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International Environmental Movements

International environmental movements are social movements that contest, at an international and sometimes global scale, different kinds of global environmental degradation. They try to show that this degradation is largely the result of current patterns of production, consumption, transportation, and energy use and, more generally, the prevailing organization of social life and the present international economic and political order. In arguing that global environmental degradation is one of the “routine consequences of modernity,” many international environmental movements challenge the very basis of modern society. International environmental movements are important because they define problems, propose solution strategies, and raise social consciousness with respect to global environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and desertification.

This entry describes the origin and development of international environmental movements, presents several examples of international environmental movement action campaigns and actors, and briefly sketches the context in which international environmental movements operate and the structure of international political opportunities.

Origins and Development

Environmental movements originally constituted one specific part of the “new social movements” that emerged in Western Europe and the United States from the late 1960s onward. Other examples of new social movements include the women's, peace, and human rights movements, as well as the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the United States. New social movements distinguished themselves from “old” movements such as the labor movement by their emphasis on “postmaterialist” rather than materialist values; by their predominantly “new middle class” constituency; by their decentralized rather than hierarchical organizational structure; by their distrust in traditional, established ways of doing politics; by their unconventional action forms; and, finally, by their orientation at the development of new individual and collective identities. New social movements pointed to the “dark sides” of progress, environmental degradation being the most important case in point.

From the 1960s onward, environmental problems have been defined on an ever larger geographical scale: local, national, regional, and global. In the 1960s, local environmental movements typically struggled against polluting factories, new motorways, and the illegal dumping of waste. In the 1970s, movements struggled against the plans of national governments to build new nuclear energy plants and in favor of strong national legislation to halt the pollution of air, water, and soil. From the 1980s onward, environmental movements discovered the transboundary character of environmental pollution, for instance, acid rain, and started to plead for stronger regional (e.g., European) solutions. Finally, from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) onward, the global character of many environmental problems was acknowledged: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation. UNCED brought together thousands of environmental groups from all over the world: It enabled the growth of contacts between these groups, which was reinforced by the facilities offered by the developments in telecommunication (e-mail, Internet).

Action Campaigns and Actors

Antinuclear Movement

One of the first international environmental movement campaigns was the Western European movement against nuclear energy in the 1970s and early 1980s. Around 1970, many Western European governments had decided to build substantial numbers of (new) nuclear power plants in order to decrease their dependency on oil for electricity generation, and in all those countries antinuclear movements arose. These movements showed striking similarities to the ideal type of a new social movement as described above. The reasons for resistance, for instance, could be labeled as ‘“postmaterialist,” although they widely differed from one country to another. In some cases, a nuclear plant was considered to threaten the character of the local community and thus to decrease local autonomy. In other cases, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons were seen as different sides of the very same coin. Additional reasons for resistance included the fear of militarization of society due to the ever stronger measures to protect nuclear plants, the unsolved problem of nuclear waste, the resistance to capitalism, and so on. Antinuclear movement activists disproportionately emerged from the “new middle class”; they organized themselves through autonomous local networks, distrusted institutional politics, and fought their case through road blockades, tent camps, and (sometimes) violent confrontations with the police. Activists from different countries struggled shoulder to shoulder, resulting in the development of new, international, and “countercultural” individual and collective identities.

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