History of the environmental movement

Concern for the impact on human life of problems such as air and water pollution dates to at least Roman times. Pollution was associated with the spread of epidemic disease in Europe between the late 14th century and the mid-16th century, and soil conservation was practiced in China, India, and Peru as early as 2,000 years ago. In general, however, such concerns did not give rise to public activism.

The contemporary environmental movement arose primarily from concerns in the late 19th century about the protection of the countryside in Europe and the wilderness in the United States and the health consequences of pollution during the Industrial Revolution. In opposition to the dominant political philosophy of the time, liberalism—which held that all social problems, including environmental ones, could and should be solved through the free market—most early environmentalists believed that government rather than the market should be charged with protecting the environment and ensuring the conservation of resources. An early philosophy of resource conservation was developed by Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, for whom conservation represented the wise and efficient use of resources. Also in the United States at about the same time, a more strongly biocentric approach arose in the preservationist philosophy of John Muir (1838–1914), founder of the Sierra Club, and Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), a professor of wildlife management who was pivotal in the designation of Gila National Forest in New Mexico in 1924 as America’s first national wilderness area. Leopold introduced the concept of a land ethic, arguing that humans should transform themselves from conquerors of nature into citizens of it; his essays, compiled posthumously in A Sand County Almanac (1949), had a significant influence on later biocentric environmentalists.

Environmental organizations established from the late 19th to the mid-20th century were primarily middle-class lobbying groups concerned with nature conservation, wildlife protection, and the pollution that arose from industrial development and urbanization. There were also scientific organizations concerned with natural history and with biological aspects of conservation efforts.

Although the United States led the world in such efforts during this time, notable conservation developments were also occurring in Europe and Oceania. For example, Sweden established nine national parks in 1909, the first in Europe, and Switzerland created a national park of 14,000 hectares (roughly 34,600 acres) in 1914. In New Zealand the Native Bird Protection Society (later the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, or Forest & Bird) arose in 1923 in response to the devastation of Kapiti Island by livestock.

Beginning in the 1960s, the various philosophical strands of environmentalism were given political expression through the establishment of “green” political movements in the form of activist nongovernmental organizations and environmentalist political parties. Despite the diversity of the environmental movement, four pillars provided a unifying theme to the broad goals of political ecology: protection of the environment, grassroots democracy, social justice, and nonviolence. However, for a small number of environmental groups and individual activists who engaged in ecoterrorism, violence was viewed as a justified response to what they considered the violent treatment of nature by some interests, particularly the logging and mining industries. The political goals of the contemporary green movement in the industrialized West focused on changing government policy and promoting environmental social values. Examples include the campaigns in Tasmania in the 1970s and ’80s to block the flooding of Lake Pedder and the damming of the Franklin River; protests in the United States and western Europe against nuclear power development, especially following the catastrophic accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986); the related decades-long controversy surrounding uranium mining in Australia’s Northern Territory, including at the Jabiluka mine; protests against deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon basin; and campaigns in several countries to limit the volume of greenhouse gases released through human activities. In the less-industrialized or developing world, environmentalism has been more closely involved in “emancipatory” politics and grassroots activism on issues such as poverty, democratization, and political and human rights, including the rights of women and indigenous peoples. Examples include the Chipko movement in India, which linked forest protection with the rights of women, and the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, a coalition of movements fighting for the right to participate in environmental and development policies.

The early strategies of the contemporary environmental movement were self-consciously activist and unconventional, involving direct-protest actions designed to obstruct and to draw attention to environmentally harmful policies and projects. Other strategies included public-education and media campaigns, community-directed activities, and conventional lobbying of policy makers and political representatives. The movement also attempted to set public examples in order to increase awareness of and sensitivity to environmental issues. Such projects included recycling, green consumerism (also known as “buying green”), and the establishment of alternative communities, including self-sufficient farms, workers’ cooperatives, and cooperative-housing projects.

The electoral strategies of the environmental movement included the nomination of environmental candidates and the registration of green political parties. These parties were conceived of as a new kind of political organization that would bring the influence of the grassroots environmental movement directly to bear on the machinery of government, make the environment a central concern of public policy, and render the institutions of the state more democratic, transparent, and accountable. The world’s first green parties—the Values Party, a nationally based party in New Zealand, and the United Tasmania Group, organized in the Australian state of Tasmania—were founded in the early 1970s. The first explicitly green member of a national legislature was elected in Switzerland in 1979; later, in 1981, four greens won legislative seats in Belgium. Green parties also have been formed in the former Soviet bloc, where they were instrumental in the collapse of some communist regimes, and in some developing countries in Asia, South America, and Africa, though they have achieved little electoral success there.

The most successful environmental party has been the German Green Party (die Grünen), founded in 1980. Although it failed to win representation in federal elections that year, it entered the Bundestag (parliament) in both 1983 and 1987, winning 5.6 percent and 8.4 percent of the national vote, respectively. The party did not win representation in 1990, but in 1998 it formed a governing coalition with the Social Democratic Party, and the party’s leader, Joschka Fischer, was appointed as the country’s foreign minister.

Throughout the last two decades of the 20th century, green parties won national representation in a number of countries and even claimed the office of mayor in European capital cities such as Dublin and Rome in the mid-1990s. Outside Europe, New Zealand’s Green Party, which was reconstituted from the former Values Party in 1990, won 7 percent of the vote in the 1990 general election; its influence had grown to 9 of the country’s 121 parliamentary seats by 2002 and to 14 parliamentary seats by 2014.

By this time green parties had become broad political vehicles, though they continued to focus on the environment. In developing party policy, they attempted to apply the values of environmental philosophy to all issues facing their countries, including foreign policy, defense, and social and economic policies.

Despite the success of some environmental parties, environmentalists remained divided over the ultimate value of electoral politics. For some, participation in elections is essential because it increases the public’s awareness of environmental issues and encourages traditional political parties to address them. Others, however, have argued that the compromises necessary for electoral success invariably undermine the ethos of grassroots democracy and direct action. This tension was perhaps most pronounced in the German Green Party. The party’s Realos (realists) accepted the need for coalitions and compromise with other political parties, including traditional parties with views sometimes contrary to that of the Green Party. By contrast, the Fundis (fundamentalists) maintained that direct action should remain the major form of political action and that no pacts or alliances should be formed with other parties. Likewise, in Britain, where the Green Party achieved success in some local elections but failed to win representation at the national level (though it did win 15 percent of the vote in the 1989 European Parliament elections), this tension was evidenced in disputes between so-called “electoralists” and “radicals.”

The implementation of internal party democracy also caused fissures within environmental parties. In particular, earlier strategies such as continuous policy involvement by party members, grassroots control over all party institutions and decisions, and the legislative rotation of elected members to prevent the creation of career politicians were sometimes perceived as unhelpful and disruptive when green parties won representation to local, national, or regional assemblies.

By the late 1980s environmentalism had become a global as well as a national political force. Some environmental nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Fund) established a significant international presence, with offices throughout the world and centralized international headquarters to coordinate lobbying campaigns and to serve as campaign centres and information clearinghouses for their national affiliate organizations. Transnational coalition building was and remains another important strategy for environmental organizations and for grassroots movements in developing countries, primarily because it facilitates the exchange of information and expertise but also because it strengthens lobbying and direct-action campaigns at the international level.

Through its international activism, the environmental movement has influenced the agenda of international politics. Although a small number of bilateral and multilateral international environmental agreements were in force before the 1960s, since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the variety of multilateral environmental agreements has increased to cover most aspects of environmental protection as well as many practices with environmental consequences, such as the burning of fossil fuels, the trade in endangered species, the management of hazardous waste, especially nuclear waste, and armed conflict. The changing nature of public debate on the environment was reflected also in the organization of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was attended by some 180 countries and various business groups, nongovernmental organizations, and the media. In the 21st century the environmental movement has combined the traditional concerns of conservation, preservation, and pollution with more contemporary concerns with the environmental consequences of economic practices as diverse as tourism, trade, financial investment, and the conduct of war. Environmentalists are likely to intensify the trends of the late 20th century, during which some environmental groups increasingly worked in coalition not just with other emancipatory organizations, such as human rights and indigenous-peoples groups, but also with corporations and other businesses.