The average Joe on the street might be hard-pressed to find a common thread among such diverse groups as the National Association Realtors, the American Sheep Industry, the Heritage Foundation, and the Independent Petroleum Association. But thanks to a 12 page polemic now being circulated by the Sierra Club and a 5 page letter to Congress from the National Wildlife Federation, activists everywhere should have no trouble linking them up.

These organizations and some 36 others have been "exposed" as part of a "Wise Use" conspiracy, an "environmental destruction coalition" that NWF President Jay Hair claims is hell-bent on turning the planet into a "barren moonscape" by stripmining Yellowstone, parking oil rigs in the Grand Canyon, and depleting the ozone layer over North America.

Others named? Try such subversive organizations as the National Association of Homebuilders, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Motorcycle Association, and the National Cattlemen's Association.

"Wise-Use," a term originally applied to land-rights citizens'groups out West, has been upgraded to a "shut-up" label (i.e., sexist, racist, homophobe, fundamentalist Christian, devout Catholic, etc.), encompassing virtually any organization or individual that has ever had the temerity to suggest that knee-jerk environmental legislation wastes valuable tax dollars and puts Americans out of work, or that there are alternative scientific views on the seemingly endless litany of potential eco-catastrophes now facing the planet If this sounds as though environmentalists are falling victim to unbridled hysteria, it is perhaps understandable. With President-elect Bill Clinton contemplating his nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and the role that agency will play in national and international policy, there is a pressing need to stifle the growing chorus of dissent among scientists, business leaders, and members of the public if environmental pressure groups hope to maintain their clout on Capitol Hill.

Despite opinion polls showing continued support for a clean environment, the signs are more ominous than good. Guilt and fear doesn't sell the way it used to. Fur sales are inching back up. Eco-oriented mutual funds, once touted as hot properties, are going nowhere. Magazines and newsletters focused on environmental topics are battling extinction, their readers, according to the Wall Street Journal, overrun by messages to think and live "green."

It's no better at the ballot box. In 1990, more than 200 state environmental initiatives went down to defeat, including a 39 page, single-spaced regulation nightmare called "Big Green" which Californians voted down by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

This year, with the economy overshadowing all other issues, far fewer environmental measures were on state ballots, but most met similar fates. Ohio voters, by a wide margin, dumped a proposal to expand on the "toxic warning" concept for consumer products, a measure that opponents said would have done little good at great cost. Massachusetts voters killed a recycling initiative that carried an annual price tag of some $230 per household. Oregon voters defeated overwhelmingly two measures to close the Trojan nuclear power plant.

Not surprisingly, leading politicians, ever mindful of the political cross-currents, have suddenly toned down their environmental rhetoric. Journalists, who once could be counted on to promote the movement's agenda, are also breaking ranks, sobered perhaps by the Earth Summit, which had been billed as a serious discussion by international statesmen, but which revealed itself instead--in the words of one correspondent--as an outrageously expensive bazaar of the bizarre, a sideshow of turtle-lovers, nuclear-power haters, breast-feeding advocates, Hollywood celebrities, and Third World kleptocrats intent on getting their hands on more of those good Yankee dollars.

At many of the largest environmental organizations-- including the NWF, Sierra, and Greenpeace USA--softening public support has resulted in some highly publicized belt-tightening. Grassroots fund- raising has been on the slide since last year; charitable foundations, another source of revenue, reportedly are directing more and more of their environment dollars toward small groups focused on specific, local problems.

"There is a sense," says journalist Stephen Greene of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, "that either the large environmental organizations don't need the money or that their years of effectiveness have passed."

In need of a new public relations strategy, environmental pressure groups have, in the months since the Earth Summit fiasco, tried to address some of the public's economic concerns by issuing report after report claiming that environmental regulation can actually bolster the economy, create jobs, raise new revenue, and reduce the deficit..

This argument is suspect, however, since jobs are not readily transferable--loggers cannot be easily turned into environmental lawyers, for example--also, it misses the point. The purpose of environmental regulation is not to raise revenue to reduce the deficit the purpose is to correct or prevent a clearly identified environmental problem.

The other tactic has been to renew efforts to silence dissenters by making them politically suspect. Thus the "Wise Use" pejorative, a bogeyman that is nothing less, in the words of the Sierra Club, than an "insidious yet vastly organized plot...to destroy the entire environmental movement." [Emphasis theirs.]

This new campaign--already picked up by other activists--may indeed prove more successful, from a political standpoint, than a putative global warming (in a cooler-than-normal year) or the desire to save old trees (at a cost of some 33,000 or more logging jobs). Perhaps the spectre of realtors or motorcycle enthusiasts out to "get" environmental groups will prove useful too in bringing in more of those $10 and $20 checks that make up the bulk of their support. But these kinds of tactics do little to clarify the reality and extent of our environmental problems and even less to bring about effective, cost-conscious solutions.

Newsweek journalist Gregg Easterbrook, among those recently critical of activist groups and their tendency toward overwrought rhetoric, has pointed out that the desire lo be exempt from confronting the arguments against one's position typically is seen when a movement fears it is about to be discredited. Certainly that is some of what is behind this shift in strategy.

But when organizations like the Sierra Club irresponsibly counsel their members, in hysterical tones, "to take whatever action is necessary to stop the destruction," and then hand out arbitrarily designated hit lists, it becomes something much worse--it becomes a movement that threatens to undo much good that has been accomplished, a movement that threatens to implode.

President-elect Bill Clinton should consider carefully the implications of this ugly trend among environmental groups. What is needed in the new Administration is the backbone to withstand pressures from extremists and to focus on what should be our national long-term goal--bringing concerns for wildlife and ecosystems back into balance with concerns for the welfare of people.