Effective at what? At achieving their organizational mission?

It's prety typical that all the people of the US know and therefor vote for the Sierra Club... forget the rest of the world...

I'd give it to a local organization working on behalf of the local community. We have several that work to clean up the local river banks and beaches, and another that works to clean up the road ways and parks.

The bigger organizations like The Sierra Club are tending towards becoming the very corporations they are fighting against. For example, The Sierra Club uses approximately 47,000 tons of paper per year for their fundraising mailings, almost none of which is printed on recycled paper. What's up with that?

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Note from the editor: We have received word from Carl Pope (the Sierra Club's executive director!) that the Sierra Club's magazine and fund-raising mailings are all done on
recycled paper.

On a personal note, I'll add that a certain investment in resources and energy is always required to reach people, inform and educate them and help them make positive changes to their lives and society. This website uses electricity and computers, but if we can have an impact on our readers and they in turn have an impact on the people around them, it'll have been worth it. -Ed.

I like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (http://www.cbf.org) the best. They're local so I can get involved. They fight for the health of the bay which branches out to healthier farming, watersheds, forests, and roadways. They appreciate a donation of your time as much as a donation of money. Last, the make good use of Internet and email to notify you of things going on in congress that you may wish to act on.

RMI

Other - Ducks Unlimited

Ducks Unlimited is my vote for most effective environmental organization. They have a clear and simple mandate to preserve wetlands and migratory bird habitat.

Despite their paper-trail, in my experience the Sierra Club also does very local work. For a while I was member of a planning group that worked to encourage the city to buy openspace, attended zoning meetings and such. The group was made up of real people who cared and worked for the enviroment and they have been successful at influencing the community to be more "green" and keep open space and implement more environmentally friendly zoning.

WORLD WILDLIFE FUND

For all of you who are voting for the "effectiveness" of the Sierra Club....

U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is seen as one of the most vulnerable Republican senators in the country. But Wednesday, the national Sierra Club came out in support of him.

The Sierra Club is endorsing Chafee even though the group gave the senator only a 20 percent rating in its environmental scorecard in 2004.

The club said a vote for Chafee is better than a vote for a Democrat because of his position as a dissident within the majority party.

The Sierra Club is SO EFFECTIVE that is is endorsing Senators who don't support thier own possitions... sad.

I switched from the Sierra Club to the Nature Conservancy because I felt the Sierra Club was becoming increasingly ineffective due to its increasing focus on political advocacy. Under the leadership of Carl Pope, the organization increasingly feels like a simple adjunct of the Democratic Party. In an era where all branches of US government are controlled by the Republicans, how effective can you be if you'd rather demonize them (it makes great copy) than look for areas where you can work with them?

There are any number of areas where the green movement can work across political lines rather than focusing on areas of disagreement. If you need to, sell a green policy using a non-green argument - for instance, plenty of hawkish Republicans will (and do) respond very favorably to cellulosic ethanol as a way to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil. The fact that it's also a great way to reduce the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere is just a bonus to them. Cleaning up point-source pollution is another area where local politicians (regardless of party) are much more easily swayed.

I think it's a great idea to have the Democratic Party remind voters that it is more focused on environmentalism - but I think it's bad politics for NGOs to do the same. If they are seen as largely partisan, they will be frozen out of the policy debate except as the source of the occassional pithy quote in a friendly newspaper article.

I give to the Nature Conservancy because I believe that a lot of the pollution problems we have now (both in terms of greenhouse gases as well as others) are temporary - better technology will minimize and even reverse a lot of the polluting that goes on today (compare a 1950s coal plant to a 2000s wind farm (or even a gas-fired turbine) - then imagine what sort of technology we'll have in 2050). The critical need is to protect as many ecosystems as we can while the technology and political will catches up. This is exactly what the NC does and that's why I think it's effective - keeping ecosystems alive through the coming rough patch where our resource usage and our level of technology are mismatched.

I personally put money into local groups and population groups.

I would argue that Planned Parenthood is the best national environmental organization. It doesn't matter what cause you fight for b/c we'll all lose if we don't bring down population to within carrying capacity before we begin to suffer massive system collapse(like global warming or peak oil).

And the national groups are usually not radical enough. We've got to have a "paradigm shift", not piecemeal efforts to save this or that tree or river. Besides, neither Population Connection nor the Sierra Club(not to mention the others) will touch immigration reform. We have to start saving local communities so that the energy decent will be more pleasent for everyone.

I've also been recently suprised/impressed by the efforts of Community Solutions out of Yellow Springs, Ohio and the PostCarbon Institute.

Fair Trade Certified products only.

I can't say I know of any of the work done by the above organisations, except of course Greenpeace.

The most effective organisations in the UK I can think of are the RSPB, The Wildlife Trusts, The Soil Association and The Woodland Trust.

In an obscure and misleading kind of way I think you could also count the BBC, mainly for bringing us David Attenborough and Bill Oddie who between them have probably turned more peoples attention towards environmental issues than anyone else. However, their main concern is love of wildlife, which in turn leads to environmental awareness.

CarbonFund.org

My answer is GreenPeace.

However one thing bothers me. Does TH aims to be international or American only? because with this survey TH turns its back to the rest of the world.

Sometimes the financial magazines in the U.S. publish data on best spending of donations by non profits. I think I have seen this in Kiplinger's and maybe Money, Forbes, or Fortune in the past.
Anyway, they look at public data on how donations are spent. Does donated money go to actual effort or office supplies, etc. Efficiency of use of money donated.
I have used this as a guide to donate in the past.
I think the best orgs for spending money are Audubon and Nature Conservancy. But that is from a year or more ago. So it's something you need to keep up on.

Your list lacks an environmental justice option. Tsk.

My vote in this regard: Communities for a Better Environment (a California-based ngo). They have an amazing success rate at convincing local legislators and governing boards in SF and LA to revoke permits, tighten allowances, and crack down on pollulters.

Before we get to use all that cool design stuff you showcase in a Utopian world, we have to clean up what we've got!

I donate to:

World Carfree Network
Union of Concerned Scientists
EarthSave
PETA (promoting a vegetarian diet)
local organizations (bicycling and open space)

The Native Forest Council

Yo, TreeHugger, it's Greenpeace, without a capital P. ;-)

Their (Global) Victories, including stopping the ocean dumping of radioactive waste, the moratorium on commercial whaling, the ban on international trade in hazardous waste, conversion of McDonalds et al to Green refrigeration, and a few other little wins, are listed there.

And what is this, a popularity contest? Effectiveness has to be measured against the niche each of these groups occupy. Greenpeace does things other groups can't -- it's hugely effective at the big bold media-mind bomb on a global scale. But NRDC is streets ahead when it comes to quality research in the US, and Treehugger is king when it comes to enabling individual lifestyle changes. Nobody has a corner on the effectiveness market, and like all systems, diversity makes the environmental movement stronger.

This is fun, in a "People Magazine" kind of way, but let's make sure that's the context we read it in.