Environmentalism

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ENVIRONMENTALISM.

THREE HISTORICAL PHASES
THE GROWTH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
ENVIRONMENTALISM'S IMPACT
LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Environmentalism is a social movement animated by the goal of bringing about deep changes in how humans perceive and behave toward the natural world. It aims at a fundamental shift in society's vision of humankind's home planet: from a world perceived as offering a virtually limitless cornucopia of resources for human use to a world perceived as fragile, finite, and requiring careful stewardship on the part of its increasingly powerful human inhabitants. Although the movement's roots lie in the nineteenth century, environmentalism really only took off during the cultural ferment of the 1960s, spreading rapidly throughout Western Europe and the other industrial democracies during the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2000s, environmentalist ideas have come to constitute a prominent feature in the political, economic, and cultural landscape of virtually all the major industrial democracies. Environmentalism still has a very long way to go before its ambitious goals of economic and ecological restructuring come close to full realization—but it has made a most impressive (and incisive) start.

THREE HISTORICAL PHASES

In Europe, three major phases in the rise of environmentalist awareness can be discerned from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The first, situated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, might be described as the era of utilitarian conservationism, marked by concern over soil erosion or the accelerating depletion of certain key resources such as timber, and by the development of new strategies for managing natural areas with an eye to husbanding those resources for the future. Thus the earliest signs of a modern environmental sensibility can be traced to the Enlightenment period, as naturalists first began putting together the systematic picture of Earth's plants and animals that would gradually mature into the full-fledged science of modern biology. Yet this emergent conservationist attitude remained quite far removed from the worldview of twenty-first-century environmentalists because it only assigned value to nature's plants and animals insofar as those creatures—or their products—might prove useful to humans. A tree was a good thing, according to this vision, because it offered wood for fuel or for building such objects as houses, boats, or furniture; its value lay solely in its utility to humankind. This homocentric vision of nature would predominate in Europe throughout the nineteenth century (and still continues to play a key role in the advancement of environmentalist agendas in some quarters even in the early twenty-first century).

Toward the late nineteenth century, however, a new vision began to emerge—an attitude that might be described as aesthetic conservationism. Partly through the far-reaching influence of the artistic currents of Romanticism, and partly as a reaction against the rapid spread of urban society and industrialism, more and more citizens of Europe and North America began to place a value on nature simply because they deemed it beautiful to behold. The first major sign of this new attitude can be seen in the creation of Yellowstone Park by the United States government in 1872. Yellowstone was of no "use" to anyone because it consisted of a large tract of territory fenced off from further development or human intervention: its value lay simply in its very wildness, in the beauty people found through the contemplation of nature in a relatively primal and untouched state. During the succeeding decades, many nations followed the example set by the United States, creating national parks throughout the world: in Australia (1879), Canada and New Zealand (1880s), South Africa (1890s), Sweden (1909), and France and Switzerland (1914). This current of aesthetic protectionism gave a powerful boost to the efforts of the more utilitarian conservationists, and the two groups often formed alliances around the turn of the twentieth century in getting laws passed for the defense of natural sites.

Yet one should not read too much into these early efforts. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Europeans, like the citizens of the world's other industrial democracies, continued to believe unabashedly in endless material progress through unrestrained economic growth, in the seemingly limitless bounty that human ingenuity could extract from nature. Only a small minority even became aware of conservationist issues, and even fewer actively campaigned for nature protection.

All this changed quite dramatically in the 1960s—the decade that marked the birth and rapid rise of modern environmentalism. Several factors came together to bring about this sudden shift: a keen awareness among scientists of the increasingly grievous (and in some cases irreversible) damage being done to the earth's ecosystems by the accelerating growth of industrial society; a new radicalism among scientists and nature lovers, no doubt emboldened by the activism and protests of the 1960s counterculture; and a new sophistication in the science of ecology itself, offering truly alarming forecasts of a full-scale environmental collapse if human beings continued to exploit nature with the reckless abandon that had thus far prevailed. For the first time, many ordinary citizens began using the metaphor of a spaceship to describe Planet Earth: a finite environment, from which only limited resources could be drawn, and into which only a limited quantity of pollutants and effluents could be cast. Once humankind crossed a critical threshold, the spaceship would simply become uninhabitable, a spherical tomb floating in the blackness of space. It was this attitude of profound alarm, coupled with an urgent and hopeful effort to mobilize the requisite social and economic changes for long-term survival, that distinguished modern environmentalism from its conservationist predecessors.

THE GROWTH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

The movement spread with extraordinary swiftness, flowing across borders and winning converts by the thousands throughout the industrialized democracies. A pullulating variety of organizations formed to spread the message: from small neighborhood groups promoting recycling to international networks such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace; from the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States (1970) to the Ministry of the Environment in France (1971) to the creation of the United Nations Environmental Program (1972). Between 1965 and 1975, vast numbers of books, newspaper articles, and TV programs devoted to environmentalist topics spread across the cultural scene; and public opinion polls consistently showed that citizens placed environmental issues near the top of their list of priorities for public policy. While the number of hard-core environmental activists remained relatively small (probably in the thousands throughout Europe), the number of Europeans who considered themselves ardently "pro-environment" clearly numbered in the tens of millions by the mid-1970s.

Not surprisingly, the politicians responded with alacrity. As fledgling environmentalist (or "green") political parties began to form in the 1970s, somewhat hesitantly submitting their first candidates in regional and national elections, the mainstream parties of both Left and Right quickly took notice: they soon co-opted various portions of the environmentalist message within their own party platforms, and declared themselves to be ardently "greener than thou." Green parties formed and began contesting elections in the late 1970s in England, Germany, and France; other West European nations, such as Spain, Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands, followed suit in the 1980s. These new green parties tended to receive between 2 percent and 10 percent of the vote in national elections, and rarely succeeded in pushing beyond those levels; but their influence far exceeded these modest statistics because their very existence—and their vocal advocacy on behalf of environmental issues—forced the larger mainstream parties in government to begin institutionalizing significant measures for environmental protection.

ENVIRONMENTALISM'S IMPACT

During the 1980s, and even more markedly during the 1990s, a dense blanket of environmental legislation and regulation gradually spread over the societies of Western Europe (with the newly liberated societies of Eastern Europe following suit after the collapse of the Soviet empire). In France by the early 1990s, for example, more than one thousand specialized laws on the environment were in place, as well as eighty-three ordinances and regulations at the level of the European Union and some three hundred international treaties. A commensurately complex thicket of French governmental agencies, institutes, and regulatory bodies had come into being to implement and enforce these new laws.

Here indeed lay one of the great ironies of the environmental movement's history: despite the fact that most green activists deeply distrusted the centralized bureaucracies of the nation-state and advocated a devolution of power to more decentralized and local forms of democratic power, the fact remained that several decades of successful environmental activism had resulted in more, not less, government. The sheer complexity of most environmental issues, and their close imbrication in virtually every aspect of a modern industrial economy, all but forced the management of environmental problems into the hands of governmental authorities—from the municipal level all the way up to the supranational institutions of the European Union. The "greening" of Europe had only proved possible through a significant growth in state power.

A second great irony also faced Europe's green activists. During the movement's early years, in the 1960s, most environmentalists earnestly believed that the main "enemy" lay in Big Industry—the huge factories with their belching smokestacks, the captains of industry who had strong economic interests in blocking environmental regulation and who possessed powerful political connections to help them do so. But the activists turned out to be wrong. By the year 2000, it was the industrial sector that exhibited far and away the most impressive "greening" of any facet of European society. Partly the changes were voluntary—under-taken by industrial firms because of tax incentives or because of concerns about maintaining a positive image before an environmentally aware public opinion; and partly the changes were coerced by ever rising standards of environmental legislation and regulation. Yet, whatever the reason, the factories of the 1990s emitted only a small fraction of the pollutants they had spewed a mere three decades earlier; they were far more energy efficient; and a great many of the products they created were being designed with tough environmental standards in mind, so that they might minimize the harm done to the natural world throughout their product life cycle, from manufacturing to disposal. The combined pressures of public opinion and stringent legislation had made a major impact.

Far less successful in the "greening" effort were the important economic sectors of transportation, the consumer economy, and agriculture. Europeans drove more cars, faster cars, bigger cars in the 2000s than they had four decades earlier; and although these modern vehicles emitted far fewer particle pollutants than the models of the 1960s, they still belched forth greenhouse gases on an ever growing scale—and most consumers apparently did not care enough about this fact to switch to eco-friendly modes of transport, such as buses, bicycles, or trains. The consumer economy, meanwhile, was pouring out a cornucopia of products that would have astonished even the most brazenly optimistic economists of the 1960s: despite substantial efforts at recycling, the volume of trash produced in most European countries in the 2000s had grown by 300 percent since the 1960s. Energy consumption had just about quadrupled in the four decades between 1960 and 2000, and the portion derived from renewable sources such as hydroelectric, wind, or solar power constituted a paltry 8 percent of the overall energy equation: the other 92 percent of energy came from sources that would sooner or later run out.

As for European agriculture, in 2004 it still remained premised on the same model that had dominated the 1950s: pour on the fertilizers, squeeze the most possible out of the land, ignore erosion and soil depletion, and place faith in the invention of new chemicals to fix the problems that will inevitably arise down the road. Overfishing of the seas around Europe, meanwhile, has resulted in the near extinction of many species that once provided a plentiful bounty of seafood; efforts by national governments and by the European Union to rein in the destructive practices of industrialscale fishing enterprises had, by the 2000s, spectacularly failed to yield positive results.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

The "bottom line," therefore, remains mixed. On one level, it is astonishing to observe just how many areas of European society have been deeply affected by environmentalist changes—and all this in the relatively short span of a mere four decades. Attitudes, habits, practices, laws, and institutions have all undergone a significant green transformation. And yet the transformation remains incomplete—appallingly so, when one considers the high stakes in play. European society, it is fair to say, has taken the first important steps down the road to a truly sustainable economic and cultural order; but the road yet to be traveled remains dauntingly long.

A pessimist might argue that environmentalism has failed, because modern industrial society has proved incapable of making a sufficiently swift transition into a fully sustainable economy, and (more importantly) because the hardest changes—those involving real sacrifices—still lie in the future. An optimist, on the other hand, could argue that the most difficult phase has already occurred: the phase in which large numbers of citizens first become aware of the environmentalist challenge and begin to adjust their horizons commensurately. According to this vision, a generation newly educated in environmental values, and energized by the grim prospect of looming environmental collapse, will prove ready to make the sacrifices, and to meet the challenges, that undeniably still lie ahead.

See alsoConsumption; Greenpeace; Greens.