Environmentalism

views updated

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Environmentalism is a broad term used to describe the ideology of social and political movements that emerged in the 1960s around concerns about pollution, population growth, the preservation of wilderness, endangered species, and other threatened non-renewable resources such as energy and mineral deposits. As such it is a vivid nexus for science, technology, and ethics interactions. Since the 1970s, environmentalism has proved to be one of the most powerful and successful of contemporary ideologies, although this very success has generated so many strains of environmentalist ideas as to threaten the meaningfulness of the term itself.

Intellectual Roots

Although modern environmentalism can be traced to multiple intellectual roots, in the United States there are three primary influences. The first are the U.S. romantic and transcendentalist movements, which found moral and artistic inspiration in the natural world. The greatest representative of these ideas is the nineteenth-century writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), whose Walden (1854) uses the natural world as a philosophical vantage point from which to evaluate and criticize U.S. society and politics. From this tradition, which was developed by John Muir (1838–1914) and others, environmentalism gains a focus on the value of preserving wilderness and nonhuman species.

A second major intellectual source for environmentalism is the U.S. conservation tradition. The most important founders of this tradition are Theodore Roosevelt and his close adviser and the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946). These and like minded progressive reformers from the early-twentieth century led a movement to regulate and conserve natural resources and preserve some spectacular wilderness areas as national parks. The overall concern of the conservation movement was to maintain a sustainable supply of natural resources for a growing economy, which was believed to be essential for the health of a democratic society. From this tradition, environmentalism has inherited concerns about sustainability, the impact of the economy on the natural world, and human equity and justice issues concerning the distribution of environmental benefits and risks.

A third intellectual source for environmentalism is found within the scientific community of the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists became alarmed by the worldwide impact of nuclear weapons use and testing, chemical pollution of the environment by modern economic activity, and the stress on the environment caused by the sharp growth in human population during the twentieth century. The three greatest representatives of this tradition are biologists who wrote highly popular and influential books that caused broad-based alarm about environmental problems, Rachel Carson (Silent Spring [1962]), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb [1969]), and Barry Commoner (The Closing Circle [1971]). Inspired by such works, environmentalism has gained a focus on public health problems that grow from modern productive processes and military technology.

Although these three traditions are responses to different types of problems and have generated different sets of concerns, environmentalism weaves them loosely together. Environmentalist thinkers and organizations stress different strains of environmentalism, but concerns as disparate as wilderness preservation, reducing environmental pollution and addressing the health problems it causes, and evaluating and protesting the injustice of unequal environmental impacts of various public policies and economic activities on disadvantaged subgroups in U.S. society (such as the poor, or people of color), are all recognized as part of the environmentalist agenda.

Two key facts about environmentalism must be stressed. First it is simply one of the most remarkably successful of all contemporary social and political ideologies. What was a marginal set of concerns and views during the 1960s has become part of the social and political mainstream. Public opinion polls consistently demonstrate wide-ranging public support for environmentalist values and policies, even if the saliency of environmentalist concern is somewhat less than that found for other issues such as the economy. Not surprisingly, candidates from across the political spectrum have found it necessary to profess environmental values, even if there is reason at times to doubt their sincerity. The corporate world has discovered that it is increasingly good business to market products and services as green, natural, organic, or environmentally responsible. Academic disciplines, from law to ethics to the natural sciences to engineering to economics and beyond, have been influenced by environmentalist concerns and have developed sub-disciplines focusing on environmental issues. Vast rivers of private financial donations flow into the coffers of a variety of environmental organizations found on the local, national, and international levels. In short, in the course of a single generation, environmentalism has grown to be one of the most visible and important ideologies in contemporary life. Rarely has an ideology enjoyed this level of achievement in such a short period of time.

The second key fact to note is that this very success, coupled with the diverse intellectual roots that nourish it, has made the intellectual content of environmentalism ambiguous, perhaps even incoherent if one is looking to find a unified ideology.

Three Types of Environmentalism

In light of this ambiguity, it is helpful to divide the universe of environmentalist views into three broad categories. First liberal environmentalists think of environmental problems in the political and social context of conventional liberal ideals and social policy. Drawing primarily, but not only, on the conservation tradition, liberal environmentalists have been successful in promoting extensive environmental regulation of industry and other polluting activities. The environmental justice movement, as well as increased interest in applying the philosophical tools of pragmatic philosophy to the study of environmental ethics, are also fundamentally liberal developments in environmentalism; the first demands respect for liberal equity in the distribution of environmental risk, and the second draws on the liberal tradition of U.S. philosophical pragmatism in order to evaluate the ethical implications of particular human behaviors in relation to the natural world. Much of the growing field of environmental economics may also be included in the category of liberal environmentalism, because it applies conventional liberal economic principles and tools to the study of environmental policy. What liberal environmentalists share is a perspective that views environmental problems within the context of recognized liberal philosophical, political, and social values.

Radical environmentalism can be thought of as an array of environmentalist ideas that challenge the philosophical and political underpinnings of liberal democratic society. The greatest unifying theme among radical environmentalists is the insistence that the anthropocentrism of liberalism, the assumption that human beings are the source and measure of all value, be rejected in favor of a moral perspective more inclusive of values intrinsic to the non-human world, a view that is sometimes called biocentrism or ecocentrism. The claim is that conventional moral perspectives are incapable of appropriately appreciating non-human things, and therefore there is a need to discover fundamentally new ways of thinking about the natural world and its relationship to people. Beyond these claims, radical environmentalists quickly part company, pursuing a multitude of philosophical paths. Eco-feminists, for example, suggest that women have natural connections with and insights into nature that men are less likely to experience, and that are lost or suppressed within a patriarchal society; fighting patriarchy is therefore related to not only freeing women from men, but to the reconnection of human beings with nature more generally. Rather than emphasizing gender, deep ecologists promote what they understand to be more primal, unified understandings of the proper relationship of humans to the natural world than they find in modern social and political theory and practice. Social ecology, a form of eco-anarchism, claims that humans could naturally live in just, non-hierarchical social organizations, and that environmental problems grow out of and reflect the oppression of humans by humans in unjust, hierarchical societies. Some would include eco-socialists among radical environmentalists, because they promote a political vision contrary to contemporary liberal democracy. Not all radical environmentalists, however, believe the socialist political program is sufficiently biocentric to be truly radical or environmentalist.

As an illustration of the huge growth in the ideological power of environmentalism, the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries began to see the emergence of new forms of conservative environmentalism. While it is true that there have always been conservation groups that have historically appealed primarily to hunters and other groups not conventionally thought to be liberal or radical, these have been on the margins of environmentalism. Historically, conservatives have more often than not been hostile to environmentalism, on the grounds that it threatened to over expand the government's regulatory powers (in the case of liberal environmentalism) or, even worse, that it attacked the moral foundations of conventional society (in the case of radical environmentalism). There is a new and growing free market environmentalism, however, that is attacking the liberal environmental regulatory programs, and defending private property rights and conventional capitalist economic organization as the best way to promote environmental health and resource conservation. There is also some growth of a less militantly free market conservative sympathy for environmentalism that emphasizes the continuity of community traditions and religious piety toward what is understood to be a created universe.

Conclusion

Beyond the U.S. context, environmentalism has become a powerful force throughout the world, both within other countries and in the international order. The diversity of environmentalist views explodes within this broader context, from the demands of indigenous peoples to control local ecosystems in the face of pressure by international markets and corporations, to the growth of Green political parties (most importantly and successfully in Germany), to the attempt to design international policies for contending with world-wide environmental issues such as global climate change, to attempts to address wildly inequitable resource allocation between the rich and poor, the developed and developing, nations. In different contexts, and with different aims and intentions, environmental politics has become a factor in local, national, and international politics, and as such contexts have proliferated, so too has the breadth of environmentalist ideology expanded almost beyond measure and clear focus.

Given this array of environmentalist views and projects, it is clear that the very notion of environmentalism is being stretched to include incompatible ideas. The single unifying theme, to the degree that it can be found, is simply the attention paid to the human relation to the natural world and the promotion of ideas and policies intended to protect the health and fecundity of nature.

In light of the diversity of environmentalist views, it is difficult to clearly assess the implications of this ideology for modern science, technology, and ethics. It is clear, for example, that there have been elements of misanthropy and hostility toward science and technology in some strains of radical environmentalism, a kind of primitivism that views modern society in all its facets as a plague on the natural world to be resisted, even turned back, as much as possible. It is also true, however, that this is a marginal set of attitudes even within the radical environmentalist camp. Radical environmentalism does indeed insist on an ethical reorientation toward non-human things, but this by no means always reflects misanthropic views. On the contrary, the claim more often includes a presumption that humans will find their lives more meaningful if they learn to live harmoniously with nature, that radical environmentalism is a positive good for both people and nature. Likewise, even while much radical environmentalism distrusts science and technology, it often draws heavily on the science of ecology to inform its own analysis of problems, and often promotes what it considers to be environmentally friendly technologies.

Liberal and conservative environmentalisms usually appeal to conventional ethical categories (for example, the weighing of public goods against individual rights), and tend to work within the conventions of mainstream science and technology to promote their ends. The debates they engage are more often about the proper balancing of environmental goods against other important values, than about the need for such a balance in the first place. Liberal environmentalism also tends to be committed to using modern science to closely evaluate the overall environmental impact of existing technologies, and to producing the most environmentally benign technologies currently feasible.

Although it is difficult to generalize about environmentalism, given the great diversity of ideas and concerns found within the movement, the very power and popularity of environmentalist ideas reflects a growing sensitivity to and concern about the natural world. While environmentalists often worry about different issues, from wilderness preservation to public health to social justice, and often see the world in different ways, from radical biocentrists to conservative free market advocates to almost an infinity of variations in between, environmentalism reflects a rich diversity of attempts to think seriously about the appropriate relationship between people and the rest of nature. It is clear, from the popularity of environmentalist ideas, that there is a broad and growing sense of the importance of this overall project.

BOB PEPPERMAN TAYLOR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Terry Lee, and Donald R. Leal. (2001). Free Market Environmentalism Today. New York: Palgrave. A good representative of the free market environmentalism literature.

Bliese, John. (2001). The Greening of Conservative America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. An example of a conservative environmentalism that is distrustful of a simple faith in the free market.

Bookchin, Murray. (1982). The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Palo Alto, CA: Chesire Books. A classic social ecology text.

Dobson, Andrew. (1998). Justice and the Environment. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Guha, Ramachandra. (2000). Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Luke, Timothy. (1999). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Capitalism, Democracy and Ecology. Luke weds environmentalism to a leftist populism.

Merchant, Carolyn. (1996). Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge. A historian's view of the relationship between women and the environment.

Norton, Bryan. (1991). Toward Unity Among Environmentalists. New York: Oxford University Press. Among the most sophisticated works in the pragmatic school of environmental ethics.

Sagoff, Mark. (1988). The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press. The best liberal critique of the use of cost benefit analysis as the primary tool of environmental policymaking.

Sessions, George, ed. (1995). Deep Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Shambhala. A standard deep ecology text.

Taylor, Bob Pepperman. (1992). Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. A survey and discussion of some of the primary strains of environmental thought in the United States.

Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics