. The growth in attention to these issues was dramatic and occurred primarily during the 1970s and first half of the 1980s. This corresponds to the period of highly elevated founding rates in national EMOs generally, as well as within the sample of majors included in this analysis specifically. Throughout the later half of the 1980s and the 1990s, proportional attention to new environmental issues remained relatively stable.

However, while there is dramatic growth in the salience of new environmental issues, they never come to dominate the collective agendas of major EMOs. Across the study period, the proportion of major EMOs attending to natural resource and wildlife issues remains significantly higher than the proportion attending to any new environmental issue across the study period. In addition, most major EMOs continue to attend solely to traditional environmental issues. Clearly, issues traditionally associated with the environmental movement continue to dominate the agendas of major EMOs.

There is also considerable variation across organizational fields in the extent of attention devoted to various environmental issues. While the issue of natural resources is represented broadly across organizational fields, the typically larger conservation and preservation organizations are especially likely to attend to both natural resource and wildlife issues. To the extent that new environmental issues have garnered increased attention, it has largely come from those fields composed of relatively smaller EMOs, namely, reform environmentalism and political ecology. Never does more than one conservation or preservation organization identify as important any new environmental issue, and no organization from these fields ever mentions the issues of environmental justice or nuclear pollution. Since larger EMOs presumably have more of an ability to influence public agendas and impact public policy, the differential representation of issues by organizational fields has potentially important implications.

In addition to rapid growth in "new" environmental issues, the analyses presented make clear there has been significant growth in attention to the issue of sustainable development. While no major EMOs identify this as a salient issue in 1970, one-fifth do so in 2000, making it tied with \pollution as the third most commonly mentioned. The ascendance of this issue can be attributed, at least in part, to the increasingly transnational nature of the environmental movement and to the legitimating effects of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, organixed around the issue of sustainable development. The "bridging" quality of this issue makes its' ascendance potentially very important, and it is one of the major directions modern environmentalism is taking, as is reflected in the growing attention to which major EMOs devote themselves. As such, sustainable development has the potential to act as a powerful force uniting disparate organixational fields within the environmental movement. Only very recently, however, does it appear to have begun serving this integrative function and to diffuse broadly within the environmental movement.

The research presented here begins to advance our understanding of the changing representation of issues among major EMOs, but also raises many questions. While the results of this study suggest that the adoption of new environmental issues has been more limited than most accounts of the movement's development imply, the extent to which the issue agendas of major EMOs are representative of the environmental movement generally remains an open empirical question. Research on local EMOs, however, supports the notion that natural resource and wildlife issues are more likely to be used as an organizing framework than are new environmental issues (Andrews and Edwards forthcoming). One area of future research should be to assess the degree to which the issue agendas expressed by major EMOs and their actual activities correspond. New-institutionalist analyses suggest that the degree of de-coupling between the expressed goals and actual activities of an organization can be considerable (Meyer and Rowan 1977). As well, there is likely to be at least some discrepancy between the issue agendas expressed by the national level offices of EMOs and the agendas and activities of organizational sub-units (e.g., individual local chapters).

The findings reported here also raise questions about how changes in the issue representation of a social movement occur. There is a remarkable degree of stability over time in the issue agendas of the larger, more established, EMOs. Conversely, the agendas of the younger, smaller organizations appear more variable. However, the younger fields also witnessed the largest growth in new organizations, suggesting that perhaps it is the founding of organizations focusing on new issues that is the engine of issue change within the movement, rather than the dynamic issue agenda of individual organizations. These observations regarding the dynamics of organizational change link directly to the debate in organizational sociology over how change in central organizational characteristics occurs in a population of organizations. Organizational ecologists generally assert that organizational characteristics (including issue agendas) are relatively fixed at founding, and that change in a population of organizations occurs primarily through compositional change as a result of differential selection by the environment. New institutionalists have argued that organizational characteristics are much more fluid, though change most often leads to increased homogeneity as flexible organizations adapt in ways that make them more similar to their contemporaries. That is, there are competing explanations of how "new" environmental issues became increasingly represented on the agendas of EMOs: through foundings of new EMOs that attend primarily to newer issues or the extension and transformation of existing organizations' issue agendas to include these new issues.

In sum, the research presented here begins to advance our understanding of changing issue representation within the environmental movement. At least among major EMOs, the ascendancy of new environmental issues has not been as extensive as it is often portrayed. While new environmental issues have been increasingly incorporated in organizational issue agendas, issues of resource conservation and wildlife, traditionally associated with the environmental movement, continue to dominate. The majority of major EMOs attend solely to traditional environmental issues, and those that do attend to new environmental issues are, on average, significandy smaller.

* This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (grant # SES-0201992), the Nonprofit sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute (grant # 2003-NSRF-07) and the Pennsylvania State University. The author would like to thank John McCarthy, Jennifer Schwartz, Nella Van Dyke and three anonymous Rural Sociology reviewers for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Please direct correspondence to: Erik Johnson, Washington State University, Department of Sociology, PO Box 644020, Pullman, WA 99163.

1 Accounts of this early period heavily emphasize the division between advocates for the scientific conservation of natural resources and the preservation of nature (Nash 1967; Oelschlaeger 1991; Gotdieb 1993).

2 So, the quality of life issues referred to as "second generation" or "new" issues may not be truly original, though the attention paid to them after the 1960s certainly was novel and represents a significant transformation within the movement.

3 In addition to mimetic isomorphism DiMaggio and Powell discuss mechanisms of coercive and normative isomorphism. Though these are theoretically distinct mechanisms hypothesized to induce greater isomorphism within organizational fields, they may not be empirically distinct.

4 Following in the resource mobilization tradition, we do not find it useful to distinguish between issue advocacy and social movement organizations (see McCarthy and Castelli 2002). A casual perusal of Encyclopedia entries indicates that many EMOs use a mixture of institutionalized and outsider tactics, making any division between issue advocacy organizations and SMOs necessarily arbitrary.

5 For 1971 and 1973, years during which the Encyclopedia was not published, data are imputed for each organization based on information reported in the year immediately following.

6 Brulle (1995) identifies six distinct discourses, though one, eco-feminisra, contains only one organization (Worldwide) and, thus, can hardly be termed a developed organizational field. The absence of a discernable eco-feminist organizational field within the environmental movement likely relates to the simultaneous mobilization around this discourse within other social movement industries (McCarthy and Zald 1977) such as women, development, and peace. While included in analyses looking at all majors, Worldwide is not included in analyses relying on organizational fields.

7 Two organizations from the reform environmentalism field (National Clean Air Coalition and New Alchemy Institute) and one from the political ecology field (Clamshell Alliance) go defunct prior to 2000.

8 The total number of major EMOs is presented at the bottom of the table. Between 1970 and 2000 the population of majors increases by twenty-one organizations, nearly doubling in size, as a host of new organizations are founded, and a handful of others die. The majority of this increase in the population of EMOs occurs during the 1970s, consistent with patterns of growth documented in previous research on the foundings of U.S. national EMOs (Johnson and McCarthy 2004; McLaughlin and Khwaja 2000).

9 Note, however, that as coded, environmental justice issues go beyond those of the unequal racial distribution of environmental costs to include class and gender distributions as well.

10 Data were collected at one-year intervals, but are displayed at five year intervals for summary purposes. I do not trace attention to environmental justice issues by field, as this issue has largely failed to diffuse among major EMOs.

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Erik Johnson

Department of Sociology and Crime, Law & Justice

The Pennsylvania State University

Appendix: Coding Issues

Below is a list of the nine different environmental issues tracked in this paper, followed by an abbreviated operational definition of each. Relevant Encyclopedia entries were coded to determine the presence/absence (1,0) of each issue on the agendas of major EMOs. Issue categories are mutually exclusive and account for the evolving discourse of environmentalism over the thirty year period under observation (e.g., the transition from trade to hazardous waste). When coding entries, all available information is used: section of the Encyclopedia, organization name, keyword, textual description, committee information, former names, publications, etc.

01 Natural resources: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with protecting, conserving or managing "natural resources" or "wilderness" generally, as well as specific types of natural resources (i.e., national parks and public lands, forests/ trees, water, plants, farmland, or soil).

02 Wildlife: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with protecting or managing "wildlife" or their "habitat" in either general or specific (e.g., ducks, trout, deer) terms. Also included is mention of endangered or threatened species.

03 Energy: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with any type of energy or power production other than nuclear (e.g., solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen, geothermal, oil, gas), or that it works in the areas of energy conservation and/or efficiency.

04 Pollution: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with environmental "quality" or "pollution" generally, or with specific types of pollution such as air pollution ("ozone,""greenhouse gasses") or water pollution/quality.

05 Health: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with protecting human health.

06 Toxics: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with issues related to the production, use, disposal and/or cleanup of trade wastes, hazardous or toxic materials, or chemicals (or specific hazardous/toxic materials such as asbestos), or pesticides (including herbicides or fungicides or mention of alternative methods of pest management).

07 Nuclear: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with issues related to nuclear energy or weapons production, safety and/or waste.

08 Environmental [ustice: if an organization indicates that it attends to or is concerned wiih the unequal distribution of environmental pollution or protection by race, class, or gender, or if the entry indicates that the organization aims to work specifically with these groups. References to look for include: "minorities,""working class,""poor,""black,""latino,""native American," and "female."

09 Sustainable Development: if an organization indicates that it is concerned with "suslainable development,""bioregionalism""ecological development,""sound development," etc. Also included is mention of transnational financial institutes and processes related to development, such as the "World Bank,""IMF," or "international development lending."

Copyright Rural Sociological Society Mar 2006

Source: Rural Sociology

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