The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970, but most of the familiar organizations concerned about various facets of the American environment were formed much sooner. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892; The Audubon Society - 1905; The Wilderness Society - founded by Aldo Leopold above in 1935; The National Wildlife Federation - 1936; The Nature Conservancy - 1951; Environmental Defense Fund - 1967. Greenpeace formed in 1971, soon after Earth Day, and the environmental movement found that the activism of the day yielded results.

At Counterpunch, Jeffrey St Clair wrote a series called How Green Became the Color of Money, about the retreat of many of these well-known environmental groups from any sort of activism in favor of corporate sponsorship. (I previously posted St Clair's articles in the News section.)

That first Earth Day — when millions participated in demonstrations, clean-ups, and rallies across the country — has been hailed as the largest organized event in American history and as a symbol of rebellion against pollution and the exploitation of natural America.

It didn’t take Congress long to get the message. The House and Senate speedily decreed a new era in environmental laws: 1970 saw the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the passage of the Clean Air and National Environmental Policy acts, under which protecting earth, air and water legally became a priority for all federal agencies. Environmental impact statements, for example, give “good science” a word in response to corporate projects. Even the Pentagon was required to play along. Then in 1972 came the Clean Water Act, the first pesticide regulations, the Noise Control Act and a series of laws protecting marine animals and coastal beaches. A year later Congress authorized the Endangered Species Act, regulated toxic chemicals and passed new green laws governing the use of public lands.

In Part Two, St Clair moves to the Reagan-Bush years: 

That such ideas took root in an era that saw a steady accretion of environmental catastrophes — from Three Mile Island and Love Canal to Times Beach, Bhopal and Chernobyl; from the listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species and the decimation of commercial fish stocks on both coasts to the wreck of the Exxon Valdez — shows how thoroughly accustomed the mainstream greens had become to the enervated political climate of Washington, D. C. Groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund had lent credence to the notion that environmental quality was a secondary value, that the right to safe drinking water, clean air and functioning ecosystems could be compromised and mediated.

By Part Three, St Clair notes how environmental violations continued to be overlooked as favors to big donors even during the Clinton Administration. Triangulation, he calls it.

Does kowtowing to corporations have to be the new reality? In Corporations, Meet Transparency, and several more focused articles, Miller-McCune Magazine compares the claims that Alcoa, Cargill, and DuPont make about corporate responsibility with the reality:

Huge efforts in corporate self-improvement — for example, the $10 million deal Dow Chemical Co. inked in January to have The Nature Conservancy evaluate Dow’s impact on the environment — have become almost commonplace. Within the past year, General Motors has moved half of its plants to “zero waste” operations, meaning they don’t send anything to the landfill. Procter & Gamble has pledged to start making the packaging for its 23 brands of consumer goods from renewable or recycled materials. Even Koch Industries, known as a corporate leader of climate change denial, counts its carbon emissions these days.

Just the same, many corporations appear to be living double lives in regard to sustainability and social responsibility. “A lot of what we see corporations doing is really greenwashing, or in the case of water, bluewashing,” says Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit watchdog group. “You can just look at what’s taking place in Congress right now with the attacks on EPA regulations and health and safety rules. It’s these multinationals who are doing the heavy lobbying and influence peddling.”

...observers, however, fear all this reporting about and rating of supposedly well-behaved companies undermines support for government regulation that is needed, regardless of the progress of the corporate sustainability/responsibility movement. Aneel Karnani, a business professor at the University of Michigan, stirred uproar in corporate responsibility circles last year with an article in The Wall Street Journal that asserted: “In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.”

In a recent phone interview, Karnani elaborated: “Let’s not delude ourselves; the only way to get companies to do something is to pass laws that force them to do it.”

But at least one of those great, green NGOs are now advocating that nature go along and get along with corporations. The Nature Conservancy's Chief Scientist Peter Kareiva insists on, "evidence-based conservation," and, "finds most ecosystems far less fragile than people think and none that can be protected as pristine, because pristine doesn't exist any more. His focus is on working the human/nature interface for maximum benefit to both." Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation summarizes Kareiva's talk, Environmentalism for THIS Century:

Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature---current college freshman have less than a tenth of the childhood experience of nature as previous generations. And there's a demographic shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a minority in California and soon to be a minority in the whole country.

Brand or Kareiva seem to think that environmentalism shouldn't matter as much to non-white city kids. 

Asked to describe a typical environmentalist, current grade school students say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.  In general, environmentalist have earned the reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists."

Or as Rush Limbaugh might describe them - enviro-whackos. 

A Guardian OpEd, Has the green movement lost its way?, offers much the same spin:

In 2008 prizewinning environmentalist author Mark Lynas experienced a "eureka moment". Reading the hostile comments underneath an article outlining his objections to GM [genetically-modified] foods on the Guardian website, he decided his critics were probably right.

A couple of years later, Lynas had another eureka moment when he read Stewart Brand's book, Whole Earth Discipline, in which the American writer tore up the green rulebook and came out in favour of urbanisation, nuclear power and genetic engineering. A few months ago, Lynas appeared in a TV documentary, What the Green Movement Got Wrong, alongside Brand – and inside the ruins of Chernobyl which, he argued, had not been nearly as devastating a disaster as most people think. ...

"Anyone who still marches against nuclear today," he writes, "as many thousands of people did in Germany following the Fukushima accident, is in my view just as bad for the climate as textbook eco-villains like the big oil companies."

Lynas gives nukes a free pass, but in Bats, birds and blades: wind turbines and biodiversity, he claims that:

The RSPB [Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds] in the UK has been trying to carve out a sensible position amongst the conflicting objectives of supporting renewable energy whilst also protecting birds. ... Increasingly this does mean opposing windfarms sited in inappropriate areas, and encouraging developers to take note of which regions should be out of bounds entirely. As always there will be conflicts between the objectives of reducing emissions, protecting nature, and mitigating human impact on the land. Those whose enthusiasm for wind seems to know no bounds should duly take note.

In reading articles on energy one notices a pattern: if you scratch the people attacking nukes you often find that they favor wind and if you scratch the people attacking wind you often find that they favor nukes. That there seems to be an alliance brewing between natural gas and wind only complicates the politics. 

The energy industry has become a pantheon of competing gods. King Coal, and his handsomer son, Clean Coal, still deny that their emissions lead to climate change. Despite the practical problems reaching new deposits, Big Oil still says drill baby drill. Despite the water problems, Natural Gas still says frack, baby frack. Despite all the accidents, the Nuclear Industry still presents itself as the only energy source robust enough to keep the lights on. Solar and Mighty Wind claim that only their clean energy can stave off climate change - no matter how many raptors have to die or how much land they have to take. Ethanol subsidies have led to high food prices, but biofuel enthusiasts insist that we can get cheap fuel from waste or cellulose. Unfortunately, all energy sources have problems, and all energy providers claim that strictly following environmental regulations is too unprofitable to consider.

While a few energy depletion types agree with John Michael Greer's argument in Profligacies of Scale that our current energy use is probably unsustainable, energy industry types are more immediately engaged in an active struggle to make certain that any government funding intended to keep the status quo going is channeled their way.

And when we need them more than ever, environmental groups seem more dedicated than ever to their own survival instead of ours. It seems that among NGOs, pristine doesn't exist anymore.

Update: An earlier Guardian article, Environmental activism needs its own revolution to regain its teeth briefly runs through a more UK-focused history of activism, and concludes:

Recently, the momentum has again fizzled away. The government and the police use a raft of criminal justice and anti-terrorism laws to stifle legitimate public protest and prosecute activists. Corporations employ legions of PR firms to keep campaigners at bay, and support climate deniers and free market optimists to muddy the waters of public opinion.

Protest tactics do raise public awareness, win the occasional policy battle, save threatened sites or get dangerous products banned. They are still necessary. But they are not sufficient to alter the destructive path travelled by virtually all governments and most corporations. They are defensive moves against the unremitting pressure of market forces and the priorities of mainstream political parties.

Something much more powerfully proactive is required to persuade the majority to change course before it is too late – something that stirs up a social force to match (peacefully) the citizen revolutions overturning the established order across the Middle East. The movement has the resources to do so. But does it have the ideas and the will?

Worryingly, in every major green group, managers, administrators, communicators and fundraisers outnumber campaigners and researchers. Too many staff have become obsessed with the process of running an organisation. Interminable meetings, not action, are the order of most days. All too often, fundraisers and PR teams, not campaigners, call the shots.

Today's activists regard once radical organisations as part of the NGO establishment: out-of-touch, ineffective and bureaucratic. The wheel has turned full circle. It is time to rethink and reorganise again.

While a Guardian commenter, sheepshank, observes:

Although I'm still a member of Friends of the Earth I believe the battle has been lost. People don't mind doing the odd thing here and there, like recycling. Nor do they mind other people changing their behaviour. But no-one wants to hear that over-consumption is a problem. No-one wants to live more simply. No-one wants to stop buying crap cheap Chinese imports for landfill.