Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 193

2. Digitalising environmental NGOs

The digital revolution and the spreading of information and communi-
cation technologies in the late 1980s changed environmental activism
in the developed part of the world. The various investigations on the use
of Internet and ICT in green activism illustrate the rather easy inclu-
sion of these new technologies in the daily practices of environmen-
talists. Greens traditionally have always been rather critical towards
new technologies, at least until the early 1990s. Although this critical,
neo-Luddite attitude towards modern technological systems changed
dramatically following the discourse and practices of ecological mod-
ernization (see Chapter 3 ), there is still significant ambivalence towards
modern technological systems, for instance, on mobility (cars, planes
and even bullet trains), agriculture (GMOs, cloning), and industrial
production. From that perspective, the embracing of the ICT system
by environmentalists is quite remarkable (cf. Horton, 2004 ). The non-
hierarchical, decentralised, fluid network structure of some parts of the
green movement and environmentalism seem to fit rather well the use
of the network and nonhierarchical character of the Internet, e-mail
systems and mobile communication technologies. Some even speak of
an organisational and ideological Wahlverwandschaft between NGOs
and social movements, on the one hand, and the Internet and ICT, on
the other (e.g., Scott and Street, 2001 ), leading to mutual influences
in the development of both. 3 Since the 1990s, national NGOs, and
after that also local NGOs, have been quick in seeing the advantages
of ICT systems. Environmental NGOs have, for instance, used ICT
technologies in their disclosure politics in the 1990s, such as Scorecard
(developed by the American Environmental Defense Fund), Factory
Watch (developed by Friends of the Earth UK) and Recht om te weten
(developed by the Dutch Gelderse Milieufederatie).
Whereas, indeed, the spreading of this technology has been impres-
sive among greens, there are also clear backdrops and criticisms. In
developed countries, especially women and nonwhite environmental-
ists have been underrepresented and relatively late in the use of the
Internet, both because of limited access (for money and space reasons)

3

Castells ( 2004 ) claims that the cultural revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s,
which founded, among others, the environmental movement, was crucial for the
open, nonprivileged and nonpatented development and design of the ICT
system.