Movements, Environmental

To identify a movement, or movements, as environmentally oriented is to cast the politics of environmentalism in terms of social movement theory. Other notable social movements include the labor, women's, civil rights, peace/antiwar, student, animal rights, and antiglobalization movements, all of which have at times been linked to environmental movements. Classically, social movements are considered to have a type of life cycle. They germinate in order to challenge some form of oppression within society, they build and mobilize affinity groups around issues of solidarity common to an oppressive cause, culminating in success or failure. If social movements fail, theorists have charted how other movements may attempt to revisit the failed issue or reorganize collective actors previously associated with the failed movement as part of a resurgent political strategy. If social movements are victorious, social movement theory has tended to represent them as inevitably ossifying and fragmenting, with leading movement intellectuals and organizations often cementing the movement's overall bureaucratization and rigid institutionalization through their demands for its rigid formalization.

Environmental movements do not appear to accurately reflect this model. Instead, such movements have remained vital and capable of adjusting to meet the dynamic needs of differing social, cultural, political, and historical conditions. They have celebrated many great and small victories without having become either de-radicalized or sclerotic. Likewise, environmental movements have been dealt innumerable setbacks and have arguably been defeated in the large, if one is to judge them by the ongoing exponential growth of global human population, the continued development of unsustainable economic systems, and the ever-burgeoning planetary ecological crises of the last 30 years. Still, this has not led to the marginalization or evaporation of environmental movements. Rather, environmental movements are flourishing as they never have before and remain poised as central agents of sociopolitical change during the 21st century.

Environmental movements involve collective activist networks of individuals, groups, formal and nonformal organizations, and institutional bodies that struggle for social transformation around environmentally-related causes such as global climate change, antitoxics, the conservation of natural resources, population growth problems, the end to nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, the protection of pristine wild places and biological species, corporate accountability, and the promotion of environmental justice principles. Environmental movements work at local, regional, national, transnational, and global levels, and can be structured as loose affiliations of a transient nature, or as longerterm alliances that consist of well-established corporate and noncorporate organizations, including political parties such as the international confederation of Green parties. While environmental movements have played crucial roles in lobbying politicians, as well as in getting governments to produce and enforce sound environmental legislation; having a professional environmental policy approach is only one function of environmental movements. Environmental movements work in legal and illegal ways to transform mainstream values, educate the public about social problems of an environmental nature, create sustainable cultural alternatives, and block environmental harms through myriad forms of protest and direct action.

Sometimes it is implied that the wide variety of global environmental movements are facets of a larger, all-inclusive ecology or Green Movement that has the gestation of a planetary consciousness, the mass proliferation of appropriate technologies, and the broad democratization of science as its goals. Others fold even this larger environmental movement into the emergent movement for global justice, which is often called the movement of movements because of its ability to signal the need for radical change on many fronts. Yet, at least in an AngloAmerican context, the terminology of environmental movement is most often used to denote the rise of modern environmentalism in advanced industrialized nations since the 1960s; though scholars also frequently extend this time frame to include previous American movements such as the conservation, preservation, and transcendental movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries as important foundations of contemporary environmental activism. A singular environmental movement exists, but the manner in which this movement is made manifest [Page 1175]and experienced throughout the world differs significantly, with singular movements sometimes working in contradiction to each other's immediate aims. The environmental movement can refer to anything from a history of localized green activism, to a theorized worldwide revolution predicated on ideas of ecological well-being.

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