Environmentalism as a social movement
Environmentalism as
a social movement
Environmentalism and environmental movement
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy and social movement
regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the state
of the environment. Environmentalism and environmental concerns are often
represented by the color green. [1]
A concern for environmental protection has recurred in
diverse forms, in different parts of the world, throughout history. For
example, in the Middle East, the earliest known writings concerned with
environmental pollution were Arabic medical treatises written during the
"Arab Agricultural Revolution", by writers such as Alkindus, Costa
ben Luca, Rhazes, Ibn Al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn
Ridwan, Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, Abd-el-latif, and Ibn al-Nafis. They were
concerned with air contamination, water contamination, soil contamination,
solid waste mishandling, and environmental assessments of certain localities.
[3][4]
In Europe, King Edward I of England banned the burning of
sea-coal by proclamation in London in 1272, after its smoke had become a
problem.[5][6] The fuel was so common in England that this earliest of names
for it was acquired because it could be carted away from some shores by the
wheelbarrow. Air pollution would continue to be a problem in England,
especially later during the Industrial Revolution, and extending into the
recent past with the Great Smog of 1952.
Environmentalism can also be seen as a social movement
that seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, activism, and
education in order to protect natural resources and ecosystems. The
environmental movement includes the conservation and green politics, is a
diverse scientific, social, and political movement for addressing environmental
issues.
An environmentalist is a person who may speak out about
our natural environment and the sustainable management of its resources through
changes in public policy or individual behavior by supporting practices such as
not being wasteful. In various ways (for example, grassroots activism and
protests), environmentalists and environmental organizations seek to give the
natural world a stronger voice in human affairs.[2]
Environmentalists advocate the sustainable management of
resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy
and individual behavior. In its recognition of humanity as a participant in
(not enemy of) ecosystems, the movement is centered on ecology, health, and
human rights.
The environmental movement is represented by a range of
organizations, from the large to grassroots. Due to its large membership,
varying and strong beliefs, and occasionally speculative nature, the
environmental movement is not always united in its goals. At its broadest, the
movement includes private citizens, professionals, religious devotees,
politicians, and extremists.
The roots of the modern environmental movement can be
traced to attempts in nineteenth-century Europe and North America to expose the
costs of environmental negligence, notably disease, as well as widespread air
and water pollution, but only after the Second World War did a wider awareness
begin to emerge.
The US environmental movement emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, with two key strands: protectionists
such as John Muir wanted land and nature set aside for its own sake, while
conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot wanted to manage natural resources for
exploitation. Among the early protectionists that stood out as leaders in the
movement were Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. Thoreau
was concerned about the wildlife in Massachusetts; he wrote Walden; or, Life in
the Woods as he studied the wildlife from a cabin. John Muir founded the Sierra
Club, one of the largest conservation organizations in the United States. Marsh
was influential with regards to the need for resource conservation. Muir was
instrumental in the creation of the world's first national park at Yellowstone
in 1872.
During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, several events
illustrated the magnitude of environmental damage caused by humans. In 1954,
the 23 man crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon 5 was exposed to
radioactive fallout from a hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The publication
of the book Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson drew attention to the impact
of chemicals on the natural environment. In 1967, the oil tanker Torrey Canyon
went aground off the southwest coast of England, and in 1969 oil spilled from
an offshore well in California's Santa Barbara Channel. In 1971, the conclusion
of a law suit in Japan drew international attention to the effects of decades
of mercury poisoning on the people of Minamata.[2]
At the same time, emerging scientific research drew new
attention to existing and hypothetical threats to the environment and humanity.
Among them was Paul R. Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968) revived
concerns about the impact of exponential population growth. Biologist Barry
Commoner generated a debate about growth, affluence and "flawed
technology." Additionally, an association of scientists and political
leaders known as the Club of Rome published their report The Limits to Growth
in 1972, and drew attention to the growing pressure on natural resources from
human activities.
Meanwhile, technological accomplishments such as nuclear
proliferation and photos of the Earth from outer space provided both new
insights and new reasons for concern over Earth's seemingly small and unique
place in the universe.
In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment was held in Stockholm, and for the first time united the
representatives of multiple governments in discussion relating to the state of
the global environment. This conference led directly to the creation of
government environmental agencies and the UN Environment Program. The United
States also passed new legislation such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air
Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act- the
foundations for current environmental standards.
By the mid-1970s anti-nuclear activism had moved beyond
local protests and politics to gain a wider appeal and influence. Although it
lacked a single coordinating organization the anti-nuclear movement's efforts
gained a great deal of attention.[3] In the aftermath of the Three Mile
Island accident in 1979, many mass demonstrations took place. The largest one
was held in New York City in September 1979 and involved two hundred thousand
people; speeches were given by Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader.[4][5][6]
Since the 1970s, public awareness, environmental sciences,
ecology, and technology have advanced to include modern focus points like ozone
depletion, global climate change, acid rain, and the potentially harmful
genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Free-market environmentalism
Free-market environmentalism is a position that argues
that the free market, property rights, and tort law provide the best tools to
preserve the health and sustainability of the environment. This is in contrast
to the most common modern approach of legislation by which the state intervenes
in the market to protect the environment. While environmental problems may be
viewed as market failures, free market environmentalists argue that
environmental problems arise because of:
Laws that override or obscure property rights and thus
fail to adequately protect or define those rights; and
As a rule, therefore, free-market environmentalists
believe that the best way to protect the environment is to allow tort and
contract laws governing and protecting property rights and tort claims to
emerge naturally, so that the protection of property no longer suffers from the
defects that give governments, individuals, and corporations perverse
incentives to spoil the environment.
Some economists believe that the market is unable to
correct the negative externalities of industrial production and excessive
depletion of non-renewable resources. In this view, firms receive the full
benefit of creating their products in a way that generates pollutants but do
not bear the full social costs of the increased pollution. They have no
economic incentive to create products in a way that minimizes pollution and
absent targeted environmental regulations, will continue to do so. This activity
would be rational, because it would be profitable for a firm to overpollute,
while letting others absorb the costs of its effects and cleanup. Regarded this
way, opponents of market solutions to the problem of pollution assert that
market mechanisms left to their own devices contain built-in incentives for
environmental degradation. The case for free market valuation is complicated by
uneven regulation, e.g. the standards set for recycling (under Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act, of 1976) are more strict than the government
regulation of mining (General Mining Act, 1872).
Ecological economist Robin Hahnel has enumerated what he
terms the four basic defects of a market economy with respect to the
environment as: [1]
overexploitation of common property resources;
overpollution;
too little pollution cleanup; and
overconsumption.
In response to these concerns, economists who prefer the
free-market environmentalist approach argue that:
Overexploitation occurs to the extent of the lack of
ownership incentives to care for the property, and that this communalization
effect occurs to the extent of multiplicity of ownership. Overexploitation
reduces the intrinsic and retail value of the property, the effect of which is
most clearly felt by individual owners or through limited co-ownership.
Pollution occurs where and to the extent that victims are
prevented or hindered from seeking tort restitution for such aggression.
Legislative and Judicial authorities have tended to favor heavy industries over
individual or class action in favor of public property and the common good.
Pollution clean-up also occurs naturally in a free market,
because reducing the negative value of a property is a net gain, again leading
to a higher intrinsic or retail value, and thus marketability.
Overconsumption is a flawed concept, because it assumes
that resources are non-renewable. The market, through supply and demand,
regulates consumption by adjusting it according to supply. For example, if a
resource becomes more scarce, its value increases and thus also its cost. This
forces consumers to redirect their purchases to alternate resources which are
in more plentiful supply. In addition, the higher market value of the resource
creates an incentive to create more of the commodity, and allows for a greater
expenditure in doing so.
The prevalence of externalities would have serious
implications for market efficiency in its static and dynamic dimensions. If
negative externalities are unnaccounted for, it would imply that market prices
will not accurately reflect true social opportunity costs, leading to
misallocations of goods. As the elementary economics text book by Baumol and
Blinder observes When a firm pollutes a river, it uses some of society's
resources just as surely as when it burns coal. However, if the firm pays for
coal but not for the use of clean water, it is expected that management will be
economical in its use of coal and wasteful in its use of water.
The standard approach to addressing negative externalities
is governmental regulation proscribing polluting activities. This approach has
been criticized by free-market economists and others as being inefficient and
ineffective. Furthermore, the demands of regulation seldom appeal to the social
conscience of industries or enterprise owners and violation is often seen as
legitimate business practice.
Critics have noted that studies sponsored by firms
assessing their own activities are invariably biased and typically exemplify an
illegitimately narrow focus that ignores a competitive market context and the
prevalence of external effects throughout the supply chain. Amoco's attempts at
voluntary measures have met with resistance from the four or five oil refining
corporations with greater market share, who expressed a preference to be forced
by state regulations before lowering their sulphur content. Following Amoco's
gestures, prominent environmental groups were unimpressed. For example, the
Earth Day 2000 report, "Don't Be Fooled" named Amoco as one the top
10 "greenwashers" of the year. [2]
While some environmentalists advocate compromises such as
carbon trading schemes, most free-market environmentalists would prefer full accountability
as dictated by courts that respect the rights of property owners in absolute
terms.
Some free-market proponents, particularly those influenced
by the Austrian economic school, such as B.J. Lawson claim that sustainability
is fundamentally impossible when the money supply exhibits secular inflation.
Some economists argue from the Coase Theorem that, if
industries internalized the costs of negative externalities they would face an
incentive to reduce them, perhaps even becoming enthusiastic about taking
advantage of opportunities to improve profitability through lower costs.
Moreover, economists claim this would lead to the optimal balance between the
marginal benefits of pursuing an activity and the marginal cost of its
environmental consequences. One well-known means of internalizing a negative
consequence is to establish a property right over some phenomenon formerly in
the public domain. This requires a little abstract thinking in the case of
environmental problems as these Coasians are talking about a grant to pollute
or to exploit some limited natural phenomenon. This is a sophisticated variant
of the polluter pays principle. However, critics have charged that the
"theorem" attributed to Coase is of extremely limited practicability
because of assumptions, including that it was theorized to account for adjacent
effects where transaction costs for bargaining agents are typically small, but
is ill-suited to real world externalities which have high bargaining costs due
to many factors.
A number of libertarians, such as Rothbardians, reject the
proposed Coasian solution as making invalid assumptions about the purely
subjective notion of costs being measurable in monetary terms, and also of
making unexamined and invalid value judgments (i.e., ethical judgments). The
Rothbardians' solution is to recognize individuals' Lockean property rights, of
which the Rothbardians maintain that Wertfreiheit (i.e., value-free) economic
analysis demonstrates that this arrangement necessarily maximizes social
utility.
Proponents of free-market environmentalism use the example
of the recent destruction of the once prosperous Grand Banks fishery off
Newfoundland. Once one of the world's most abundant fisheries, it has been
almost completely depleted of fish. Those primarily responsible were large
"factory-fishing" enterprises driven by the imperative to realize
profits in a competitive global market.[3] It is contended that if the fishery
had been owned by a single entity, the owner would have had an interest in
keeping a renewable supply of fish to maintain profits over the long term. The
owner would thus have charged high fees to fish in the area, sharply reducing
how many fish were caught. The owner also would have closely enforced rules on
not catching young fish. Instead commercial ships from around the world raced
to get the fish out of the water before competitors could, including catching
fish that had not yet reproduced.
According to Richard L. Stroup, markets in the
environmental field, in order to function well, require "3-D"
property rights to each important resource — i.e., rights that are clearly
defined, easily defended against invasion, and divestible (transferable) by
owners on terms agreeable to buyer and seller. The first two rights prevent
property owners from being forced to accept pollution, and the third right
provides an incentive for owners to be good stewards. [4]
Many free-market environmentalists argue that the problem
of regulatory capture whereby large companies play a large role in setting
regulations has created a system where things are far too biased in favor of
large companies. For instance, in the United States lands that could be more
valuably used for tourism are often used for resource extraction because the
many disorganized tourists cannot have the same impact on government as the few
organized corporations. If the land was privately held the land owner would
realize that tourism would make more of a profit than logging and nature would
be preserved.
The implementation of property rights provides governments
with an opportunity to raise revenues. This has been illustrated by recent
auctions of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum for telephony, another
example of an attempt to manage a scarce resource through property rights
rather than regulation. Such auctions offer an alternative to conventional
taxation for funding public spending, by capitalizing the expected rent earned
by the privatized good. Some economists, most notably Henry George in the
1870s, have argued that taxes on income and profits represent taxes on
productivity, innovation and creativity and that we should rather tax land
rents and externalities such as pollution, consumption of fossil fuels and road
congestion. Environmental property rights offer a means to shift taxation from
"goods" to "bads" and rents.
One example of free market attempt to protect the
environment is The Nature Conservancy organization. It has been successful in
protecting many sensitive, ecologically important places by simply purchasing
them, although this practice has met with controversy in some areas. In some
cases the lands are donated or sold to government agencies for management,
while in others the Nature Conservancy itself manages these preserves. Billionaire
Ted Turner has a similar private program that has seen him buy up tens of
thousands of acres of wilderness around the United States.
There are a number of arguments against free-market
environmentalism:
Historically, Tort Law has been of limited efficacy for
confronting environmental problems. According to the World Bank, "tort
law, based as it is on the protection of individual rights and the need to
prove specific injury, has not been a significant means of preventing
environmental degradation." [5] Similarly, in "Law in Environmental
Decision-Making" legal scholar Jenny Steele notes that in respect to
protection of the environment, "a number of historical studies have assessed
the extent of tort's impact in this respect, to generally critical
effect." [6] In the environmental law textbook, "Environmental
Protection", Sue Elworth and Jane Holder argue that the most significant
limitation of common law, including tort law "was, and continues to be
that the protection of private property is the rationale of private law and its
motivation...Environmental protection may be effected through the protection of
property rights. But private law is said to act only to protect the
individualized self-interested claim, which considerably constrains legal
action. The main doubt about the ability of private law to provide an
appropriate means of protecting the environment is that environmental problems
demand collective action, there is therefore some resistance to the idea that
individual rights might contribute to collective progress towards environmental
protection." [7] Class action, however, is every bit as capable of direct
tort-based restitution as individual legal action.
Not all aspects of the public domain are easily
"privatisable" in practice. It may be impossible to establish
property rights on things like air and water that circulate the globe, so
stopping air pollution or global warming on an individual basis would be very
difficult. Coasian environmentalists often support carbon trading schemes
advocated by other environmentalist movements. The US Clean Air Act of 1990,
for instance, set up a system of emissions trading for sulfur dioxide. The
Kyoto protocol also seeks to establish a system of emissions trading for carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Rothbardians reject government-imposed
emissions trading schemata, and instead maintain that pollution is by
definition a matter of Lockean property rights being violated, and hence should
be handled as a subject of individual or class action tort, as any other
invasion of property. As long as there is an aggressor and a victim, there is a
tort.
Some believe that the conservation of endangered species
is not necessarily achievable using the free market, especially where there is
little economic value in the species in question. For example: there might be
only limited profit to be made from a piece of land by maintaining it as the
habitat of a rare beetle, whereas alternative economic uses for that land
(which might be deleterious to the welfare of the beetle) - such as building a
parking lot on it - might yield a greater profit. Regardless of the broader
ecological importance of the beetle, it is much more likely that the landowner
will prioritize short-term profits to be gained from development, rather than a
long-term benefit which may be of comparably little (perhaps even imperceptible
on the surface) benefit to himself. Thus, threatened or endangered species
could be lost by relying on the willingness of individual landowners to take a
loss in order to protect them.
A related philosophical objection is that free-market
environmentalism is entirely anthropocentric and ignores the "innate"
value of nature outside of human perception. (see ecocentrism). But even in the
world of politics, someone must see and place a value on the environment or
specie in question in order for it to be protected.
The principle of limited liability protects investors from
the costs of the activities from which they benefit. In the U.S., there have
been recent suggestions that, while limited liability towards creditors is
socially beneficial in facilitating investment, the privilege ought not to
extend to liability in tort for environmental disasters or personal injury. [8][9]
In fact, most free-market environmentalists oppose limited liability in torts
as a form of corporate welfare and a limitation of full property rights.
Countering the tragedy of the commons claim, Elinor Ostrom
has studied a large number of empirical cases where common property resources
have been managed successfully. Her work emphasizes neither private
property/market arrangements nor government regulation but the successes of
communities consciously designing institutional arrangements in response to particular
common property dilemmas. The stress is on democratic institutions that allow
the users of the common to govern the commons.[10]
Modern environmentalism
Today, the sciences of ecology and environmental science,
rather than any aesthetic goals, provide the basis of unity to most serious
environmentalists. As more information is gathered in scientific fields, more
scientific issues like biodiversity, as opposed to mere aesthetics, are a
concern. Conservation biology is a rapidly developing field. Environmentalism
now has proponents in business: new ventures such as those to reuse and recycle
consumer electronics and other technical equipment are gaining popularity.
Computer liquidators are just one example.
In recent years, the environmental movement has
increasingly focused on global warming as a top issue. As concerns about
climate change moved more into the mainstream, from the connections drawn
between global warming and Hurricane Katrina to Al Gore's film An Inconvenient
Truth, many environmental groups refocused their efforts. In the United States,
2007 witnessed the largest grassroots environmental demonstration in years,
Step It Up 2007, with rallies in over 1,400 communities and all 50 states for
real global warming solutions.
Many religious organizations and individual churches now
have programs and activities dedicated to environmental issues. [11] The
religious movement is often supported by interpretation of scriptures. [12]
Most major religious groups are represented including Jewish, Islamic,
Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, Christian and Catholic.
Radical environmentalism
Radical environmentalism is a grassroots branch of the
larger environmental movement that emerged out of an ecocentrism-based
frustration with the co-option of mainstream environmentalism. It is the
ideology behind the radical environmental movement.
The radical environmental movement aspires to what scholar
Christopher Manes calls "a new kind of environmental activism:
iconoclastic, uncompromising, discontented with traditional conservation
policy, at time illegal ..." Radical environmentalism presupposes a need
to reconsider Western ideas of religion and philosophy (including capitalism,
patriarchy[1] and globalization)[2] sometimes through "resacralising"
and reconnecting with nature.[1]
The movement is typified by leaderless resistance
organizations such as Earth First!, which subscribe to the idea of taking
direct action in defense of "Mother Earth" including civil
disobedience, ecotage and monkeywrenching.[1] Movements such as the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF) and Earth Liberation Army (ELA) also take this form of
action, although focus on economic sabotage, rather than civil disobedience.[3]
Radical environmentalists include earth liberationists as well as anarcho-primitivists,
animal liberationists, bioregionalists, green anarchists, deep ecologists,
ecopsychologists, ecofeminists, neo-Pagans, Wiccans, Third Positionists, anti-globalization
and anti-capitalist protesters.[1]
Whilst many people believe that the first significant
radical environmentalist group was Greenpeace, which made use of direct action
beginning in the 1970s to confront whaling ships and nuclear weapons
testers,[4] others within the movement, argues as Earth Liberation Front (ELF)
prisoner Jeff "Free" Luers, suggests that the movement was
established centuries ago. He often writes that the concept of
"eco-defence" was born shortly after the existence of the human race,
claiming it is only recently that within the modern development of human society,
and individuals losing touch with the earth and its wild roots, that more
radical tactics and political theories have emerged.[2][5]
In 1980 Earth First! was founded by Dave Foreman and
others to confront environmental destruction, primarily of the American West.
Inspired by the Edward Abbey novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang", Earth
First! made use of such techniques as treesitting[8] and treespiking[9] to stop
logging companies, as well as other activities targeted towards mining, road
construction,[10] suburban development and energy companies.
The organization were committed to nonviolent ecotage
techniques from the group's inception, with those that split from the movement
in the 1990s including the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in 1992, naming
themselves after the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) who formed in the 1970s.[12]
Three years later in Canada, inspired by the ELF in Europe the first Earth
Liberation direct action occurred, but this time as the Earth Liberation Army
(ELA), a similar movement who use ecotage and monkeywrenching as a tool,
although no guidelines had been published.
The ELF gained national attention for a series of actions
which earned them the label of eco-terrorists,[13][14] including the burning of
a ski resort in Vail, Colorado in 1998, and the burning of an SUV dealership in
Oregon in 1999. In the same year the ELA had made headlines by setting fire to
the Vail Resorts in Washington, D.C., causing $12 million in damages.[15] The
defendants in the case were later charged in the FBI's "Operation
Backfire", along with other arsons and cases, which were later named by
environmentalists as the Green Scare; alluding to the Red Scare, periods of
fear over communist infiltration of U.S.[16][17] Following the September 11,
2001 attacks several laws were passed increasing the penalty for ecoterrorism,
and hearings were held in Congress discussing the activity of groups such as
the ELF. To date no one has been killed as a result of an ELF or ALF action
since both groups forbid harming human or non-human life.[18] It was then
announced in 2003 that "eco-terrorist" attacks, known as
"ecotage", had increased from the ELF, ELA and the "Environmental
Rangers", another name used be activists when engaging in similar
activity.[19]
In 2005 the FBI announced that the ELF, is America's
greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal
incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property,
[20] with the United States Department of Homeland Security confirming this
regarding the ALF and ELF. [21]
Plane Stupid then was launched in 2005, in an attempt to combat the growing airport expansions in the UK using direct action with a
year later the first Camp for Climate Action being held with 600 people
attending a protest called Reclaim Power converging on Drax Power Station in
North Yorkshire and attempted to shut it down. There were thirty-eight arrests,
with four breaching the fence and the railway line being blocked. [22][23]
Radical environmentalism has been called a new religious
movement by Bron Taylor (1998). Taylor contends that "Radical
environmentalism is best understood as a new religious movement that views
environmental degradation as an assault on a sacred, natural
world."[18][24]
Several philosophies have arisen from ideas in radical
environmentalism that includes Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism, Social Ecology, and
Bioregionalism.
Deep Ecology is attributed to Arne Naess and is defined as
“a normative, ecophilosophical movement that is inspired and fortified in part
by our experience as humans in nature and in part by ecological knowledge”.
[25]
Ecofeminism originated in the 1970s and draws a parallel
between the oppression of women in patriarchal societies and the oppression of
the environment.[26]
Social Ecology is an idea attributed to Murray Bookchin,
who argued that in order to save the environment, human society needed to copy
the structure of nature and decentralize both socially and economically. [26]
Bioregionalism is a philosophy that focuses on the
practical application of Social Ecology, and theorizes on “building and living
in human social communities that are compatible with ecological systems”. [26]