“If an environmentalist were to take a gander at [NRDC’s] holdings,” a reporter for an environmental website wrote in 2015, “she might raise a quizzical eyebrow: 1,200 shares of Halliburton, 500 of Transocean, 700 of Valero. Marathon, Phillips 66, Diamond Offshore Drilling—they’re in there, too.”29 The founding donor of Friends of the Earth was oilman Robert Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield. He gave Friends of the Earth the equivalent of $500,000 in 2019 dollars. “What was David Brower doing accepting money from an oilman?” his biographer wondered.30 The answer is that he was
...more
