Environmental Issues

Environmental issues are concerned with human actions that affect the biosphere that humans and other species inhabit. Interest in the conservation of particular species, habitats, or landscapes, in particular localities or countries, dates back to the 19th century, but a concern with international environmental issues that transcend national boundaries may be dated back to the beginning of the 1970s. The European Conservation Year in 1970, the first Earth Day in 1970, and the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, which initiated the UN Environmental Programme, raised and focused the level of awareness and interest. A number of institutional developments also took place around this time. The Environmental Protection Agency in the United States was established in 1970, as was the Department of the Environment in the United Kingdom. In the European Community, the 1972 Paris summit of heads of government called on the Commission to draw up an environmental policy and set up a directorate responsible for environmental protection. The Community published its first Environmental Action Programme in 1973. New nongovernmental organizations with a broader agenda than older conservationist bodies and with a greater reliance on methods of direct action were founded around this time, the most important being Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, both in 1971.

Why did this new interest in environmental issues emerge at this time? A more affluent and better educated society was becoming less interested in prosperity per se and more interested in a broader definition of the quality of life. Rachel Carson's best-selling book Silent Spring published in 1962, which dealt with the effects of pesticide use on the countryside, raised public awareness of the fact that modern technology had costs as well as benefits. The fragility, vulnerability, and beauty of the Earth were emphasized by the first pictures of the planet taken from deep space in 1968. This initial period of the environmental debate was also influenced by a concern about world population growth and its impact on scarce natural resources. Incidents such as the mercury poisoning at Minamata Bay in Japan in 1959 showed that pollution could have serious public health consequences, a lesson reinforced at the end of the 1970s by the Love Canal incident in the United States where leaking toxic waste affected the health of children, among others.

This early phase of the environmental debate was characterized by a more integrated ecological approach to the problems being encountered, in which the ecosphere was conceived as a whole, with changes in one part of the system seen as having effects elsewhere. This approach was exemplified by the 1972 Club of Rome Limits to Growth report. The analysis carried out for this report by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used computer modeling techniques to explore the relationships between a number of variables such as industrialization, resource depletion, pollution, food production, and population. Seen in retrospect, the results were far too pessimistic and highlight the dangers of projecting current trends into the future, but the report was highly influential at the time and encouraged consideration of the environment as an interacting system rather than just particular pollutants that had been the focus of earlier ad hoc policy interventions.

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