You say you want a revolution; well, we’ve got one–a green revolution, to be exact. From a conference in Copenhagen to the marketing meetings at GM, we are beginning to understand the enormous impact that we have on the environment. Sustainable business models are starting to look beyond the short-term with the understanding that the lifestyle we lead cannot continue unchecked into the future. However, many companies are still mired in the short-term thinking that led industrialized cultures to down this wasteful path in the first place. For this kind of problem, the solution cannot come from grassroots mobilization; instead, society needs to turn this “bottom-up” support into “top-down” regulation and enforcement. Israel, like the United States, has turned to non-profit NGOs to help enforce the law. Adam Teva V’Din, known in English as the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (IUED), acts as a corporate watchdog legal team to help hold companies responsible for their environmental policies.
IUED focuses on a number of different issue areas, including clean energy, climate change, land and water protection, and environmental economies. The group says its mission is “to protect Israel’s environment – as a public watchdog, as a catalyst to policy reform, as a source of free legal counsel to victims of environmental hazards, and as an initiator of strategic campaigns to further environmental goals” (source). They work both by drafting and lobbying for legislation as well as engaging in legal battles to force companies to comply with Israeli environmental laws.
This model is an extremely clever way for a group to organize. Rather than relying on the social movements that the American greenies tend to embrace (grassroots organizations like Greenpeace or Environment America), IUED works to both draft and enforce environmental legislation through lawsuits. Thus, this NGO actually performs the work traditionally charged to the executive branch of a government.
The existence of such a group and its similarity to other groups around the world says something about the global environmental movement. Organizations like IUED are working to create the political will to implement “top-down” solutions to a large problem. Indeed, they push their agenda one step further by actually providing one avenue of green law enforcement. On one hand, this is extremely empowering: grassroots groups are able to create and (to some degree) police the world in which they want to live. However, this also presents a worrisome proposition. If specific groups gain the ability to deeply influence the system on the legislative and executive level, then we face a slippery slope of special interest and self-proclaimed “public interest” groups writing and passing legislation outside of the bounds of representative government. It would be disappointing to see the most functional democracy in the Middle East overrun by competing factions. A smart government will find a way to balance these interest groups and their power with the will of the people.
Eventually, of course, it would be great to see an agreement that both protects the planet and fundamentally enhances democracy.
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