In the United States today, an organized environmental movement is represented by organizations often called non-governmental organizations or NGOs. These organizations exist on a local, national, and international scale. Environmental NGOs vary widely in political views and in the amount they seek to influence the environmental policies of the United States and other governments. The current environmental movement consists of both large national groups as well as many smaller local groups with local concerns. Some are similar to the U.S. conservation movement whose modern expression is The Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society, and the National Geographic Society - an American organization with world influence.
Video Environmental movement in the United States
Movement coverage
- The early Conservation Movement, which began in the late 19th century, included fisheries and wildlife management, water, soil conservation and sustainable forestry. Today includes sustainable results from natural resources, conservation of wilderness areas and biodiversity.
- The modern environmental movement, which began in the 1960s with concerns about air and water pollution, is becoming more widespread in scope to cover all landscapes and human activities. See List of environmental issues.
- The dating environmental health movement at least with the Progressive Era Reform (1890s-1920s) includes clean water supply, more efficient raw sewage disposal and reduction in overcrowded and unhealthy living conditions. Today, environmental health is more related to nutrition, preventive medicine, good aging and other issues specific to the well-being of the human body.
- The sustainability movement that began in the 1980s focuses on Gaia's theory, the value of Earth and other interrelationships between human science and human responsibility. Ecology in spin-offs is more spiritual but often claimed as science.
- Environmental justice is a movement that began in the US in the 1980s and seeks to end environmental racism. Often, low-income and minority communities are located close to roads, landfills, and factories, where they are exposed to greater pollution and environmental health risks than other residents. The Environmental Justice Movement seeks to link "social" and "ecological" environmental concerns, while at the same time keeping the environment aware of the dynamics within their own movements, namely racism, sexism, homophobia, classicism and other dominant cultural malaises./li>
Since public awareness and environmental science have increased in recent years, environmental issues have been expanded to include key concepts such as "sustainability" as well as new concerns such as ozone depletion, global warming, acid rain, land use and biogenetic pollution.
Environmental movements often interact or relate to other social movements, eg. for peace, human rights, and animal rights; and against nuclear weapons and/or nuclear power, endemic diseases, poverty, hunger, etc.
Some US universities are now green by signing "President Climate Commitment," a document that a university can sign to enable the college to practice environmentalism by switching to solar power, etc.
Maps Environmental movement in the United States
History
Early European settlers came to the United States bringing from Europe a joint-owned concept. In the colonial era, access to natural resources was allocated by each city, and disputes over fisheries or land use were resolved at the local level. However, technological change, strained traditional ways to resolve disputes over resource use, and local governments have limited control over strong special interests. For example, damming rivers for mills to cut the city upstream from fisheries; logging and clearing of forests in watersheds is detrimental to local fisheries downstream. In New England, many farmers become restless as they realize forest clearance alters river flow and decreases bird populations that help control insects and other pests. This concern became widely known by the publication of Human and Nature (1864) by George Perkins Marsh. Environmental impact assessment methods are generally the main mode for determining what issues the environmental movement is involved in. This model is used to determine how to proceed in situations that harm the environment by choosing the least destructive and least lasting implications.
Conservation movement
The first conservation became a national problem during the progressive conservation movement of the era (1890s - 1920s). The early national conservation movement shifted the emphasis on scientific management that supported large companies and controls began to shift from local government to state and federal government. (Judd) Some authors praise sportsmen, hunters and fishermen with the influence of increasing conservation movements. In the 1870s sports magazines such as the American Athlete, Forest and Flow, and Field and Flow were seen as leading to the growth of the conservation movement. (Reiger) The conservation movement also urges the establishment of national and national parks and forests, wildlife protection, and national monuments intended to preserve natural features that are worth noting. Conservation groups focus primarily on issues whose origins are channeled in general expansion. As Industrialization became more prominent and an increasing trend toward Urbanization, a conservative environmental movement began. Contrary to the popular belief conservation groups are not opposed to expansion in general, but rather they are concerned with efficiency with resources and land development.
Progressive era
Theodore Roosevelt and his close ally George Bird Grinnell, motivated by the naughty waste that took place in the hands of the market hunt. This practice resulted in placing a large number of North American game species on the edge of extinction. Roosevelt recognizes that the laissez-faire approach of the US Government is too wasteful and inefficient. In any case, they noted, most of the natural resources in western countries are already owned by the federal government. The best action, they say, is a long-term plan designed by national experts to maximize the long-term economic benefits of natural resources. To achieve the mission, Roosevelt and Grinnell formed Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. The club was made up of the best and most influential people of the day. Boone and Crockett Club's vagueness toward conservationists, scientists, politicians and intellectuals became Roosevelt's closest adviser during his journey to preserve wildlife and habitats throughout North America. As president, Theodore Roosevelt became a leading conservationist, putting high problems on the national agenda. He works with all the main characters of the movement, especially his main advisor on the matter, Gifford Pinchot. Roosevelt is deeply committed to conserving natural resources, and is considered the country's first conservation president. He encouraged the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to promote the construction of a federal dam to irrigate a small farm and put 230 million acres (360,000 mi² or 930,000 km²) under federal protection. Roosevelt set aside more Federal land for national parks and the conservation of nature than all of his predecessors combined.
Roosevelt founded the United States Forest Service, signed a law on the creation of five National Parks, and signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, where he proclaimed 18 US National Monuments. He also founded 51 first Bird Sanctuaries, four Nature Reserves, and 150 National Forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the first country. The territory of the United States he places under total public protection is about 230,000,000 hectares (930,000 km 2 ).
Gifford Pinchot has been appointed by McKinley as head of the Forestry Division at the Department of Agriculture. In 1905, his department controlled the national protected forest. Pinchot promotes personal use (for a fee) under federal supervision. In 1907, Roosevelt assigned 16 million acres (65,000 km²) of the new national forest just minutes before the deadline.
In May 1908, Roosevelt sponsored the Governor Conference held at the White House, focusing on natural resources and its most efficient use. Roosevelt delivered his opening address: "Conservation as a National Duty."
In 1903 Roosevelt visited the Yosemite Valley with John Muir, who had very different conservation views, and tried to minimize commercial use of water and forest resources. Working through the Sierra Club he founded, Muir succeeded in 1905 after Congress transferred Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley to the National Park Service. While Muir wants nature preserved for pure beauty, Roosevelt approves the Pinchot formulation, "to make forests produce the greatest amount of harvest or service will be very useful, and continue to produce it for generations of people and trees." Muir and Sierra Club vehemently opposed damming Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite to provide water to the city of San Francisco. Roosevelt and Pinchot supported the dam, as did President Woodrow Wilson. The Hetch Hetchy dam was completed in 1923 and still operates, but Sierra Club still wants to tear it down.
Other influential influencers in the Progressive Era include George Bird Grinnell (a prominent sportsman who founded Boone and Crockett Club), Izaak Walton League and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club in 1892. Conservationists organized the National Parks Conservation Association, the Audubon Society, and the group others that remain active.
New Offer
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45), like his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, was an avid conservationist. He uses many programs from the Agriculture and Interior departments to end wasteful land use, reduces the effects of Dust Bowl, and efficiently develops natural resources in the West. One of the most popular of all New Deal programs is the Civil Conservation Corps (1933-1943), which sends two million poor youth to work in rural areas and wilderness, especially on conservation projects.
Post 1945
After World War II increased encroachment in the soil wilderness evoked sustained resistance from conservationists, which successfully blocked a number of projects in the 1950s and 1960s, including the proposed Bridge Canyon Dam that would support the waters of the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon National Park.
The Inter-American Conference on the Conservation of Renewable Natural Resources met in 1948 as a collection of nearly 200 scientists from across America formed the principle of belief that:
"No generation can exclusively have the renewable resources in which it lives.We hold the commonwealth in trust for prosperity, and to reduce or destroy it is to betray the future"
Beginning modern movement
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, several events occurred that increased public awareness of the dangers to the environment caused by humans. In 1954, 23 men of Japanese fishing boatman Lucky Dragon were exposed to radioactive effects from a hydrogen bomb test in Bikini Atoll, in 1969, an ecological oil spill disaster from an offshore well in California's Santa Barbara Channel, Barry protested Commoner against nuclear testing, Rachel Carson Silent Spring's Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb all add to environmental concerns. The Earth images from the sky emphasize that the earth is small and fragile.
As the public becomes more aware of environmental issues, concerns about air pollution, water pollution, solid waste disposal, reduced energy resources, radiation, pesticide poisoning (especially as described in Spring Silent Spring influenced by Rachel Carson, 1962) noise pollution, and other environments. problems involve more and more investigators. The public's support for the environmental issue became widespread in the Earth Day demonstrations of 1970.
In contrast to the conservation movement of the Progressive Era (1890s - 1920s), the largely elitist, largely composed of politically wealthy and powerful people, the modern environmental movement is a social movement with more popular support. The environmental movement borrowed tactics from a successful civil rights movement and protested against the Vietnam war.
Preservation of the wilderness
In the modern desert preservation movement, an important philosophical role is played by the writings of John Muir who became activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along with Muir perhaps the most influential in the modern movement is Henry David Thoreau who published Walden in 1854. Also important are the foresters and ecologists Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of the Wilderness Society in 1935, who wrote the classical observations of nature and ethical philosophy. , A Sand County Almanac , was published in 1949. Another philosophical foundation was founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Jefferson.
There is also a growing movement of campers and others who enjoy outdoor recreational activities to help preserve the environment while spending time in the desert.
Anti-nuclear movement
The anti-nuclear movement in the United States consists of more than 80 anti-nuclear groups who have acted against nuclear or nuclear weapons, or both, in the United States. These groups include the Abalone Alliance, the Clamshell Alliance, the Energy and Environmental Research Institute, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and the Doctor for Social Responsibility. The anti-nuclear movement has delayed construction or halted its commitment to build several new nuclear plants, and has pressured the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to enforce and strengthen safety regulations for nuclear power plants.
Anti-nuclear protests peaked in the 1970s and 1980s and grew out of the environmental movement. Campaigns that attract national public attention include Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, Seabrook Nuclear Power Station, Diablo Canyon Power Station, Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant and Three Mile Island. On June 12, 1982, a million people demonstrated in Central Park of New York City against nuclear weapons and to end the cold war weapons race. It was the largest anti-nuclear protest and the biggest political demonstration in American history. The International Day of Nuclear Disarmament was held on June 20, 1983 at 50 locations throughout the United States. There have been numerous Nevada Desert Experience protests and peace camps at the Nevada Test Site during the 1980s and 1990s.
More recent campaigns by anti-nuclear groups have been linked to several nuclear power plants including Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Station, India Point Energy Center, Oyster River Nuclear Power Station, Nuclear Power Plant, Salem Nuclear Power Plant, and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.. There are also campaigns related to the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant, the Idaho National Laboratory, proposing the storage of nuclear waste from Yucca Mountain, Hanford Site, the Nevada Test Site, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the nuclear waste transport from Los Alamos. National Laboratory.
Several scientists and engineers have expressed reservations about nuclear power, including: Barry Commoner, S. David Freeman, John Gofman, Arnold Gundersen, Mark Z. Jacobson, Amory Lovins, Arjun Makhijani, Gregory Minor, Joseph Romm and Benjamin K. Sovacool. Scientists opposed to nuclear weapons include Linus Pauling and Eugene Rabinowitch.
The antitoxic group
The antitoxic group is a subgroup affiliated with the Environmental Movement in the United States, which is primarily concerned with the effects that cities and their products have on humans. This aspect of the movement is a self-proclaimed "housewife" movement. Concerns over groundwater pollution and air pollution increased in the early 1980s and people involved in the antitoxic group claimed that they were concerned about their family's health. Prominent cases can be seen in the homeowners association of channel love (LCHA); in this case housing construction is built on sites that have been used for toxic disposal by Hooker Chemical Company. As a result of this disposal, residents experience skin irritation symptoms, Lois Gibbs, a development resident, initiates grassroots campaigns for reparations. Success ultimately leads the government to buy homes for sale in development.
Federal law in the 1970s
Prior to the 1970s, air and water supply protection was a problem left for each state. During the 1970s, the primary responsibility for clean air and water was transferred to the federal government. The growing concerns, both environmentally and economically, from cities and towns as well as sportsmen and other local groups, and senators like Maine Edmund S. Muskie, led to the passage of broad legislation, in particular the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Control of Water Pollution Amendment of the Act of 1972. Other legislation included the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), which established the Environmental Quality Board; Marine Protection, Research and Nature Protection Act of 1972; The Endangered Drugs Act of 1973, the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Conservation and Resource Recovery Act (1976), the Amendment of the 1977 Water Pollution Control Act, which came to be known as the Clean Water Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, commonly known as the Superfund Act (1980). This law regulates public drinking water systems, toxic substances, pesticides, and oceanic discharges; and protect wildlife, wilderness, and wild and beautiful rivers. In addition, the new law provides for pollution research, standard setting, cleaning of contaminated sites, monitoring, and law enforcement.
The creation of this law caused a major shift in the environmental movement. Groups like the Sierra Club are shifting the focus from local issues into lobbying in Washington and new groups, for example, the Defense Council for Natural Resources and Environmental Defense, appear to influence politics as well. (Larson)
Updated focus on local action
In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan attempted to limit the scope of environmental protection measures to take such measures pointing to James G. Watt who called one of the most "anti-environmental politicians openly appointed". Major environmental groups responded with mass mailings that led to increased membership and donations. Large environmental organizations increasingly depend on relationships in Washington, D.C. to advance their environmental agenda. At the same time membership in environmental groups becomes more suburban and urban. Groups such as animal rights, and arms control lobbying become linked to environmentalism while sportsmen, farmers and ranchers are no longer influential in the movement.
When industry groups lobby to weaken regulation and reaction to environmental regulations, so-called wise movement movements gain interests and influence. The wise movement of use and anti-environmental groups are able to describe the environment as unrelated to mainstream values. (Larson)
"Post-environmentism"
In 2004, with the seemingly halting environmental movement, some environmental activists began to question whether "environmentalism" is even a useful political framework. According to the controversial essay titled "The Death of Environmentalism" (Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, 2004) American environmentalism has been very successful in protecting the great air, water, and wilderness of North America and Europe, but these environmentalists are stagnating. as a vital force for cultural and political change.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus wrote, "Today, environmentalism is merely a special interest." The evidence for this can be found in the concepts, proposals, and reasons. "What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders about what counts and what is not 'the environment'. Most of the thinkers, funders, and supporters of this movement do not question their basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what we should do. "Their essay was followed by a San Francisco speech called" Is Environmentalism Dead? " by former President of the Sierra Club, Adam Werbach, who proposed the evolution of the environment into a wider, more relevant, and strong progressive politics. Werbach supports the creation of a more relevant environmental movement for the average American, and controversially chooses to lead Wal-Mart's efforts to take on the mainstream of sustainability.
These "post-environmental movement" thinkers argue that the ecological crisis faced by human species in the 21st century is qualitatively different from the problems created by the environmental movement to be addressed in the 1960s and 1970s. They argue that climate change and habitat destruction are global and more complex, demanding far-reaching economic transformations, culture and political life. The consequences of obsolete and arbitrary environmental definitions, they argue, are political ignorance.
These "politically neutral" groups tend to avoid global conflicts and view the resolution of human-to-human conflicts as being separate from attention to nature - in direct contradiction to the growing ecological movement and peace movement: while Greenpeace, and groups such as the ACTivist Magazine consider ecology, biodiversity, and end non-human extinction as an absolute base for peace, local groups may not, and see a high degree of global competition and conflict justified if it allows them to preserve their own interests. local uniqueness. However, such groups tend not to be "exhausted" and survive for long periods, even generations, protecting the same local treasures.
Local groups are increasingly finding that they benefit from collaboration, e.g. on consensus decision-making methods, or making simultaneous policies, or relying on common law resources, or even occasional public glossaries. However, the differences between the various groups that make up the modern environmental movement tend to outweigh the similarities, and they rarely work together directly except on some major global questions. Except, more than 1,000 local groups from across the country united for a one-day action as part of the 2007 Step It Up campaign for real solutions to global warming.
Groups like the Bioregional Revolution are calling for the need to bridge these differences, because of the convergent 21st century problems they claim to force people to unite and take decisive action. They promote bioregionalism, permaculture and the local economy as a solution to these problems, overpopulation, global warming, global epidemics, and water scarcity, but especially to "peak oil" - predicting that the country is likely to reach the world's maximum oil production which can spell drastic changes in many aspects of the everyday life of citizens.
Environmental rights
Many environmental lawsuits bring to life the question of who has stood up; whether the legal issue is limited to the property owner, or does the general public have the right to intervene? Christopher D. Stone's 1972 writing, "Should the trees stand up?" seriously discussing the question of whether the natural object itself must have legal rights, including the right to participate in lawsuits. Stone states that nothing is absurd in this view, and notes that many entities that are now considered to have legal rights are, in the past, considered "things" that are deemed to have no legal right; for example, aliens, children and women. His essay is sometimes regarded as an example of a hypostatization error.
One of the earliest lawsuits to establish that citizens can sue for environmental and aesthetic damage is the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, decided in 1965 by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The case helped stop the construction of power plants at Storm King Mountain in New York State. See also environmental law of the United States and David Sive, a lawyer involved in the case.
Role of science
Conservation biology is an important and growing field.
One way to avoid the stigma of "ism" is to evolve early anti-nuclear groups into a more scientific Green Party, foster new NGOs such as Greenpeace and Earth Action, and dedicated groups to protect global biodiversity and prevent warming global and climate change.. But in the process, most of the emotional appeal, and many of the original aesthetic goals are lost. Nonetheless, these groups have well-defined ethical and political outlooks, supported by science.
Criticism
Some people are skeptical of the environmental movement and feel that it is more rooted in politics than science. Despite serious debates on climate change and the effects of some pesticides and herbicides that mimic animal sex steroids, science has shown that some environmental experts claim to have faith.
Claims made by environmentalists can be considered a covert attack on industry and globalization rather than a legit environmental problem. Detractors noted that a large number of environmental theories and predictions are inaccurate and show that regulations recommended by environmentalists will be more likely to harm the community than to help nature.
DDT
Specific examples include when Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, suggests that DDT pesticides cause cancer and drastically damage the ecosystem. DDT is highly toxic to aquatic life, including crayfish, daphnids, lobsters, and many species of fish. However, DDT is also used to control malaria.
Graduate novelist and graduate of Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, appeared before the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to address these concerns and recommended the use of double-blind experiments in environmental research. Crichton suggested that because environmental concerns are so political, policy-makers need neutral and conclusive data to base their decisions on, rather than guesswork and rhetoric, and double-blind experiments are the most efficient way to achieve that goal.
The consistent theme that supporters and critics (though more often voiced by critics) criticize from the environmental movement is that we know very little about the Earth in which we live. Much of the field of environmental studies is relatively new, and therefore what research we have is limited and not far enough for us to fully understand the long-term environmental trends. This has prompted a number of environmental activists to support the use of prudential principles in policymaking, which ultimately affirms that we do not know how certain actions can affect the environment, and because there is reason to believe they can cause more damage than good. we must refrain from such actions.
The myth of the desert
Historian and President of the American History Association William Cronon has criticized the modern environmental movement for romantic romantic idealism. Cronon writes, "the wilderness serves as an untested foundation of so many quasi-religious values ​​of the modern environment." Cronon claims that "insofar as we live in an industrial-urban civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our true home is in the wilderness, only to the extent that we give ourselves permission to avoid responsibility for real life we live. "
Similarly, Michael Pollan argues that desert ethics leads people to ignore areas with less than absolute depths. In his book, Second Nature, Pollan writes that "once the landscape is no longer 'virgin' it is usually abolished like falling, lost to nature, irreversible."
Debate in motion
In the environmental movement, there is an ideological debate between those with an ecocentric point of view and an anthropocentric point of view. An anthropocentric view has been seen as a conservationist approach to the environment with nature seen, at least in part, as a resource to be used by humans. In contrast to the conservationist approach of ecocentric views, associated with John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth is referred to as a preservationist movement. This approach sees nature in a more spiritual way. Many environmental historians consider the split between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. During the conservation/conservation debate, the term preservasionis becomes seen as a derogatory term.
While the ecocentric view focuses on the protection of biodiversity and the wilderness, anthropocentric views focus on urban pollution and social justice. Some environmental writers, for example William Cronon criticized the ecocentric view for having a dualist view as a human being separate from nature. Critics from an anthropocentric point of view argue that the environmental movement has been taken over by what is called left with an agenda beyond environmental protection.
Several books after the mid-twentieth century contributed to the emergence of American environmentalism (distinct from the long-established conservation movement), especially among students and more educated societies and societies. One of them is the publication of the first book on ecology, Ecology Fundamentals by Eugene Odum and Howard Odum, in 1953. Another is Silent Spring's best-seller performance by Rachel Carson , in 1962. His book brings new interpretations of pesticides by exposing their harmful effects in nature. From this book many are beginning to refer to Carson as "the mother of the environmental movement". Another influential development was the 1965 lawsuit, Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. The Federal Power Commission, opposes the construction of power plants in the Storm King Mountain, which is said to have spawned the modern environmental laws of the United States. The vast popularity of the Whole Earth Catalog , which began in 1968, was quite influential among the younger, active, activist in the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, in addition to opposing environmental degradation and protecting the wilderness, an increasing focus for coexistence with natural biodiversity has emerged, a clear tension in the movement for sustainable agriculture and in the concept of Ecology Reconciliation.
Environmentalism and politics
Environmentalists have become more influential in American politics after the creation or enforcement of various US environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA in 1970. This success is followed by enforcement. of the entire set of laws governing waste (the Conservation and Rescue Act), toxic substances (Poisons Control Act), pesticides (FIFRA: Federal Insecticides, Fungicides, and Rodenticide Act) polluted places (Superfund), Endangered Species Act protection, and more.
Fewer environmental laws have been passed in the last decade as companies and other conservative interests have increased their influence over American politics. The company's partnership with environmental lobbyists has been organized by the Wise Usage group. At the same time, many environmentalists have turned to other means of persuasion, such as working with businesses, communities, and other partners to promote sustainable development.
Environmental activism is much directed towards conservation, as well as the prevention or elimination of pollution. However, the conservation movement, the ecological movement, the peace movement, the green party, the green anarchists and ecologists often embrace a very different ideology, while supporting the same goals as those who call themselves "environmentalists". For outsiders, these groups or factions can seem indistinguishable.
As human populations and industrial activity continue to rise, environmentalists often find themselves in serious conflicts with those who believe that human and industrial activity should not be overly regulated or restricted, such as some libertarians.
Environmentalists often clash with others, especially "corporate interests," on the issue of natural resource management, such as in the case of the atmosphere as "carbon sinks," the focus of climate change, and the controversy of global warming. They usually try to protect resources that are owned or not commonly owned for future generations.
The radical environment
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