How mainstream environmental groups are middlemen of democracy
(p 115-16) Citizen environmental democracy now falls primarily to the foster care of advocacy groups who present an institutionalized face of public concern. Whether these organizations inject a heroic thumb in the failed dike of environmental law or unwittingly enable the demise of environmentalism continues to be debated. To a certain extent, they may do both. ... Mainstream environmental groups, however, tend to operate in ways that perpetuate, rather than challenge, the very dysfunction that grips the environmental system as a whole. ... At another level, large environmental groups rarely challenge (openly at least) the dysfunction that infects nearly the entire system of natural resource governance.