The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations.

• Author: Atkinson, Carla

You're a dedicated environmentalist. You could fill a resume just with your environmental involvement, including a long list of green organizations you have joined or supported. Citizens for the Environment? The U.S. Council for Energy Awareness? The Alliance for Environment and Resources? Or maybe the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow?

Hopefully not. These groups may sound like a perfect match for a diehard activist like you, but their agendas aren't exactly as environmental or progressive as their names might lead you to believe. Citizens for the Environment, which says it supports "market-based" environmental protection, fought passage of the Clean Air Act of 1990 and California's Proposition 128, a referendum that would have improved state regulation of toxic substances. And despite its name, the group has no citizen membership.

The others are similarly misleading. The U.S. Council for Energy Awareness promotes nuclear energy for the nuclear power industry; the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow has called for a rollback of federal air and water quality standards and repealing the Endangered Species Act; and the Alliance for Environment and Resources was formed by the California Forestry Association to support the agenda of the timber industry.

It's hardly surprising that the success of environmental organizations would in turn spawn counter-environmental groups. While few environmentalists would deny opponents the right to organize and promote their views, activists argue that many of these groups are deceiving the public by wrapping their agendas in earth tones.

But why would these groups intentionally paint themselves green if their sole purpose is to discredit environmental causes? Because they know that it's much more effective to jump on an already popular bandwagon than to publicly sabotage it. Millions of Americans belong to environmental groups, and these opposition groups know their chances are far better if they twist their message into an earth-friendly package, says a new book.

Greenpeace, the international grassroots environmental organization, has set out to expose these deceptive groups to the public with its Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations. A slim volume that combines several brief introductory chapters - explaining the genesis of the anti-environmental movement and defining the major types of anti-environmental organizations - with a catalog of more than 50 deceptive groups, the guide is a...