Varieties of environmental action

I'm usually skimming through French and Italian newspapers on-line looking for environmental stories.  And I'm sometimes interested in how environmental organizations in those countries compare with those in the U.S.  There's a short article in yesterday's Corriere della Sera that's suggestive.  From the article, Legambiente, the largest Italian environmental organization, strikes me as seeing environmental action in rather broader terms than I imagine most similar organizations in the U.S. do.  Admittedly, it's been a while since I've been to a demonstration, so my experience may be out of date.  But I don't think of, for example, the Sierra Club, or the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund being out in the street with groups demonstrating for housing and smart growth.

In Rome, yesterday, Legambiente representatives joined with a number of other groups to protest the lack of affordable housing while, at the same time, the city is apparently planning to demolish several buildings to open up new development.  About 1,000 protesters carried banners through the streets for about 2 km from Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, near the Termini train station, to Piazza Santi Apostoli, just east of the Via del Corso and the Piazza Venezia.  Cristiana Avenali, the Legambiente director for the Lazio region and a candidate in the up-coming elections, told Corriere della Sera that "We're demonstrating to say no to cement projects, to say no to Alemanno's cement projects."  (Giani Alemanno, of Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà (Pdl) party, is Rome's current mayor.)  Makes sense.