Environmental Movements

TheHistory of Environnetal Movements Environmental issues and forms of environmental concern have a very long history; awareness of the environmental consequences of economic development was given an increasingly political character from the 1950s onwards. Individuals produced provocative studies warning of particular threats to the environment, as with Rachel Carson's well-known criticism of the increased use of DDT as a pesticide. Groups formed to press for solutions to particular or local problems or sought to get the political system to respond. Think tanks, such as the Club of Rome, published accounts dramatizing the potential depletion of the Earth's resources. International agencies, including the United Nations Environment Programme began holding international conferences and promoting detailed studies of issues as part of an effort to get more coordinated and effective responses to increasingly global environmental problems. Later, protest movements, linking up with late 1960s student radicalism and with various anti-war mobilizations, took to the streets and forests in efforts to get a political response. In some places the mainstream political parties began to respond; in others, environmental concern was mocked and marginalized. After the period of 1970 there was a spurt in environmental movements. Porter and Welsh Brown estimate that by the early 1980s there were approximately 13000 environmental movements in the Third World Countries, such as African NGO environmental network (ANEN) formed in 1982. Twenty one environmental NGOs were among the founding organizations, but by 1990, membership has swelled to 530 NGOs in forty-five countries. In Latin America and the Caribbean, there are currently 6000 environmental NGOs, most of them formed since 1970s, India has some 12000 development NGOs, Bangladesh has 10000 NGO and Philippines has 18000 NGOs. And in the Developed world, North America, Australia and parts of Scandinavia the environmental agenda has often been dominated by attempts to protect wilderness areas from the intrusion and excesses of human development. Here environmental conflict has challenged the dominant goals of advanced capitalism and industrialism, such as unlimited growth and the rights of private property. It would be wrong to view environmental politics simply as challenge of capitalist orthodoxy. In Europe, environmental politics developed as a rejection of state socialism's promotion of rapid and ecologically damaging forms of industrial and agricultural development. As part of the East European ‘velvet revolutions' of the late 1980s, environmentalists championed pluralist democracy and 'free-market' economic solutions derived from the tenets of capitalism, in a bid to overthrow decades of rigid, bureaucratic and authoritarian rule. Asian, African and other Third World countries have used environmental debates to challenge a different and global status quo, where a few affluent and powerful countries have access to disproportionately greater amounts of the Earth's limited resources. The governments of these countries are more concerned with promoting economic development to raise the standard of living of their populations. In these countries, environmental politics often focuses on issues of human survival such as the adequate provision of housing, food and employment, as well as safe work and healthy living conditions. Governments of some industrializing countries oppose moves from the USA and Europe to impose global environmental objectives on them. Hence, in the international debates over greenhouse problems, Malaysia has set itself firmly against any moves that would make it harder for it to industrialize and export its goods. It should be noted that within these industrializing developing countries environmental issues are still raised by groups of environmental activists. For example in Nigeria, the struggle of the Ogoni people against the military regime has strong environmental theme. Here, poor people protest against the damage being done to their land by the polluting activities of Shell Nigeria. In Indonesia, environmental groups oppose the logging of rain forests; in India, environmentalist activists oppose excessive logging of forests, the polluting consequences of industrialization, and the environmental damage associated with population growth and urbanization, and they are concerned about the consequence of global climate change. Further, in many parts of the world environmental politics has been used to contest inequalities and differences in power based on gender, class, race and species.