Environmentalism

Environmentalism is a social and political movement emerging in the mid-20th century in various Western countries like Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Environmentalism is not just a mere concept for the defense of the environment; rather, environmentalism argues that the protection of nature is more important than economic matters, industry, corporations, governments, and private interests. In other words, creating new jobs for a future nuclear power plant would be meaningless for environmentalists if it also brought pollution, hazardous waste, and industrial risks to a region. Therefore, environmentalism implies bringing environmental concern into a political sphere.

Environmentalism promotes environmental consciousness and cries for a social change on varied issues such as deforestation, desertification, global warming, greenhouse gases, nuclear hazards, and genetically modified organisms.

Some observers see environmentalism as a democratic mode of civic participation—civic environmentalism—while other scholars perceive it as an ideology with a coherent worldview, or even as a kind of religion, as argues environmental historian Thomas Dunlap in his 2005 book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest.

Because it carries more values than just the respect of the protection of natural resources and land management, environmentalism is often linked with other ideologies or political movements not necessarily related with the environment, such as antiglobalization, anticapitalism, counterculture, and even anti-Americanism. As a consequence, corporations and their lobbyists who seek to legitimize industrialization are often the targets of environmentalists and social activists. On the other side, most groups that promote environmentalism usually emerge from civil society.

The main ideas of environmentalism—respect for nature, protection of wildlife, and green energy production—have historic roots that have been passed through the generations as many environmentalists advocate for the preservation of natural resources, even beyond their own life spans, for the benefit of future generations. Specifically, advocacy groups like the Sierra Club (founded in 1892 by John Muir), the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace are now global organizations using and adapting some of the strategies of public funding and advertising in order to bring their messages to a large public audience. These organizations use the media in various ways in attempt to influence public opinion on debated issues such as the defense of wildlife, global warming, and air and water quality.

Many environmentalists advocate for the preservation of natural resources for the benefit of future generations.

In many cases, environmentalist movements are the result of a strong reaction to major events that are seen as a threat to health, wildlife, landscapes, or security. For example, when U.S. biologist Rachel Carson (1907–64) published her book Silent Spring in 1962, it created a whole movement against the use of DDT, a now illegal toxic insecticide that was initially [Page 594]used to control mosquito populations in battle against malaria. Typically, average citizens are converted to environmental activists when they believe that their governments do not act in order to protect their land against pollution, or when they feel there is no one else who would care as much as they do about the future of nature. For instance, a large international network of environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in the United States by David Brower to promote a fair use of nature. Similarly, Greenpeace was a pacifist organization created in 1971 to oppose the United States nuclear testing in the Pacific region.

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