Green Movement

Social movements are described as agents of social change. Green movements are collectives of actors pursuing environmental issues from a variety of political, class-based, and ethical persuasions whose tactics vary from direct action to policy reform. Green movements can be characterized as those that adhere or promote to one or more dimensions of environmentalism, which is seen as an interest group community. Green movements seek to promote social change based on a commitment to sustainability and environmental preservation, but for motivations that range from diverse sets of environmental values from the conservative Wise Use movement to the more radical Earth First!

In social movement theory, green movements are characterized as part of the new social movements. Separate from class-based movements, the specific grievances of new social movements are driven by changing ideas that permeate culture and society. Green movements emergence coincided with the emergence of the women's liberation, anti-Vietnam War, and other leftist counterculture movements. Green movements are unified along the axes of environmental problems, though they constitute a diverse set of political perspectives and ethical orientations.

Early antecedents to green movements organized around concerns about hunting and conservation of natural resources. Soon, urban policy questions around sanitation, clean water, clean air, and public health became the driving concerns of green movements. Some attribute the success of green movements to the spread of values emerging out of the counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the critique of capitalist consumer society.

Others note the importance of the image a fragile earth, from the early space missions and connecting that image to arguments about a finite earth, presented in the report from MIT scientists called the Limits to Growth. Much support for green movements emerged with Louis Gibbs' attention to Love Canal, where children were exposed to toxics in the soil below the site of a school that was previously a toxic dump. Soon after, green movements emphasized local issues and extended into households where mothers took up concerns about children's exposure to toxins.

The philosophical orientations of green movements range from the conservation-oriented utilitarians that look to preserve resources for human use to those preservation-oriented perspectives that attribute intrinsic value to ecological systems, biodiversity, and species. Utilitarian perspectives are often characterized as anthropocentric because they [Page 816]ascribe rights only to humans, while the eco-centric and bio-centric perspectives extend the domain of ethical consideration to living species and assemblages of species. The eco-centric and bio-centric perspectives have their origins in the Romanticism of Thoreau and others writing about nature in the 19th century. These views come into conflict with questions about the human use of natural resource management and wilderness preservation. This often leads to contradictory goals across different green movements.