PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS
Table 6.2 Membership of selected UK environmental organisations (’000s)1971 1981 1991 1998 2004National Trusta 278 1,046 2,152 2,557 3,400
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds 98 441 852 1,012 1,042
Wildlife Trusts 64 142 233 320 413
WWF 12 60 227 240 330
Greenpeace 30 312 194 221
Friends of the Eartha 118111 114 100 b
Campaign to Protect Rural England 21 29 45 47 58Notes:
aData are for England, Wales and Northern Ireland only.
bEstimated.
Source:Office for National Statistics ( 2000 ); 2004 data from annual reports or corre-
spondence with the groups.initial spurt during the late 1960s/early 1970s, a second period of expansion
reflected the escalation of public concern about global environmental prob-
lems during the mid/late 1980s. Subsequently, during the early 1990s, several
environmental groups experienced a decline in membership; in particular,
themembership of Greenpeace USA collapsed, resulting in the closure of
regional offices and the reduction of salaried staff by a third (Bosso 2005 :
92). Nevertheless, the major environmental groups now command substan-
tial budgets owing to the massive increase in membership subscriptions and
thedevelopment of professional fundraising activities (Jordan and Maloney
1997 ;Rawcliffe 1998 ;Bosso 2005 ). In particular, the US group The Nature
Conservancy had an overall budget of $972.4 million in 2003, and is one
of the biggest non-profit recipients of private support in the country (Bosso
2005 :101).◗ A typology of environmental groups
The environmental movement is extraordinarily diverse, encompassing tra-
ditional conservation organisations (including RSPB and the Sierra Club),
international NGOs (FoE and Greenpeace), radical direct action groups (Earth
First! and Robin Wood) and a mass of local grassroots groups. Indeed, some
observers argue that it is wrong to talk of a single environmental move-
ment because the differences between groups are more significant than
thesimilarities (Jordan and Maloney 1997 ; Bosso 1999 ). By contrast, Dal-
ton ( 1994 )refers to an all-inclusive ‘green rainbow’ in which differences
between groups simply reflect tendencies along a continuum between a
conservation orientation and an ecological orientation – ideal types that
broadly correspond to the two historical waves of environmentalism. An
inclusive approach to the environmental movement as encompassing all