The Environmental Defense Fund: Fighting the System by Guarding the Lifeworld as a Defensively Funded Environment

Abstract

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) prides itself on its mission and legacy, namely, “50 years of forging solutions that help people and nature prosper.” Has this solutionist approach to struggles along the frontiers of what Habermas identified as “system” to defend “life-world” actually helped people and nature prosper? The EDF has secured a relatively small number of protected stop-gap sites around the planet, which it oversees as specially “funded defensible environments.” Yet, these interventions typically assist only certain peoples and specific locations. While it presents itself as an anti-establishment or market-resistant operation, the EDF also usually depicts its “funded defensible environments” through the frames of a complex victimology in which “the system” assaults “the life-world.” It then can step forth as a third-sector “public defender,” forging solutions through defensive legal actions meant to assure fairness and justice in environmental management through legalistic and/or market-based strategies. This analysis critically reassesses how the EDF’s practices assure human, and increasingly nonhuman, beings are accorded legal service to share in the future appreciation of Nature’s stocks, services, or systems as well as a right to redress losses to these interests with legal remedies for any despoliation or destruction of shared environmental equity in the solutions it forges.