A photograph on the front page of the New York Times shows Fifth Avenue looking north toward Central Park from 43rd Street, capturing a moment in time on April 22, 1970. What you see are people: a businessman with a striped tie, an elderly woman with oversized sunglasses, a young girl with a bow in her hair – throngs of people choking the wide city boulevard, flanked on both sides by luffing American flags, dissolving into black and white specks of newsprint in the distance. A headline above the photo declares “Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation.”

“On 14th Street the folk singer Odetta was singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ while at the other end of the square a rock group was chanting ‘Power to the People,’” the Times wrote on April 23, 1970.

New Yorkers were not alone. On that spring day in 1970, some 20 million Americans took part in Earth Day activities nationwide, targeting pollution and diminishing natural resources.1 The event was originally conceived of by Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, as a “National Environmental Teach-In,” in the spirit of the anti-Vietnam War sit-ins of the 1960s. It was organized by older as well as newly formed organizations, some local and some national in their scope. It was a bold concept designed to introduce Americans to an innovative idea – “living lightly on the earth.”2

The event led to the creation of Environmental Action, a lobbying organization that became the engine of Earth Day activities, publicizing the “Dirty Dozen” companies with the worst pollution records. It prompted national environmental leaders to create the League of Conservation Voters, a bipartisan organization that tracked the environmental voting records of members of Congress and the executive branch. Indeed, it ushered in what environmental historians call the “Green Decade,” which witnessed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the passing of the Clean Water Act, the Ocean Dumping Act, and the Endangered Species Act, among others.

My aim here is not to recount a history of the environmental movement. Rather, I use the environmental movement to illustrate a broader point about the importance of social movements. Social movements help define social needs, and are a primary mover in the world of social sector innovations.

Social innovations that later appear to be attached to government action, or even private action, are often kick-started by social movements. The movements by themselves are not sufficient to generate innovation – existing nonprofits, policy entrepreneurs, and professionals must shepherd them along, bending a movement’s framing for politicians, who in turn enact legislation. By looking at the example of the environmental movement, we can answer an important question: Why does the social sector need social movements?

A Grievance Machine for Change

Social movements can be defined as the mobilized attempt of groups, organizations, and individuals, acting in some coordinated way to change policies, social structures, and the concrete distribution of goods and services. The supporters and adherents of the movement believe that the current policies and distributions are unfair, unjust, or harmful to groups and individuals or to the ways society ought to function. Movements come in many guises. They may have totalistic ideologies that call for the transformation of many areas of social life, such as “liberalism” or “socialism.” Or they may have much narrower goals, such as the anti-drunk driving movement or the anti-smoking movements. Although we often think of them as made up of the dispossessed and deprived in the society, they may include supporters and adherents who are not dispossessed. Over the last half century we have seen the development of several movements, including the environmental movement and the new Christian Right, aimed at changing social policy and societal norms and behaviors, that are not made up of socioeconomically deprived citizens.

There have been scores of social movements in the United States – from the Civil Rights Movement to the Feminist Movement to the anti-tobacco and anti-drunk driving movements. I have written extensively on them over a 40-year period, drawing upon many case studies and quantitative analyses.3 I have attempted to understand their organizational dilemmas, their strategies and tactics, how they emerge, diffuse, and decline, their relationship to the mass media and to the political process.

One of the most important roles of social movements is that they bring to the attention of the larger society groups of people who are being treated unfairly under the current social arrangements, or they identify conditions affecting large numbers of people that are seen as potentially correctable by collective action and public policy. Social movements are a kind of grievance machine for creating and aggregating demands for change, especially where established institutions have ignored the group or the problem, or have responded in a way that can be judged as morally inadequate. The environmental movement is a good example of this.

The United States has not always had a strong environmental ethic. In fact, the philosophical underpinnings of the nation stem from a Judeo-Christian ethic in the Bible that can be construed as anti-environmental: “All the beasts of the earth, and the winged things of the sky, and the creeping things of the earth, are to go in fear and dread of you, and I give you dominion over all the fishes of the sea. This creation that lives and moves is to provide you food.” Early U.S. settlers held fast to Old World traditions that both land and nature existed for their needs.

Furthermore, wrote the environmental historian Roderick Nash, “The strength of individualism and competitiveness in the American value system supported the pioneer’s (and his descendant, the entrepreneur’s) insistence that the land he owned could be used as he willed. The long-term interest of society made little difference. Consideration of immediate profit dictated the relationship with the land. A scarcity of natural resources? Absurd! Over the next ridge was a cornucopia of wood, water, soil, and game!”4

Earth Day was by no means the first manifestation of the environmental movement. Indeed, environmental sensibility had been ebbing and flowing in the United States for at least 150 years, dating back to the days of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about the need for community open spaces. But April 22, 1970, was a crucial moment, when the movement coalesced and gave voice to grievances, “spotlighting such problems as thermal pollution of the atmosphere, dying lakes, the profusion of solid waste, ruinous strip mining, catastrophic oil spills, and dwindling natural resources.”5

The people who were wronged were the people in the communities affected by one or more of those blights. Marches in Manhattan made this point by distributing New York Pollution Survival Kits, “with a list of 40 actions that individuals could take to fight noise, waste, and dirt.”6 According to historian Benjamin Kline, “The event emphasized that the obsession with industrial growth and consumerism was straining the environment to the breaking point.”7 The march brought together not only people from communities directly affected by environmental blight, but also those concerned with preserving wilderness areas, national parks, and a balance between human needs and ecological stability. The march and the movement helped to create a demand for government action.

The Galvanizing Event

Leaders and activists connected to social movements develop and utilize “frames” to crystallize the movement’s grievances.8 Frames are the key words, metaphors, and images that bracket or shape the definition of the problem and the alternative solutions to the problem. “Diagnostic framing” not only identifies an injustice or collective harm, it may also attribute blame, suggesting the causes. “Prognostic frames” offer solutions, suggesting what is to be done.

Some movements develop prognostic frames that are clear guidelines to action and serve as mobilizing frames, yet are illtailored to the organizational realities on the ground. For instance, the “three strikes you’re out” frame, developed by a loosely affiliated anti-crime movement in response to Polly Klass’ sexual molestation and murder in 1993, worked well as a mobilizing frame. When the public realized that Klass’ killer had prior convictions, they passed a legislative referendum in California requiring three-time felons be sentenced to no less than a 25-year prison term. “Three strikes you’re out” drew on a baseball analogy and was easily understood. However, there was little attention to the costs that were mandated by the law. For one thing, felons who were convicted for a third time could well be convicted for minor offenses. The costs of incarceration are very large, often more than $20,000 a year. The legislation also reduced judicial and prosecutorial discretion. For prosecutors, it meant that defendants with prior records had less reason to plea bargain, thus raising the costs of prosecution.

The environmental movement has had many cycles of frames since Thoreau’s time 150 years ago. The Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in 1892 to protect the Pacific Coast wilderness, was one of the earliest organizations to present a diagnostic frame for the environment. Battling against a dam proposal in Yosemite National Park in 1912 and 1913, Muir framed the problem in no uncertain terms: “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” 9

Nearly two decades later, University of Wisconsin professor Aldo Leopold offered another diagnostic frame, advocating a new ethic based on science, and challenging the prevailing conservationist notion that land belonged to the people. “A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” Leopold wrote. “Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of the land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow.”10

Robert Marshall, chief of the Forest Service’s Division of Recreation, offered a prognostic frame in his 1930 pamphlet “The Social Management of Forests,” promoting the socialization of the U.S. commercial timberlands.11 Marshall envisioned “the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness,” founding the Wilderness Society with Leopold in 1935.12

According to the official EPA history: “The definition of wilderness as an immense natural storehouse, subject to human management, changed after the Second World War. … As the middle class found itself living on the edges of open lands, political questions surfaced about the preservation of the landscape just over the back fence. The concept of ecology – which valued esthetics and biology over efficiency and commerce – began to penetrate the public mind.”13

The publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 shifted the diagnostic frame yet again, highlighting for the first time the problem of “the indiscriminate use of the insecticide DDT and its spread through the food chain.”14“We have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself,” Carson wrote. “Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world.”15

Eight years later, 20 million people marching for Earth Day framed the issue thusly: The problems were population growth, water and air pollution, loss of wilderness, and pesticides contaminating the food chain. “The event galvanized environmentalism into the national consciousness,” wrote Andrew J. Hoffman, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Boston University School of Management. “While many factions still existed and the movement was still somewhat splintered, its presence had become established within the American culture. Following Earth Day, an avalanche of environmental developments would ensue, causing some to label it the dawn of American environmentalism.”16

Although movement activists can recommend different kinds of policies and even develop prototypes of new programs and new organizational entities, they rarely can establish enduring programs and policies by themselves. To establish enduring programs and policies, professionals, policy experts and politicians, and decision makers in corporate and nonprofit organizations and in philanthropic organizations must support – willingly or unwillingly – policies and programs promoted by the movement.

Brokering Movement Aims

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, social reformers often did not have specialized professional degrees, even if they did come from the middle classes and more educated groups in society. Today, however, although some new movements do not attach themselves to professionalized groups, many, if not most, do. If social movements generate new definitions of services and needs, professions that have jurisdiction over the definitions of problems and the solutions to cope, manage, or treat them play a central role in the processes of working on the problems. In other words, for movements to bring about institutionalized change, they need to enlist, co-opt, or influence elements of the professional class.

How do movements penetrate professions, and how do professions change from within? Social movements penetrate professions in three ways: (1) they may directly challenge the practices of the professions and the organizations with which they are attached; (2) they may change the discursive grounds of the professions by providing alternative definitions of the ends and means of professions; and (3) they may provide cadres of new entrants to the profession who are committed to the ends of the movement.

Consider for example the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), an organization founded in 1967, five years after Carson’s book helped diagnose environmental concerns like sewage pollution, wildlife and habitat preservation, and the use of DDT. The organization was formed in Long Island, N.Y., when concerned local residents met with scientists from the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In the 1970s, the EDF “became a major litigator in campaigns that focused on eliminating lead toxicity, fighting against the Supersonic Transport, protecting sperm whales, and reducing pesticide hazards.”17Today, the organization (now called Environmental Defense) boasts “more than 250 scientists, economists, attorneys, and other professionals nationwide working on regional, national, and global issues.”

“A Livable World,” a Dec. 24, 1967 article in the New York Times, underscored the importance of enlisting professionals in the battle. “A new organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, is carrying into the courts the many-sided struggle to keep this a world in which human beings, animals, and fish can live.” The newspaper noted that the group’s challenges had so far been unsuccessful. In Michigan, the Supreme Court refused to halt the wholesale spraying of 28,000 acres of farmland with a deadly pesticide to fight Japanese beetles and Dutch elm disease. In Long Island, a state Supreme Court refused to grant a permanent injunction against the use of DDT. “The legal battle, however, has just begun,” the Times wrote. “Other cases are sure to develop until eventually courts recognize the right to sue to protect one’s environment.”

Other “lawyer-scientist-based organizations” were founded in the year following Earth Day, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, helping to further actualize the goals of the movement.18

In addition to professionals, another group that helps translate movement grievances into practical programs are the policy entrepreneurs.

Although politicians may specialize (and make their careers) by riding specific issues very hard in an information-saturated world, they rarely can master all of the details of the programs for which they innovate. To translate a problematic issue into a viable policy alternative, they must work with and depend upon policy experts – administrators and professionals with expertise in the law, the regulations, and the disciplines with substantive knowledge of the policy domain. It was not always this way. Bureaucracy was once small; congressional staffs were once small or nonexistent. Politicians had broad command. So it is that policy entrepreneurs – professors who teach and do research, bureaucrats who administer relevant governmental programs, industry lobbyists, people in think tanks, and other influential experts – form a reinforcing triangle of knowledge and information.19 As social movements challenge policy, or events and trends raise the saliency of an issue, policy entrepreneurs offer solutions.

We have already shown how the environmental movement began raising serious concerns about everything from pollution to pesticides through the 1960s. By the end of the decade, events were also playing a part. On Jan. 28, 1969, an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel spread some 3.25 million gallons of crude oil across the California coastline. On June 22, 1969, an oil-slicked section of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire – an incident that quickly became a symbol of environmental degradation. Additionally, 11 tons of coho salmon were seized in Wisconsin and Minnesota due to high DDT concentrations in the fish.

Into this milieu stepped policy entrepreneur Ralph Nader. In 1969, Nader founded the Center for Study of Responsive Law, hiring some 200 individuals to research social problems. In May 1970, the month after Earth Day, the center produced a 523-page report called “Vanishing Air” – documenting the health hazards of air pollution caused by irresponsible business practices.20 According to the New York Times, the center’s report described the “resistance of major industries – automotive, oil, chemical, and ferrous metals – to effective air pollution controls and abatement efforts.” The center’s solutions included “more stringent anti-pollution controls, larger penalties for violations, [and] more money and more men for anti-pollution programs.”

The center produced 17 studies by 1972, including reports on pesticides, the despoliation of land by developers, and the lack of a federal response to increasing water pollution.21

Nader’s work did not escape the notice of government officials. In April 1971, for example, responding to the center’s report on water pollution, EPA Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus backed Nader’s central findings. “Mr. Nader and his able assistants are right,” Ruckelshaus told UPI, in an article published in the New York Times on April 14, 1971. “We are in danger of creating a ‘water wasteland’ if we permit to happen in the future what has happened in the past.”

According to the article, “Ruckelshaus said he was requesting ‘radical changes in the law’ to enable his agency to crack down on polluters.”

There is a third group that serves to shape a movement’s grievances as well: existing organizations. One way organizations shape policy is through the publications they produce. The first newsletter on environmental issues in Washington, D.C., was put out by the National Wildlife Federation in 1963, one year after “Silent Spring”; the Sierra Club issued its first newsletter in the nation’s capital in 1970. “Few environmental organizations were capable of conducting scientific research, but they fostered with some success the ability to keep in touch with and ferret out scientific work conducted by others to bring it to the arena of public decision making,” wrote historian Samuel P. Hays. “Often environmental organizations were involved with locating information in the hands of administrative agencies that those agencies did not wish to reveal to the public.”22

Indeed, professionals, policy entrepreneurs, and existing environmental organizations are important because they broker, and often bend, the movement’s framing of the problem for the politicians and decision makers.

The Niche Opens

It is clear, then, that by the time the first Earth Day rolled around, the environmental movement had gone a long way to defining policy needs.

Certainly, the situation is always fluid, and it has always been this way with the environmental movement. Needs can be defined and redefined continuously, as a movement frames and reframes its central issues. The need to conserve wild-lands, and indeed the philosophy of “conservation,” was first forged under Gifford Pinchot, chief forester for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the administration of Teddy Roosevelt, in response to rapid population growth and overuse of natural resources; this was a need that the Sierra Club and other early back-to-nature enthusiasts helped to define.

What is important is that at each stage that needs are identified and then shaped by professionals, policy entrepreneurs, and existing nonprofit organizations, a niche opens, encouraging the entry of new nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations.

So it was that Friends of the Earth was formed in 1969, with the aim of alerting the public to issues including air pollution, whale hunting, and forest conservation. So it was that Environmental Action formed in 1970 to pick up where Earth Day left off, incorporating movement gains, and lobbying to tackle problems like the solid waste crisis. So it was that the League of Conservation Voters was formed that same year to track the voting records of congressional leaders and back environmentally sensitive politicians. According to the New York Times, “The league’s first major mailing to 3,500 conservationists across the country criticized what it called the ‘appalling records’ of the two Republican incumbents [in Alaska].”23 So it was that in 1971, Greenpeace was formed, and as its first action, attempted to halt an underground nuclear bomb test on an Alaskan island.

“Membership in environmental organizations increased dramatically after Earth Day and overflowed into more than 200 new national and regional groups and 3,000 local ones,” wrote Kline. “The mainstream groups focused on four arenas: legislation, administrative and regulatory action, the courts, and the electoral sphere. By the end of the decade, the mainstream groups’ influence and participation in the political arena had increased, and they were actively influencing the development of environmental policies as well as the government agencies established to regulate them.”24

Ultimately, the institutionalization of the movement can help prompt policy change. Without the environmental movement, it is difficult to imagine congressional passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which “recast government’s role. Formerly the conservator of wilderness, it now became the protector of earth, air, land, and water. The law declared congressional intent to ‘create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony,’ and to ‘assure all Americans safe, healthful, productive, aesthetically, and culturally pleasing surroundings.’” 25 The law required federal agencies to conduct environmental impact statements for any projects that were likely to affect the environment.

Without the environmental movement, it would be hard to imagine President Nixon’s decision in July 1970 to establish the Environmental Protection Agency as an autonomous body to oversee enforcement of environmental policy, with responsibility for clean air, water programs, and pesticide research.

“As concern with the condition of our physical environment has intensified, it has become increasingly clear that we need to know more about the total environment – land, water, and air,” Nixon said July 9, announcing the reorganization. “Our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food. Indeed, the present governmental structure for dealing with environmental pollution often defies effective and concerted action.”26

The Clean Air Act was revised in 1970, identifying 189 pollutants in smog, and regulating their emissions. Factories were required to install scrubbers to filter out air pollutants. Automakers had to install catalytic converters to cut down on exhaust. In 1972, the Clean Water Act regulated the release of pollutants into waterways, and DDT was finally banned. That same year, the Ocean Dumping Act regulated ocean disposal; the following year, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, “allowing species to be listed as threatened or endangered without considering the economic consequences.”27

If not directly responsible for the actual design of social programs, movements still call attention to needs, identify groups deserving of public attention, and suggest prototypes that are accepted, modified, or rejected by professionals, organizational administrators, and policy entrepreneurs. Social movements are a source of innovation in that they identify new client groups and new service needs that ought to be served. They make claims for what ought to be the public interest.

In mobilizing these claims, movements not only make direct demands for legislative, professional, and organizational change, but they also change the discursive grounds of the larger society, diffusing messages about right behavior and relationships.

In a sense, then, social movements do for the social service sector what inventors and entrepreneurs do in the market for private goods. They contribute to the redefinition of possible combinations of resources, technology, and clients. Each movement, if it has a lasting impact, leaves a residue of policies and programs that then become relatively permanent parts of the organizational landscape; they become a part of the institutionalized landscape of society. While they may change and adapt in response to current demands and changes in organizational fields, their roots, in particular social movements, mark the paths that they take.

If, as I have argued, innovations in the social sector are firmly rooted in social movements, then foundations and others that want to effect social change need to fund not only the entrenched nonprofit organizations that support a given cause, but also the activists and movement adherents who are advocating for change, sometimes long before the movement has become institutionalized.

Gaylord Nelson, who organized Earth Day, built on decades of movement gains, mobilizing some 20 million people in 10,000 grade schools and high schools, 2,500 colleges, and 1,000 communities across the country.28 A foundation or philanthropist seeking to change environmental policy might have done well to focus on what was happening on 14th Street between Third and Seventh avenues in Manhattan, which, “left free for pedestrians between noon and midnight, became an ecological carnival.”29

Any view of the social sector that focuses solely on nonprofits, foundations, businesses, and the government is inadequate, because it puts aside the real motivation for and engine of social change.

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Josh Rolnick for his help in drawing together and crafting the historical materials on the environmental movement that we have used to illustrate this article’s theoretical story.

1 Kline, B. First Along the River (San Francisco: Acada Books, 1997).

2 First Along the River.

3 Some of my writings on social movements can be found in Zald, M. and McCarthy, J. Social Movements in an Organizational Society: Collected Essays (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1987). See also Davis, G.; McAdam, D.; Scott, W.; and Zald, M. Organization Theory/Social Movement Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

4 Nash, R. The American Environment: Readings in the History of Conservation (London: Addison-Wesley, 1968), as quoted in First Along the River.

5 First Along the River.

6 Hill, G. “Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation,” The New York Times, April 23, 1970.

7 First Along the River.

8 Snow, D. and Benford, R. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization” in International Social Movement Research (1998); and “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

9 Scarce, R. Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement (Chicago: The Noble Press, Inc., 1990), as quoted in First Along the River.

10 Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), as quoted in First Along the River.

11 First Along the River.

12 Marshall, R. “The Problem of the Wilderness,” Scientific Monthly 30 (1930), as quoted in First Along the River.

13 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Guardian: Origins of the EPA (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992). See http://www.epa.gov/ history/publications/origins.htm.

14 First Along the River.

15 Carson, R. Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), as quoted in First Along the River.

16 Hoffman, A. From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

17 First Along the River.

18 First Along the River.

19 Zald, M. and McCarthy, J. “Organizational Intellectuals and the Criticism of Society,” Social Service Review 49, no. 3 (September 1975).

20 Bollier, D. Citizen Action and Other Big Ideas: A History of Ralph Nader and the Modern Consumer Movement (Washington, D.C.: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1991). See http://www.nader.org/history_bollier.html.

21 Citizen Action and Other Big Ideas: A History of Ralph Nader and the Modern Consumer Movement.

22 Hays, S. A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), as quoted in First Along the River.

23 The New York Times, Aug. 16, 1970.

24 First Along the River.

25 The Guardian: Origins of the EPA.

26 The New York Times, “Excerpts From President’s Message on Reorganization of Environmental Agencies,” July 10, 1970.

27 First Along the River.

28 Cooper, M. “Environmental Movement at 25,” CQ Researcher (March 31, 1995), as quoted in First Along the River.

29 Hill, G. “Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation.”

MAYER N. ZALD is professor emeritus of sociology, social work, and business administration at the University of Michigan. He has published or edited more than 15 books and written more than 70 journal articles on topics including the sociology of social welfare, boards of directors, political sociology and social movements, and social change. He is one of the founders of the “resource mobilization approach” to the study of social movements. Among other honors, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].

Read more stories by Mayer N. Zald.