From Library Journal
In this timely book, award-winning journalist Dowie analyzes why the once-effective environmental movement now appears, even under an ostensibly friendly Democratic administration, increasingly powerless and irrelevant. The bulk of his text details the tendencies and practices that Dowie identifies as leading to the current crisis: dependence for success on mass mailings and professional lobbyists; neglect of grass-roots activism; failure to involve minorities; excessive willingness to compromise; naive belief in the good faith of government agencies and corporate boards; and a general lack of audacity and zeal. The important closing chapters discuss various emerging groups and philosophies that could contribute to a "fourth wave" environmental movement. This thought-provoking book joins Philip Shabecoff's A Fierce Green Fire (Hill & Wang: Farrar, 1993) and Kirkpatrick Sale's The Green Revolution (LJ 7/93) in both interpreting the history of environmentalism and assessing its future. While not one of these books is definitive, each has special strengths. Dowie excels in the treatment of events and trends since 1989. Recommended for academic libraries and environmental collections.Joan S. Elbers, formerly with Montgomery Coll., Rockville, Md.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Dowie is an award-winning journalist with a penchant for radical inquiry. He has tackled the American environmental movement out of frustration, believing that it should have accomplished much more than it has. Why environmentalism has failed to live up to its potential occupies much of Dowie's rigorous analysis. He begins with a scathing history of the movement's first stirrings, an effort by well-heeled, elitist white men to maintain wilderness areas for recreational purposes. The next phase pitted conservationists interested in "wise use" against the more prescient preservationists. Dowie tracks the rapid devolution of "wise use" into abuse during the Reagan years and the foolish fallback tactics of the green movement, which bureaucratized itself into little more than a direct-mail machine. As critical as Dowie is, he does see hope in the next phase of this phoenixlike movement. He believes that a genuinely democratic form of environmentalism--linked to civil rights, focused on urban as well as rural environmental issues, and involving women and men of all races and cultures--is possible and promising. Let's hope so. Donna Seaman


Book Description
"Losing Ground is an ambitious and brave book. Mr. Dowie has marshaled an exceptionally broad array of facts and produced a provocative explanation for why a once vibrant social movement is flagging....one of the truly important books on a genuinely American social movement." -- Keith Schneider, New York Times Book Review "Perhaps the most interesting environmental book published yet this year." -- The Washington Times A recent history replete with compromise and capitulation has pushed a once promising and effective political movement to the brink of irrelevance. So states Mark Dowie in this provocative critique of the mainstream American environmental movement. Dowie, the prolific award-winning journalist who broke the stories on the Dalkon Shield and on the Ford Pinto, delivers an insightful, informative, and often damning account of the movement many historians and social commentators at one time expected to be this century's most significant. He unveils the inside stories behind American environmentalism's undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures. Dowie weaves a spellbinding tale, from the movement's conservationist origins as a handful of rich white men's hunting and fishing clubs, through its evolution in the 1960s and 1970s into a powerful political force that forged landmark environmental legislation, enforced with aggressive litigation, to the strategy of "third wave" political accommodation during the Reagan and Bush years that led to the evisceration of many earlier triumphs, up to today, where the first stirrings of a rejuvenated, angry, multicultural, and decidedly impolite movement for environmental justice provides new hope for the future. Dowie takes a fresh look at the formation of the American environmental imagination and examines its historical imperatives: the inspirations of Thoreau, the initiatives of John Muir and Bob Marshall, the enormous impact of Rachel Carson, the new ground broken by Earth Day in 1970, and the societal antagonists created in response that climaxed with the election of Ronald Reagan. He details the subsequent move toward polite, ineffectual activism by the mainstream environmental groups, characterized by successful fundraising efforts and wide public acceptance, and also by new alliances with corporate philanthropists and government bureaucrats, increased degradation of environmental quality, and alienation of grassroots support. Dowie concludes with an inspirational description of a noncompromising "fourth wave" of American environmentalism, which he predicts will crest early in the next century.


Book Info
Unveils the inside stories behind American environmentalism's undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures. Paper. DLC: Environmentalism - U.S. - History.


About the Author
Mark Dowie is currently editor at large of InterNation, a transnational feature syndicate based in New York. A former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine, he is the recipient of fourteen major journalism awards, including an unprecedented three National Magazine Awards.

ANNOTATION

Journalist Dowie weaves a spellbinding tale, from the movement's conservationist origins as a handful of rich white men's hunting clubs, through the evolution in the 1960s and '70s into a powerful political force that forged landmark environmental legislation.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Losing Ground is an ambitious and brave book. Mr. Dowie has marshaled an exceptionally broad array of facts and produced a provocative explanation for why a once vibrant social movement is flagging....one of the truly important books on a genuinely American social movement."
-- Keith Schneider, New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps the most interesting environmental book published yet this year." -- The Washington Times A recent history replete with compromise and capitulation has pushed a once promising and effective political movement to the brink of irrelevance.

So states Mark Dowie in this provocative critique of the mainstream American environmental movement. Dowie, the prolific award-winning journalist who broke the stories on the Dalkon Shield and on the Ford Pinto, delivers an insightful, informative, and often damning account of the movement many historians and social commentators at one time expected to be this century's most significant. He unveils the inside stories behind American environmentalism's undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures.

Dowie weaves a spellbinding tale, from the movement's conservationist origins as a handful of rich white men's hunting and fishing clubs, through its evolution in the 1960s and 1970s into a powerful political force that forged landmark environmental legislation, enforced with aggressive litigation, to the strategy of "third wave" political accommodation during the Reagan and Bush years that led to the evisceration of many earlier triumphs, up to today, where the first stirrings of a rejuvenated, angry, multicultural, and decidedly impolite movement for environmental justice provides new hope for the future.

Dowie takes a fresh look at the formation of the American environmental imagination and examines its historical imperatives: the inspirations of Thoreau, the initiatives of John Muir and Bob Marshall, the enormous impact of Rachel Carson, the new ground broken by Earth Day in 1970, and the societal antagonists created in response that climaxed with the election of Ronald Reagan. He details the subsequent move toward polite, ineffectual activism by the mainstream environmental groups, characterized by successful fundraising efforts and wide public acceptance, and also by new alliances with corporate philanthropists and government bureaucrats, increased degradation of environmental quality, and alienation of grassroots support. Dowie concludes with an inspirational description of a noncompromising "fourth wave" of American environmentalism, which he predicts will crest early in the next century.