Worldwatch Institute has Grasp on Mission

In his opinion piece “Environmental Groups Need to Stop Carrying the Weight of the World” (September 18), Russell Max Simon raised questions all nonprofit organizations must ask: Should our reach exceed our grasp? Do we work for transformative change or for more feasible incremental steps in the right direction?

Unfortunately, Mr. Simon oversimplified the choices environmental nonprofits have made, arguing that we claim we are “creating a sustainable world” or “solving global warming.”

Few, if any, groups claim so much.

At the Worldwatch Institute, where Mr. Simon worked for less than a year, our vision is indeed an environmentally sustainable world that meets human needs. Our mission is do what we can—guided by strategy and the opportunities our resources and 37 years of experience in sustainability research provide—to help accelerate the transition to sustainability.

Fortunately, our grants have never “dried up,” as Mr. Simon wrote, though like other nonprofits we have had to work harder to secure them.

With a diversity of funding from foundations, governments, individual donors, and earned income, we work to demonstrate through our research and writing specific ideas and innovations—especially in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and rights-based population policy—that help bring sustainability within reach.

Our goals and vision are indeed large, but much of our work is quite literally on the ground.

To produce the most recent edition of our signature book, State of the World, for example, Worldwatch researchers spent nearly two years in 25 African nations, working individually with local farmers to learn about innovations in food production, storage, and distribution. In the Caribbean, we work directly with utility managers and government officials to help them shift from imported petroleum to renewable energy to power local economic growth.

As an independent and privately funded research organization, we hold ourselves accountable for the faith our donors place in us.

It is not easy to measure the impacts of our work, but we do our best, understanding funders’ need to know that their scarce funds are being used as effectively as possible to advance our mission.

Contrary to Mr. Simon’s assertions, we have never “wait(ed) to achieve a global consensus” on solving climate change or other environmental problems, though along with others in the environmental movement we do work to make global consensus possible in the future.

In his short time with us, Mr. Simon seems to have missed the fact that we also work to make progress on environmental sustainability “piece by piece, wherever and whenever it can be made”—but doing so strategically.

At Worldwatch, as at other environmental organizations, we are happy to roll up our sleeves and to act, as well as to think, both locally and globally.

Robert Engelman
Executive Director
Worldwatch Institute
Washington