Environmentalism. Although its roots go back much earlier, the social movement known as environmentalism first appeared in the 1960s. It soon became one of the most successful movements in modern history, with a national and global impact on politics, economics,
technology, design, and personal values.As the twentieth century ended, that impact seemed likely to endure, yet how truly profound it would be remained unclear. As it grew the movement came to mean different things to different groups, though at its core it remained an effort to improve human relationships with the other‐than‐human world.
Roots of Environmental and Ecological Awareness.
In the early twentieth century, the word “environmentalism” referred mainly to the effects of external social influences (as opposed to genetic endowment) on the individual. But increasingly after
World War II, “environment” came to mean the natural world surrounding people, including flora, fauna, climate, water, and soil—the entire biosphere. At the same time, that natural world began to seem highly vulnerable to human activity; it was no longer an all‐powerful Mother Earth providing boundless nourishment for her children but an endangered source of life. That sense of vulnerability inspired a social and political reform movement. Environmentalists called for a more responsible relationship between human beings and nature. Human survival was at stake, as was the stability and integrity of the whole fabric of life on the planet.
More and more citizens sensed that the human‐nature umbilical link was itself under attack, and that defending it required a radically new way of thinking. The environment had to be seen holistically, they insisted. For them, nature was not a realm set above and apart from human beings, like another country one visits from time to time, but instead is a vast, intricate community interacting all around us, a system of connections and interchanges to which all belong. Human beings cannot move away from that condition, nor ignore it with impunity, they concluded, even in the midst of the largest metropolis.
A defining work in the emergence of environmentalism was Rachel
Carson's
Silent Spring (1962), which warned of the wholesale contamination of the environment by chemical pesticides such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Like many others of her generation, Carson was shaken by the fear of all‐out nuclear war and worried about radioactive fallout from weapons‐testing polluting food chains even in the most remote parts of the planet. In 1967, a group of scientists and lawyers founded the Environmental Defense Fund, which sought to get dangerous pesticides banned by the courts as a threat to the health of both human beings and natural ecosystems. The National Environmental Policy Act (1969) set up a federal regulatory agency, the
Environmental Protection Agency, and required an “environmental impact statement” for any federally funded project that might cause damage to the earth. The 1963
Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a ban on DDT use in the United States, and the passage of many new laws (including the 1960 Clean Water Act and the 1963 Clean Air Act) all sprang from growing conviction that the human‐nature relationship was more essential than Americans had generally realized, and that what happened to one side of the relationship inevitably affected the other. Capping a decade of ferment, environmentalists in 1970 declared the first Earth Day, an event to celebrate human‐nature interdependence. An estimated twenty million people, most of them North Americans and most under the age of thirty, participated, far outnumbering student demonstrations for the
civil rights movement or for an end to the
Vietnam War. The event became an annual, and eventually a truly international, ritual—an unprecedented global “holiday.” More substantially, almost all nations passed laws similar to those enacted in the United States, and several nations surpassed the United States in cleaning up their rivers and atmosphere, recycling their wastes, reducing toxic emissions, improving energy efficiency, and preserving a critical habitat for biodiversity.
Within the United States, environmentalism was an amalgamation of several older strands of intellectual and political consciousness. Among them were nineteenth‐century
transcendentalism and the
Romantic movement. Rachel Carson acknowledged her indebtedness to such figures as Henry David
Thoreau and John
Muir, both of whom had celebrated American nature in its wilder state and sought to recover a direct personal relationship with the nonhuman. Both looked for ways of getting outside the confine of civilization now and then and into primeval woods or mountains. Painters and poets had encouraged people to seek the sublime in nature, alone or in small groups, in such awe‐inspiring landscapes as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the
Grand Canyon. Carson herself, a marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was passionate about the sea; she found her wilderness in tidal pools along the Maine coast. But by the 1960s, in a highly urbanized nation of over 200 million people, with a far denser web of artifice obscuring the natural order, this kind of romantic quest had become increasingly difficult to satisfy by solitary, private excursions. Environmentalism, though inspired by romantic yearnings for contact with nature, could not be simply an individual act of reverence for or withdrawal from modernity; it must be a public project pursued collectively in the courtroom, the legislative chamber, and the corporate headquarters. Organization and lobbying were required to win passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which over the next three decades would protect 100 million acres and stand as one of the great successes of the American environmental movement.
A second strand was the
Progressive Era conservation movement, which gained momentum in the early twentieth century under the leadership of Gifford Pinchot, chief forester during Theodore
Roosevelt's presidency, and of Roosevelt himself. That movement supported the preservation of national parks and wildlife refuges, but even more importantly it set up a national forest system based on sustained‐yield management principles and called for protecting the nation's soils and minerals from overrapid development. The core ideal was “wise use.” For Pinchot and his allies, that ideal required the federal government to be permanently in charge of managing land and overseeing national development. American society could not endure, they felt, without a secure, continuing permanent supply of natural resources. Unregulated private exploitation, they feared, threatened the nation's long‐term security. The post‐1960 environmental movement shared that same concern about stopping waste and inefficiency and safeguarding resources for the future, but it went further, calling for an overhaul of the entire modern economic system to fit consumption patterns to the limits of the land.
A third source of modern environmentalism was a
public‐health movement working for cleaner, safer factories and urban neighborhoods. By the mid‐nineteenth century, physicians and other professionals in Europe and North America were agitating for better sanitation to prevent devastating outbreaks of
cholera and
typhoid fever. The early targets had been water supplies contaminated by human waste, slaughterhouse offal, and garbage. As coal replaced wood as the nation's chief energy source after 1870, public‐health concerns broadened to include air pollution, though clear medical evidence of the effects of such combustion on lungs and other body tissues was slow in coming. The urban environmentalist Alice Hamilton—a medical doctor, social worker at Jane
Addams's Hull House in
Chicago, and a sometime professor of industrial hygiene at Harvard University—pioneered in investigating the poisons that infected workplaces and tenement dwellings. Reformers found life in the modern city particularly degraded and unwholesome, but they soon extended their efforts into rural areas, including Indian reservations and sharecroppers' cabins, wherever poor people disproportionately bore the costs of progress. Not until Rachel Carson, however, did public‐health reformers generally begin to realize that the human body is a part of nature too, and that its pollution by dangerous substances is one with the pollution of the earth.
Finally, the emergence of environmentalism owed something to a relatively obscure group of natural scientists and academics in such fields as ecology and geography who first perceived the environment as an interactive physical system connecting human beings and the rest of nature. Visualizing that system on a global scale, many of them dramatically transcended the nationalistic perspective of the Progressive conservationists or the localized concerns of urban health reformers. Their basic theories often came from abroad as well: from the Russian geologist V.I. Vernadskii, originator of the concept of the biosphere; from French and German geographers, who had long debated the question of nature as a limiting factor on human activity; and from a succession of English naturalists, including Charles Darwin, Charles Elton, and Arthur Tansley (who suggested the idea of the ecosystem). A key American figure in this emerging body of scientific thought was Aldo
Leopold, a University of Wisconsin wildlife expert, who introduced many readers to the science of ecology through his
Sand County Almanac (1948).
By the 1950s, these scientific ideas had come together in a new integrative and interdisciplinary point of view that united the natural and
social sciences, a perspective that might be called human ecology. Avoiding the extremes of environmental determinism, which had tried to reduce cultures to their physical conditions, and of a technological optimism that was blind to all environmental limits, the new view insisted that human life must be lived within natural constraints, both physical and moral.
The concept of human ecology emerged on many fronts in the late 1940s and 1950s. Anthropologists Betty Meggers and Julian Steward—one working in Amazonia, the other in the American
Southwest—laid the foundations for “cultural ecology.” Historian James Malin argued for an ecological approach and applied it in his own studies of the relations of plants, animals, soils, climate, and human populations on the Great Plains. Among geographers, Carl Sauer produced influential essays and books exploring the effects of European colonialism on New World peoples and landscapes. Several of those scholars and others from diverse disciplines gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1956 for a symposium on the deteriorating state of the human‐nature relationship. The resulting publication,
Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), dedicated to the nineteenth‐century American conservationist George Perkins Marsh, played a major role in preparing the deeper intellectual ground for the environmental movement.
Among the symposium participants was Paul B. Sears, a botanist who chaired the conservation program at Yale University. In his short but prophetic paper, “The Processes of Environmental Change by Man,” Sears reviewed the global impact of human population growth, the intensification of agricultural land use, and water and air pollution in industrial areas, noting that the United States, with less than a tenth of the world's population, was consuming more than half of its mineral production. Neither Sears nor the other conference‐goers called themselves environmentalists, but their concern over the growing effect of human beings on global ecology helped give environmentalism a set of defining ideas and theories. In 1972, when environmentalists from many countries assembled in Stockholm to resurvey the global situation, they drew on the perspective worked out by those pioneering human ecologists. By the later 1990s, that same perspective had become widely popularized in the United States, and ecology (however shallow or profound) was part of the daily language of masses of people worldwide.
Growing Urgency and Backlash: Post-1960 Developments.
What the environmentalist movement added to these fertile new ideas of human ecology was a growing sense of urgency, bordering at times on apocalyptic fear. By the
Sixties, activists warned of an environmental “crisis.” Rachel Carson's nightmare of a future springtime when no birds would sing, all dead from manmade poisons, introduced a tone of anxiety missing from the writings of Thoreau, Pinchot, Hamilton, Leopold, or Sears. Following Carson, another anxious biologist, Paul Ehrlich, warned in
The Population Bomb (1968) of a demographic hazard that “keeps ticking,” ready to explode. In
The Closing Circle (1971), the Washington University biologist Barry Commoner alerted the country to the death of Lake Erie from pollutants and the death of people from radioactivity, smog, and ground‐water contamination. Commoner explained that he had first been alerted to the environmental crisis by the activities of the
Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission), which during the 1950s had exposed Americans and others to deadly Strontium 90 through nuclear‐weapons testing and then failed to let the public know the full consequences of that exposure. The urgent need, in his view, was for an awakened public, led by informed scientists, to force the government and corporate America to develop less life‐threatening technologies. The specter haunting each of these environmentalists was nothing less than death—the death of birds, of ecosystems, of nature itself, and, because of our dependence on nature, the death of human beings as well.
Only slightly less apocalyptic were those environmentalists who by the 1970s called for a reevaluation of the purposes and consequences of
economic development. In their view, an economy expanding geometrically using ever more energy, land, minerals, and water, must eventually encounter the limits of the earth's resources. The environment, they insisted, must be seen as more than a storehouse of commodities to be ransacked and consumed. Here the environmentalists confronted attitudes deeply engrained among economists, business leaders, politicians, and the public about the virtues of economic growth, attitudes underlying the modern economic system and indeed the whole materialistic ethos of contemporary culture. Although the popular response to this challenge was difficult to gauge, polls did show a growing tilt toward environmentalist views in all the industrial countries and a greater public willingness, at least in affluent societies, to make economic sacrifices to reduce pollution, preserve species, and consume less energy.
During the 1980s, as American politics turned conservative, a rising chorus of antienvironmentalists, led by President Ronald
Reagan and Secretary of the Interior James Watt, insisted that the environment was neither fragile nor a real constraint on human ambition. The antienvironmental backlash continued during the presidency of George W.
Bush (2001 – ). Closely linked to corporate interests and energy companies, the Bush administration sought to rollback environmental regulations, promoted logging in national forests and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and dropped investigations of more than 140 refineries and industrial sites suspected of Clean Air Act violations. The administration also withdrew from negotiations over the final terms of the 1997 Kyoto Accords, a UN-sponsored effort to reduce emissions contributing to global warming. Environmentalists responded by renewing their sense of mission and increasing their numbers.
The
Sierra Club and other environmental organizations vigorously protested this retreat from a well-established bipartisan commitment to environmental protection. They countered opposition by seeking alliances with other groups demanding cultural change: among feminists, some of whom insisted that women were more attuned to ecological interdependencies than men; among ethical radicals, who wanted to extend rights to animals, trees, and the rest of nature; and among social‐justice advocates at home and abroad, who demanded protection for the poor from the environmental damage and toxic dumping by the rich. Above all, environmentalists tried to temper their gloomier tendencies with a more hopeful, and more politically acceptable, emphasis on creating a new “green future” in which environmentally sensitive cities, economies, and technologies would all be reembedded in the tangled web of life.
See also
Conservatism;
Consumer Culture;
Feminism;
Forests and Forestry;
Industrial Diseases and Hazards;
Laissez‐faire;
Mass Production;
National Park System;
Nuclear Arms Control Treaties;
Nuclear Weapons;
Painting: To 1945;
Three Mile Island;
Yellowstone National Park;
Yosemite National Park.Bibliography
Stephen Fox , The American Conservation Movement, 1981.
Samuel P. Hays , Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 1987.
Robert C. Paehlke , Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, 1989.
Riley E. Dunlap and Angela G. Mertig, eds., American Environmentalism, 1992.
Bob Pepperman Taylor , Our Limits Transgressed, 1992.
Robert Gottlieb , Forcing the Spring, 1993.
Kirkpatrick Sale , The Green Revolution, 1993.
Donald Worster , Nature's Economy, 2d. ed., 1994.
Willett Kempton,, James S. Boster,, and and Jennifer A. Hartley , Environmental Values in American Culture, 1995.
Donald Worster
; Updated by
Paul S. Boyer
