SierraScape October - November 2006
Back to Table of Contents
by McNeer Dillon
EMG members showed their civic responsibility in the Election of 2004. An average of about 85% of county EMG members went to the polls then. This is laudable. The sample of our membership and of registered voters in the county was large enough to project this as the estimated percent for the whole EMG. I hope EMG members will continue to vote like this or better in the coming election.
EMG members have demonstrated the political interest and the civic responsibility to vote. It seems that they acknowledge that electing legislators who will vote to protect the environment is very important. I propose to the membership that this activity is where the primary battle for the environment is fought. When we lose the elections to anti-environmental candidates, we lose the environment due to legislative erosion. Political action is the most effective way to defend the environment. The environment will always be inadequately defended without it.
This does not assert that other oppositions to environmental destruction are not valuable. The assertion here is that without political action, or with defeated political action, other oppositions are insufficient. The legislators favorable to the environment must be put in place to vote right. This is the key to success.
If you doubt any of this, look at the past six years of legislative performance in the Missouri General Assembly. Anti-environmentalists have tried hard with some success to pass laws to reduce environmental restrictions upon corporations and private businesses, and to allow them to keep it secret when they actually pollute or destroy something. They cut regulatory budgets so that existing regulations cannot be enforced. More Republicans and Libertarians fall into this category than Democrats, but there are anti-environmental Democrats too. Careful selection of candidates to endorse is necessary.
It is necessary for the Political Committee to determine what environmental issues are most important currently and to question what their positions on those issues really are. It is necessary to do research on candidates and make the information available. Candidates to endorse have to be found and be justified as environmental candidates to the ExComs of the EMG and the Ozark Chapter. This is a good deal of time-consuming work. It cannot be done without numerous political research people. One person working full time cannot get all the work done. It takes volunteers willing to do different parts of it. The tasks must be delegated to different people.
To find volunteers, people willing to do recruiting work are needed. Not one person, but a number of people are needed. Recruiters need to find people who will do a selected kind of work right through the election season, as team members, and not just single task volunteers.. They need to place people in political jobs on the committee, for which they may be trained in advance, not left to struggle with uncertainty at the last moment.
Not only research, recruiting and training people are needed; some public relations personnel are needed, having the skills to write letters to editors and articles for other publications than the SierraScape. We need public speakers who will talk to other civic and political groups. We need to get the good word out to other people in the populace. We do little of this.
We have a fairly large number of people who can hike long distances carrying loads. Yet we have very, very few who can walk comparatively short distances canvassing for candidates. We have very few willing to sit still and telephone for candidates. Hardly anyone will show up to drop literature if called upon. We have never found and assigned more people than one to work the poll entrances for environmental candidates.
We need a tactical leader who would organize this sort of thing. He or she would organize teams of people who could be assigned to environmental candidates with close and highly contested races to help them win. The favored candidates would certainly be more grateful to us if we did that, and that candidate might even win the election.
Other projects sometimes drop upon the political committee, such as voter registration drives and efforts to encourage or aid certain sectors of the public to get to the polls. Special projects ought to be dealt with by a projects coordinator, who will get people from recruiters and assign them appropriate duties.
The usual response to all these proposals is "Good grief, this is too much to deal with. People have to work for a living, after all!" Now we get to the point. It is entirely too much for 3 or 4 people. Because members work for a living, all the work has to be divided up and delegated to numerous individuals who will work together as a team. The tasks assigned must correspond to the time available for people. If the political action cannot be organized in such a way, you can forget about having a political committee that accomplishes anything.
Now comes the rudest shock of all. Organizing and training an EMG political committee must begin immediately following a General Election. Why is this? To begin with, people must be actively recruited. The recruiters are not yet recruited. There is no recruiting organization. It takes time to get all this done, and find people who will serve. The recruiters ought to be able to work before Christmas. They could begin in January.
There ought to be enough people to begin training to do the research by the end of January. All the necessary people will not be available in January, so this training will be protracted. Their duties should begin in the following November with discovering the environmental issues and debating how the questions on the candidate questionnaire should be phrased. This takes time. There is more to learn there than meets the eye at first glance. Questionnaires should be mailed out the day that registration for the Primary Election ends.
Research people also need to learn where to find information and how to complete candidate profiles. They should be able to learn how legislators voted on bills affecting the environment. They should learn how to interview candidates. It takes time to learn and it takes time to complete the profiles.
Public relations people need to learn the issues and where to publish letters and essays about them. They need to learn how to discover how legislators vote on environmental bills.
Tactical people need to learn how canvassing is done and to record opinions house by house. Groups of 4 or 5 should be formed in order to be assigned to candidates. All this takes time.
Accomplishing these objectives requires time, recruiting, training, leadership, and delegation of duties as small enough tasks for a working person to get them done. After the November election, the EMG PolCom will need to be completely staffed and reorganized. Only a few will remain to populate it. If it is not organized, the battle for the environment will probably be lost again.
So how many members will volunteer to operate this committee? Who will recruit, do research, do writing to inform the public, and give tactical support to endorsed candidates? You may give your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to Penny Holtzmann at the EMG office, or to me, until the new PolCom Chair is found. Phone or e-mail Penny at 314-644-0890 or emg.sierraclub@earthlink.net. Phone or email me at 314-726-0390 or mcneer@charter.net.