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From my post 30, "THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT (1980s)"

>>>National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE<<<

More on who the NRPE is:

In October 1994, Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), told Cleveland, Ohio’s Plain Dealer that, [NRPE’s] focus is not on legislation . . . but rather the integration of [environmental issues] permanently into religious life. ‘We are not’, he insisted, ‘the environmental movement at prayer’. Despite Mr. Gorman’s assurances, however, the Partnership has taken an active role in the political debate on Endangered Species Act reform. In January 1996, the Partnership -- which includes the U.S. Catholic Conference, Evangelical Environmental Network, Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and National Council of Churches of Christ -- launched a $1 million political campaign against ESA reform. Executive officers of the Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and World Resources Institute greeted this activism with joy. Green organizations, over the last few years, had lost grassroots activists to the property rights and Wise Use movements. Finances had been fractured so badly that green groups had been forced to rely on government grants and nonprofit foundation and corporate donations for more than half their budgets. More important, the environmental lobby had fewer troops to mobilize against Congress. All that changed, however, when the religious community was shepherded into the environmental fold.

Environmental leaders moved quickly to establish control over the National Religious Partnership for the Environment’s agenda. Religious leaders were convinced to establish NRPE’s headquarters at the Green Cathedral, St. John the Divine Episcopal Church in New York City. Then they set out to control the scientific information upon which NRPE policy decisions were based. One of the Partnership first acts upon creation was to establish a Science Office that would address the inescapable evidence on conditions threatening the integrity of the global environment. According to NRPE, the Science Office represents an essential resource for all program areas . . . as well as a vehicle to sustain the dialogue and alliance between religious leaders and scientists. NRPE’s Science Director participates in the Partnership’s key strategy meetings, and provides scientific information and public policy recommendations. It is, therefore, of critical importance that the Partnership chose to headquarter its science office with the Union of concerned Scientists in Cambridge Massachusetts. The Partnership claims it abdicated this crucial role to UCS because it enables the religious community to draw upon UCS’s extensive body of research, its national network of scientists, its longstanding experience in public education and its knowledge of environmental policy. In reality, NRPE placed entire control of its agenda in the hands of a left wing organization.

In 1969, forty-eight professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The group conducted a highly publicized strike in March 1969, that included such speakers as leftist MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and Eric Mann of the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. (SDS was the terrorist organization responsible for bombing the U.S. Capitol Building in 1971.) The Union used the strike as a forum to declare that misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind. This philosophy was starkly articulated by key organizer, Jonathan Kabat: You’ve got to say, No, we want capitalism to come to an end.

The Union’s trendy radicalism launched it into money, power and influence. A permanent office was opened in Cambridge, and UCS grew into a multimillion dollar activist organization. Three of its original founders still sit on the board: James A. Fay, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering (MIT); Kurt Gottfried, Chairman of the Physics Department at Cornell University; and Victor Weisskopf, Professor Emeritus of Physics (MIT). The Board of Directors of this organization also includes the standard litany of corporate America special interests, liberal nonprofit foundations, and former government agency employees.

Political activism in UCS’s early years was confined primarily to opposing nuclear power and the military defense establishment. Emphasis later shifted to include all energy policy issues and global warming. In 1989, the Union commissioned Republican pollster Vince Breglio of Research/Strategy/Management to conduct a survey on global warming and environmental protection. Breglio found that the environment is becoming a political issue with some bite. This poll convinced the group to change its focus. In 1990, UCS brought together forty-nine Nobel laureates, and 700 members of the U.S. Academy of Scientists to sign an appeal for action against global warming. The event was highly publicized and called for tougher fuel efficiency standards for U.S. automobiles, centralized government control of energy issues and the continued deactivation of America’s nuclear power generating industry. That same year, however, 425 scientists and intellectual leaders presented another document to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio. Entitled The Heidelberg Appeal, it condemned UCSs document as an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development. Today, more than 2,700 signatories, including
dozens of Nobel Prize winners, from 102 countries have signed The Heidelberg Appeal.

Undaunted by professional criticism, or the fact that a mere 10% of the Union’s membership actually comes from the scientific community, UCS decided it needed to coordinate a new movement to save our planet from the looming threat of global warming, environmental degradation, over-consumption and population growth. It was at this time that former Senator Al Gore brought the Union and religious leaders together. UCS provides the scientific foundation upon which the Partnership’s faith groups inform tens of millions, establish thousands of model congregational programs, train leaders, distribute resources, undertake research and scholarship and set in place networks to assure the permanent commitment of the American religious community to environmental activity." In short, the National Religious Partnership has become a front organization for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Environmental Grantmakers Association -- sugar daddy of the environmental movement -- is also using its power of the purse to manipulate the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. Every year, the EGA bestows hundreds of millions of dollars on green organizations, and coordinates the environmental movement’s political strategies. EGA includes such high-powered members as the Ford Foundation (which claims it fathered the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s), and Pew Charitable Trusts. Less known nonprofits like Surdna Foundation are also members. Surdna owns 165,000 acres of timber in Northern California. It likes to donate to green groups that file timber appeals against its competitors. Not one appeal, however, has ever been filed against Surdna. As a result, the Foundation enjoyed a $2.7 million income from its timber holdings between 1992 and 1993.94 Other EGA members include Apple Computers, L.L. Bean, Chevron, Waste Management, ARCO and Pategonia Inc. The later openly promotes Earth First!’s radical Wildlands Project in its adult clothing catalogue.

EGA members use their money to entangle organizations in a financial spider web of control. Grantmakers Association foundations donate directly to the National Religious Partnership, but they also manipulate the members that belong to it. Like Surdna Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation is one of the fourteen direct NRPE funders. However, the organization also has a representative on the advisory board of one NRPE partner, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. EGA tentacles extend to Partnership support organizations as well, like the Union of Concerned Scientists. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s president sits on the Union’s board of directors. It also receives donations from George Gund Foundation and the Florence and John Schumann Foundation -- both Grantmakers Association members. The Partnership relies heavily on the Union to provide essential resource[s] for all program areas, and to supply congregations with speakers who can relay the true condition of the planet, tell them how their families and communities are at risk, where to find reliable scientific data on the issues, and instruct congregants on how to become politically active. When the Partnership abdicated control of its science program to UCS, therefore, it not only relinquished power to a radical environmental group, it gave EGA members a seat at the NRPE policy-making table.

Other green policy makers have sought, and obtained, influential positions with the NRPE. When the Evangelical Environmental Network launched a $1 million media campaign in January 1996 to save the Endangered Species Act, it hired the Environmental Information Center. EIC was formed in 1994 by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rockefeller Family Fund (whose director is the Grantmakers Association’s Coordinator of the Secretariat), Pew Charitable Trusts, W. Alton Jones Foundation, and the Conservation Law Foundation. EIC literature claims it was created to combat environmental misinformation and help strengthen grass roots support for environmental protection. In reality, the Center conducts training sessions that instruct green groups on how to use the media to reach religious, scientific, and children’s constituencies. Fenton Communications, the Washington, D.C. based public relations firm that orchestrated the Alar scare, participates in these training sessions. Top EIC staffers came directly from the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee and the League of Conservation Voters. EIC’s media consultant, Mike Casey, was a former press secretary for Al Gore. The Center’s executive director, Philip Clapp, served on the Clinton-Gore National Steering Committee of Environmentalists.

It appears the National Religious Partnership for the Environment answers to a more earthly master. San LeQuire, director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, bristles at the suggestion the NRPE is nothing more than a front for the environmental movement. Trying to link us with secular environmentalists is just not true, he fumed in a February 27, 1996 Washington Post article.102 Nevertheless, the Evangelical Environmental Network charged in a January press release that Congress and special interests are trying to sink the Noah’s Ark of our day." EEN also circulates a publication called Green Cross, whose 1996 consulting editor was Michael Crook, Senior Director of Policy Communication for the National Wildlife Federation. Mr. Crook wrote in the Green Cross article Truth, Lies and the Endangered Species Act, that landowners were lying about ESA horror stories. He ended the piece with the instruction: Green Cross members and supporters can help by demanding that the [Endangered Species Act] debate be grounded in another Christian value: simple honesty. Crook should have heeded his own words, making it clear to Green Cross readers where his own loyalty lay.

At Environmental Grantmakers Association’s 1992 workshop, funders candidly discussed their influence over programs like the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. Donald K. Ross, Vice President of Rockefeller Family Fund observed at that time, ‘The fundamental effort that has to be made is a reorganization of the [environmental] movement . . . We have to look much more at a task force approach on major issues . . . Where funders can play a real role . . . is using the money to drive, to create ad hoc efforts .” When asked if organizations resisted being driven by the foundations, Ross replied ‘that many groups did not like funders setting their political campaigns, strategy and style. I know that there are resentments in the environmental movement toward funders doing that,’ he said. ‘Too bad. We’re players. They’re players.’ He then tried to justify this arrogant retort with the following remarks: ‘There isn’t one of them, even the biggest -- National Wildlife, or Audubon or Sierra Club -- that has the capacity to wage full-scale battles on major issues by themselves.’