Nationwide, a broad range of environmental issues such as air and water pollution, threats to public lands, endangered species, environmental justice, longwall coal mining, mountaintop removal, community sustainability, public transportation, fracking, and climate change have motivated grassroots involvement. The movement has mobilized a variety of constituents, including retirees, students and other young people, religious groups, residents of affected areas, labor unionists, and long-time progressive activists. In Pittsburgh, the movement includes established organizations such as the Group against Smog and Pollution (GASP), Clean Water Action, PennEnvironment, and the Sierra Club, as well as newer environmental justice, climate action, and anti-fracking groups. Grassroots activists have employed a variety of tactics, from conventional lobbying and electoral politics to demonstrations and direct actions. They have organized numerous campaigns and participated in many alliances. The movement has frequently succeeded in engaging a large number of people, though many potential supporters have not become involved, and it is difficult to maintain organizations and collective action for an extended period of time. The movement has won some important battles, but continually struggles to make real progress in protecting the environment.

In the summer of 2014, representatives of several environmental groups in Pittsburgh began meeting to plan for local participation in the People’s Climate March to be held in New York City on September 21, 2014. The Sierra Club, 350.org, and other national and international groups were organizing the march around a United Nations (UN) meeting on climate change held in New York in advance of the Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015. Across the country, grassroots groups, including affiliates of Rising Tide North America and the Climate Justice Alliance, were organizing to attend the People’s Climate March and to participate in a week of activities that would include a nonviolent direct action in New York’s financial district to “flood Wall Street” on the day following the main march. Radical and mainstream environmentalists alike were eager to be part of these events, and participants in the Pittsburgh meetings included a staff member of the Sierra Club and members of the Global Warming Action Team of the Allegheny Group of the Sierra Club, local anti-fracking and environmental justice groups, student environmental groups, and a community organization called Action United. In addition to organizing Pittsburgh residents to attend the People’s Climate March, their goal was to build a diverse local climate movement consisting not only of environmentalists but also unions, faith leaders, students, and residents of disadvantaged communities. On September 8, 2014, this ad hoc group held a “pre-event” with speakers, music, and refreshments that attracted a diverse crowd of people. A national organizer working with 350.org and Rising Tide came from New York to speak about the march, followed by local speakers from a student coalition, the local Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the Sierra Club among others. Framing of the issue reflected the diversity of the event coalition; the SEIU speaker talked about how low-income workers are “extremely affected by climate change,” and the AFSC representative talked about “climate justice” in connection with racial justice and human rights (fieldnotes, September 8, 2014). A few weeks later, several hundred Pittsburgh residents traveled to New York in at least five buses organized by local groups.

Collective action is critical to social movements; tactics are necessary both to mobilize participants and to impact targets. Through tactics such as demonstrations, movements involve supporters and make their concerns known to bystanders and authorities, raising public awareness and influencing public policy. Some collective action occurs relatively spontaneously (Snow and Moss 2014), and social media have increased the ability to organize protests quickly when emotions are running high, as in the case of the Trump resistance movement (Meyer and Tarrow 2018). But ongoing action typically involves ongoing talk that occurs in face-to-face settings as well as online. Many important processes occur within social movement organizations (SMOs), and organizational dynamics are essential to the growth and maintenance of movements (Blee 2012; Ganz 2000; Han 2014; Lichterman 1996, 2005; Polletta 2002). Activists attend meetings, commit resources, choose leaders (or avoid doing so), plan actions, and recruit and integrate newcomers into their organizations. Yet, we still do not know a lot about how the meetings of different types of organizations facilitate or impede these activities (Baggetta et al. 2013:564); my contribution in this chapter is to show what happens at movement meetings and how they affect mobilization and strategic decision-making.

Grassroots environmental organizations have mounted many campaigns and engaged in a wide variety of strategies and tactics. Movements need strategies, which include choices about tactics, frames, alliances, and targets, to mobilize supporters and have an impact on public opinion and policies. One key question for movement scholars is how strategies and tactics affect outcomes (Andrews 2004; Banaszak 1996; Gamson 1990; Luders 2010; McCammon 2012). Another question, which is my concern in this chapter, is how strategies get created (Ganz 2000; Jasper 2006; Polletta 2002). While scholars commonly view movements as a series of collective actions or campaigns (Marwell and Oliver 1984; Tilly and Wood 2013), it may be harder for movements to devise strategies and sustain campaigns than is generally recognized (cf. McAdam and Boudet 2012). In addition to assessing the effectiveness of particular strategies, it is important to take a step back to see how strategies get devised; while new actions and campaigns allow movements to grow and succeed, strategic innovation is not always easy.

The Pittsburgh environmental movement community consists of affiliates of state, national, and international organizations as well as free-standing local organizations. These groups address long-standing problems such as air and water pollution as well as more recent concerns about fracking, environmental justice, and climate change. In this chapter, I describe my sampling of the grassroots environmental movement in Pittsburgh. For the five groups that I studied intensively, I provide narratives of their origins and major activities as well as a brief description of their organizational structures and ideological approaches in this chapter (see also Staggenborg 2018; Staggenborg and Ogrodnik 2015). In subsequent chapters, I draw on these cases to look more closely at processes of mobilization, including internal organizational dynamics and strategic decision-making.

Grassroots environmentalism depends on the passion and commitment of local activists, most of them volunteers, who donate their time, skills, and other resources to efforts to protect their neighborhoods and communities as well as public lands. It also requires some type of organization to bring community members together, as well as strategies and tactics, both to accomplish goals and to build the movement by engaging supporters in collective action. This chapter begins to explain the mobilization of grassroots environmentalism by showing how compelling environmental issues create concerns among local residents and lead many to become active. It also describes how movement actors work to frame issues in ways that capture the experiences and grievances of potential constituents. Chapters 5 and 6 then continue the story of how grassroots environmentalists mobilize by looking at how concerned individuals become movement participants and how movement structures and communities continue to organize them. To explain the process of mobilization, I draw extensively on my observations of the anti-fracking activities and campaigns that took place during the time of my study.

Grassroots activism is essential to the contemporary environmental movement. The danger to our planet from climate change is urgent and overwhelming, and related threats to water, air, land, endangered species, and human health are immense. In a situation of “all hands on deck,” local activists as well as state, national, and international organizations have much to contribute. Case studies of local movements reveal that grassroots environmentalists have achieved a great deal over many decades by raising public consciousness, changing popular discourse, testifying at hearings, lobbying government, and engaging in direct action (e.g., Bell 2013, 2016; Bevington 2009; Bullard 1990; Ferguson 2015; Longhurst 2010; McGurty 2007; Pellow 2014; Walsh et al. 1997). To be sure, there are limitations on the ability of movements to have an impact, and in some places, movements never organize at all to combat environmental threats (McAdam and Boudet 2012). My study of the Pittsburgh movement uses fieldwork conducted over a number of years, following several organizations to the end of their life spans, to provide a close-up look at grassroots environmental groups. This inside description reveals both the excitement and the messiness of collective action, which helps explain the limitations as well as the accomplishments of the movement. In this concluding chapter, I outline the implications of my research for the study for social movements and for movement activists and organizations seeking to create change through grassroots environmentalism.

The environmental movement in Pittsburgh, like the national movement, has ebbed and flowed over time (Ogrodnik and Staggenborg 2016). Some local organizations, such as the Group against Smog and Pollution and the Allegheny Group of the Sierra Club, have survived since the 1970s, albeit with fluctuating levels of activity. Many other groups have come and gone, though they often have impacts beyond their lifetimes as active organizations, such as the creation of networks and changes in public discourse. The movement has experienced ups and downs as new issues motivate supporters and later recede in urgency. Individuals often become involved in social movements during periods of threat, when issues and organizing efforts are visible. As we saw in Chapter 5, some of the early opponents of fracking in Pittsburgh were newcomers to the local environmental movement who, as residents of city neighborhoods threatened by fracking, became aware of the issue. Movement organizers had to devise ongoing tactics and create organizational structures that would involve supporters and maintain the movement. This was difficult to keep up over time, and Marcellus Protest, Shadbush, and Protect Our Parks all eventually stopped meeting. Nevertheless, the movement continued.

Social movements around the world have demonstrated the power of collective action to bring about significant cultural and political change (Tarrow 2011). The potential for a social movement exists when people have grievances or concerns about a problem and want change; emotions such as anger, resentment, and fear are powerful motivations for collective action. Threats, including environmental hazards, can intensify feelings of grievance and increase incentives for collective action (Almeida 2019). But movements do not simply “happen” in response to upsetting conditions. Climate change, notably, has provoked many complex emotions, including fear, helplessness, and guilt, which have made it hard for many people to respond to the crisis (Norgaard 2011:80). Movements can provide ways for concerned people to act together, and experiences with collective action can create hope that change is possible.