Environmentalism

History

Sociologist Riley Dunlap and several others have documented an increase in environmentalism, in the form of increased concern about the environment in North America and a number of other countries. In the United States, long standing concern about conservation of natural resources and local concerns about public health gave way to rising concern about environmental health and quality after World War II. This process intensified in the 1960s, as organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund grew, the popularity of Aldo Leopold's 1949 book A Sand County Almanac extolled the notion of humans having an ethic to protect the land rather than simply produce wealth, and Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring galvanized worries about toxins. Public pressure produced political action, including the advent of Earth Day in 1970 and a myriad of environmental protection policies that (for a time) enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States.

Worldwide, environmental politics spread in industrialized nations, aided in part by concern over nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Those concerns spurred the growth of West Germany's Green Party in the 1970s (a party that continues in the early 21st century as a substantial presence in parliament), and green parties exist, with less influence, in several other nations.

Greater public interest in the environment in the United States was heightened by the widely read book Silent Spring, which detailed the destructive role of pesticides and other agricultural applications on bird life; the first Earth Day in 1970; and the energy crisis in the 1970s (due to an oil embargo), where then U.S. President Jimmy Carter urged Americans to consume less energy. The environment began to hold greater sway over public media and interest in North America and elsewhere, and suggested a move away from a dominant social paradigm that viewed humans as exceptional creatures who are able to overcome environmental limits, particularly through technological advancements.

The stewardship ethic under the dominant paradigm is based on utility for humans, where land is primarily useful for harvesting natural resources, and it is reasonable to use land and water for waste disposal. Under the new environmental paradigm, humans are one among many creatures and increasingly learn to recognize their interdependence with the physical world. The new environmental paradigm is associated with environmental protection, population control, and constraints on industrial activity.

Approaches

Since the 1960s, surveys measuring adherence to the new environmental paradigm have found increasing levels of support, as support for the dominant social paradigm lessens. The work of environmentalism is largely undertaken by environmental organizations (typically termed environmental nongovernmental organizations or ENGOs. The approaches of various ENGOs reflect distinct views on how to best address environmental crises. Such views include the

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