Summary

In 1965, the Natural Conservancy purchased land in Texas that was the natural habitat of endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken. The conservancy ultimately hired oil and gas extraction experts and began its own drilling operations eventually causing the chickens to completely disappear. Klein cites this as an example of relationships that sometime develop between private conservation groups and the fossil fuel industry. Green groups compromise with fossil fuel companies by agreeing to half-measures that merely put a band-aid on problems. Klein feels that these groups are left off the hook too easily for their ineffective practices and policies.

Klein relates that environmentalists became aggressive in the 60s and 70s spurred on by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. In addition to Friends of Earth and Greenpeace, new groups were established including the Environmental Defense Fund which had...