Activists and the public

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

I've read many comments here from people wondering why the public seems to be disinterested.  I think that some of the comments show a lack of understanding of the role of activists in the community.

Activists are those members of the community who are interested in a particular issue and have time and energy to devote to it.  If you call a public meeting and only activists show up -- well, that is only to be expected, pretty much by definition.  Most people have very little free time and rightly think that they are paying taxes to hire people to work on these issues.

Activists face important time constraints.  For one thing, each activist must decide whether their time will primarily be spent on local, regional, or national issues.  If you send out an announcement about a local Superfund site, and a local activist is already busy working on national water permit issues, they aren't going to have time to show up, unless the Superfund site is so dangerous that you should have done something about it already.  If it's a community concerned with environmental justice, they have many other pressing problems as well, and their pool of available activists will be even further spread out.

Activists are often informal representatives of their community.  Often their neighbors and friends know they are involved in their issues and will talk to them about their concerns.

Activists often become known to the governmental branches involved in the issues they work on.  That's why I thought that someone else's suggestion of contacting the people who had complained to City Hall was a very good one, by the way.  Because activists become known, they often get stigmatized as "the usual crowd" -- again, shouldn't people expect that the people who have taken the time to become educated about an issue will be the most likely ones to show up?

Lastly there is the stakeholder parity myth.  The idea seems to be that attendence equals interest.  The problem is that some stakeholders have far more resources than others.  Industry has the resources to send someone to every meeting.  The environmental community does not, even when you include paid staffers of environmental groups.  The public should not have to show up at every meeting to defend their interests.  Isn't that supposed to be EPA's job?