Contemporary Environmental Movement Research Articles

Climate Change or Social Change? Environmental and Leftist Praxis and Participatory Action Research

This work seeks to advance and synthesize leftist political and environmental theory and enhance historical and contemporary understanding of environmental activism, especially related to the movement to halt climate change. We share findings from our participatory action research (PAR) on the internal dynamics and debates among the three main climate activist networks mobilizing at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings in Copenhagen in 2009, those of the reformist Climate Action Network (CAN), the more marxian-inspired Climate Justice Now! (CJN), and the autonomist and anarchistic Climate Justice Action (CJA). We elucidate how leftist reformist and especially the more radical currents are engaging with non- or anti-Western indigenous praxis to forge the contemporary transnational environmental movement. Este trabajo busca avanzar y sintetizar la teoría política izquierdista y la medioambiental y enriquecer el entendimiento histórico y contemporáneo del activismo medioambiental, especialmente relacionado al movimiento para detener el cambio climático. Compartimos los resultados de nuestra acción de investigación participativa (PAR, por sus siglas en inglés) sobre las dinámicas internas y los debates entre las tres principales redes activistas del cambio climático, movilizadas en reuniones dentro de la Convención Marco de las Naciones Unidas sobre el cambio climático en Copenhague en 2009, en aquellas reformistas de la Red de Acción Climática (CAN, por sus siglas en inglés), las de mayor inspiración marxiana de ¡Justicia Climática Ahora! (CJN, por sus siglas en inglés) y la autonomista y anarquista Acción por la Justicia Climática (CJA, por sus siglas en inglés). Dilucidamos cómo las corrientes reformistas de izquierda y especialmente las más radicales, están colaborando con las prácticas indígenas no-o-anti-occidentales para crear el movimiento medioambiental trasnacional. 本文旨在推进和综合左派政治理论和环境理论研究，并加强对环境行动主义，特别是涉及遏制气候变化运动的历史理解和当代理解。本文分享了我们对内部动态的参与行动研究（PAR）和关于2009年联合国气候变化框架公约哥本哈根会议上活跃的三个主要气候问题活动网络间争论的研究发现。三个网络分别是改革派的气候变化行动网络（CAN）、更具马克思主义倾向的气候正义现在就要！（CJN）和自治的无政府主义的气候正义行动（CJA）。我们阐述了左倾改革派、特别是更激进的派别是如何参与到非西方或反西方的本地实践中以推进当代跨国环保运动的。 이 논문은 좌파 정치이론과 환경 이론을 발전시키고 종합하고자 하며 또한 기후변화를 막기 위한 운동과 관련된 환경운동의 역사적 그리고 현재적 이해를 높이고자 한다. 우리는 2009년 코펜하게에서 개최된 기후변화에 관한 UN회의에서 동원된 3개의 주된 기후변화 반대 운동가 네트워크들 간의 내적인 동학과 논쟁에 대한 참영행동연구(PAR) 결과른 공유한다. 이들 3개 기후변화 반대 운동은 개혁주의적인 기후행동네트워크(CAN), 자율주의자와 무정부주의 기후정의행동(CJA)이다. 우리는 좌파 개혁주의자와 특히 더 급진적인 흐름들이 현대 초국적 환경운동을 만들기 위하여 어떻게 비서구 혹은 반서구 원주민 운동에 관련하였는지를 보여준다.

Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Justice Activism, Research, and Scholarship

This article argues that there is a long history of environmental racism in American society. The first part of the article briefly discusses some of the environmental practices that discriminated against and negatively impacted people of color. It also discusses the responses of people color to these inequities. The second part of the article examines the rise of the contemporary environmental justice movement. This portion of the essay also looks at the evolution of environmental justice scholarship. It argues that despite controversy over the assertion that race and class are related to the siting patterns of hazardous facilities, most studies support the claim.

Russia’s Contemporary Environmental Movement

Laura Henry's book, Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia, explores the evolution of Russia's environmental movement post-1991. It is grounded on extensive interviews and associated fieldwork activity in various regions of Russia. The main empirical focus of the book encompasses the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s. The book is a welcome addition to the existing literature in this area, helping to confirm, as well as augment, current understanding via a detailed analysis of environmental activism in Russia. More specifically, the book's findings build purposefully on the earlier work of authors exploring the nature and character of environmental movements and related democratic trends following the fall of socialist regimes in 1989/1991 (e.g., Fagan and Jehlicka 2003). In view of the size and significance of Russia as a global environmental actor, there has been relatively limited critical engagement with the country's environmental movement in the Western literature post-1991. Exceptions include the historical work of Mirovitskaya (1998), the earlier work of Henry (2006), in addition to regional work by Crotty (2003) and, more recently, chapters by Henry and Metzo in the edited collection by Julian Agyeman and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger. Furthermore, the work of the Russian sociologist, Oleg Yanitsky, has provided significant and influential insight from the Russian perspective (e.g., Yanitsky 1999, 2001). In general, this body of work captured the emergence and protracted reconfiguration of Russia's environmental movement during the uncertainties of the 1990s and early 2000s. Henry's monograph is particularly useful in developing the findings of this literature in order to establish an understanding of both national and regional trends within Russia. The analytical and empirical focus of the work is strengthened further by its specific engagement with a period of growing state antipathy towards the activities of independent social movements; a trend that was particularly marked in the case of environmental organisations.

The Historical, Present and Futurenessof Environmental Education in India

AbstractWhat is distinctive or indistinctive about environmental education in schools and other formal education settings in India? In essence, what is thenessof environmental education in the Indian education system? Our responses to these important questions form the focus of this paper, shedding light on the historical, present and future directions (orness) of environmental education in India. In effect, we attempt to capture thenessof environmental education by considering practice, policy and research developments throughout the various contemporary and traditional environmental education movements. In so doing, we identify a theory-practice gap and a dire lack of research as some of the pertinent issues facing environmental education in India. In conclusion we discuss possible future directions that environmental education might take in addressing these issues.

Nature, Environment and Beauty: An Examination of the Beliefs of Modern Black Churchgoers and John Muir

AbstractThis qualitative research examined participants in environment-related projects in Miami, Florida, who were Black churchgoers driven by a sense of spirituality and stewardship. An examination of interviews and participant observations demonstrated that participants were strongly influenced by a shared concept of "beauty" in nature. This use of the word and concept of "beauty" to refer to nature was connected both to Black history and religion in inspiring participants' actions and attitudes toward environmental preservation. This emphasis on "beauty" as it relates to nature was independent from, yet quite similar to, the idea and language of spiritual "beauty" displayed in the writings of early U.S. conservationist John Muir. These similarities suggest commonalities where sometimes only division is perceived, and underscore the importance and applicability of interconnectedness in the contemporary environmental protection movement.

Barry Commoner and the science of survival: the remaking of American environmentalism

For over half a century, biologist Barry Commoner has been one of most prominent and charismatic defenders of American environment, appearing on cover of Time magazine in 1970 as standard-bearer of the emerging science of survival. In Barry Commoner and Science of Survival, Michael Egan examines Commoner's social and scientific activism and charts an important shift in American environmental values since World War II.Throughout his career, Commoner believed that scientists had a social responsibility, and that one of their most important obligations was to provide citizens with accessible scientific information so they could be included in public debates that concerned them. Egan shows how Commoner moved naturally from calling attention to hazards of nuclear fallout to raising public awareness of environmental dangers posed by petrochemical industry. He argues that Commoner's belief in importance of dissent, dissemination of scientific information, and need for citizen empowerment were critical planks in remaking of American environmentalism.Commoner's activist career can be defined as an attempt to weave together a larger vision of social justice. Since 1960s, he has called attention to parallels between environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements, and connected environmental decline with poverty, injustice, exploitation, and war, arguing that root cause of environmental problems was American economic system and its manifestations. He was instrumental in pointing out that there was a direct association between socioeconomic standing and exposure to environmental pollutants and that economics, not social responsibility, was guiding technological decision making. Egan argues that careful study of Commoner's career could help reinvigorate contemporary environmental movement at a point when environmental stakes have never been so high.

Condescension and Cross-Class Coalitions: Working Class Activists' Perspectives on the Role of Social Status

This piece focuses on working class activists' perspectives on cross-class coalitions, considering the influence of environmental justice activists' social status evaluations on experiences in cross-class coalition efforts with professional environmental activists. We ask: To what extent have cross-class coalitions been formed between working class and middle class environmental organizations? How did working class activists perceive their experiences in contacts with middle class environmental organizations? From the perspective of working class activists, what role does differential social status play in coalition efforts? Data sources include face-to-face focus groups and interviews, and telephone interviews with a sample of actiuists across the United States representing working class, community-based, grassroots environmental justice organizations. Findings indicate that cooperative efforts involving groups of different status within the contemporary environmental movement are rare and that coalitions do not occur. Social status evaluations are a central factor in determining the likelihood of cooperative efforts and coalition building.

Farmers, foresters and forest temples: conservation in the Dong Mun uplands, Northeast Thailand

Between 1970 and 1980 villages adjacent to the Dong Mun Uplands of Northeastern Thailand were transformed from subsistence communities, based on wet rice production, to a cash economy linked to global markets and the national and international political order. Although formally designated reserves had been created on old growth forests, the new economic opportunities encouraged conversion of forests to agriculture. Attracted by a false belief that land was being made available for settlement, immigrants flooded in and cleared forests to plant dryland cash crops using the newly expanded and improved road network to export their products. Social forestry programs may have assisted community development and encouraged agricultural diversification but were insufficient to prevent the contraction of forests, which now remain only as degraded remnants on the steepest slopes and least accessible sites. To some extent the social, political and economic forces have stabilized in Dong Mun and evidence of a new relationship between humans and their forest land is appearing. The Royal Forest Service is largely reconciled to the loss of domain over most of forest reserve and is pursuing a modified management policy that shows some evidence of a shift from an industrial to a post-industrial mode. In recent years, Buddhist monks in forest temples found through the uplands have achieved some effective forest conservation and restoration. Their efforts stem from the Buddhist precepts of the sanctity of all life and a view that forests are places for contemplation and spiritual renewal. Monks have been able to protect and restore some forest land because their views and wishes are far more likely to be honored than laws and demands of government officials. This reflects a broader phenomenon in Thailand where considerable impetus for a contemporary environmental movement has come from religious sources in contrast to the west where it is largely a secular in origin.

Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes

Review: Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes By Barbara L. Allen Reviewed by Tom Fletcher Bishop’s University, Quebec, Canada Barbara L. Allen. Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 224 pp. ISBN 0-262-01203-0 (cloth); 0-262-51134-7 (paper). US$55.00 cloth; US$22.00 paper. Having grown up in south Louisiana and gone on to specialize in the politics of environmental justice and hazardous waste, it was for me a real pleasure to read Barbara Allen’s remarkable book. Like her, I also have childhood memories of “malathion and magnolias” that have no doubt formed the basis for my own impressions of the chemical economy and its relationship to race, class and the environment. Uneasy Alchemy is more than a serious, scholarly work, which it is; Allen’s writing is also clear, approachable and tells a fascinating story that is filled with insightful observations as she interprets the contradictory landscape of that part of the world. For her, it is a “strange juxtaposition of important architectural artifacts and historic rural communities with ominously futuristic techno-cities of stacks and tanks, lights and towers” (p. xiii). The book begins with numerous layers of context, each of which is necessary to understand the complexities of environmental injustice. Most fundamentally, Allen explains the historical geography of the area as a way of understanding contemporary political economy and social relations that are somewhat unique in the American context. The 18th century Acadian settlements and the prevalence of property ownership among blacks, even during the antebellum period, are two of the more important distinctions that she elaborates along with the typically Southern injustices associated with the feudal society that formed the plantation economy and, of course, slavery. Moreover, while the postbellum period witnessed the freedom of slaves, it also brought various forms of external control over black property ownership. This continued during the 20th century when transnational petrochemical companies began to purchase former plantations. The result was that black communities became trapped amongst noxious forms of industrial production that ultimately degraded the quality of their only source of economic value, their land, as well as their physical wellbeing. The contemporary environmental justice movement thus emerged within this historical context in south Louisiana.

Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land

Review: Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land By Chip Ward Reviewed by Kurt A. Rosentrater United States Department of Agriculture, USA Chip Ward. Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2004. 350 pp. ISBN 1-55963-977-6. US$27.00 cloth. Recycled, acid-free paper. Chip Ward, in his new book Hope’s Horizon, emphatically relays the message that using the environment as a sacrifice for constructing and sustaining our society must come to an end. He argues that it is time to restore balance between our civilization and the ecosystems of which it is a part. He portrays this ongoing effort to protect and restore the environment as a significant challenge, fraught with many obstacles, but it is not an endeavor that is yet beyond hope. Progress is being made toward this end even if it appears slow in materializing. In fact, people’s perceptions and attitudes, if not their actions, are evolving over time. This is due, in good measure, to scores of people working within the context of the modern environmental movement. In this work, Ward describes several current environmental issues, the problems surrounding them, and the people working to change the status quo. He provides a highly personal account of their histories, successes, and failures. Above all, however, he relates their deep sense of enthusiasm and purpose. Ward accomplishes this by dividing his work into three unique, yet thematically connected, segments. The first discusses the rewilding of North America, or at least portions thereof, with reclaimed indigenous wildlife habitat. The second discusses the Colorado River basin. Specifically, he explains the “reclamation” of Glen Canyon into Lake Powell by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, the resulting aftermath on the ecosystems, and current efforts to restore the native habitat. The third discusses hazardous and nuclear waste disposal in the Great Basin Desert, especially the issues surrounding the development of Yucca Mountain as a federal nuclear waste repository. Ward provides a highly personal account of the contemporary environmental movement in the United States, and relays a thorough, comprehensive background regarding many environmental issues that must be dealt with, as well as the people and locations that are involved. He uses extensive metaphors and humor, with flashbacks as well as personal stories, to

Reflections on the iconography of environmental justice activism

The United States environmental justice movement has grown in the last 20 years from tactical cooperation between civil rights and environmental activists on hazardous waste issues into a broad‐based movement for social change. As dozens of organizations invest resources in an environmental justice agenda, it is important to examine how such organizations portray their stance toward the goals of the larger movement in order to better understand tensions within the movement between social justice and environmental protection, diversity and commonality, and localized and broader movement agendas. This paper explores what contemporary environmental justice imagery tells us about this social movement through a critical discourse analysis of environmental justice organizations’ logos. The conceptual approach used here links a tradition of critical discourse analysis of textual materials with elements of a critical visual methodology. The paper examines how the social grievance of environmental injustice is constructed in relation to the social and natural world, and considers what these images tell us about the identities, relationships and modes of authority that constitute the contemporary environmental justice movement.

Turning the Whole Soul: The Educational Dialectic of a Sand County Almanac

AbstractA Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold is arguably the most influential text for the contemporary environmental movement. It is designed to entice readers to seek direct and sustained experience of nature and to structure that experience through the lens of ecology and evolutionary biology. Part I implicitly conveys the evolutionary-ecological worldview through descriptive prose; in Part II it is expressed in more abstract, conceptual terms; Part III explores its normative implications. The wisdom of this project is problematic. Environmental education in the form of worldview remediation should be encouraged at the post-secondary level of education, but should be complemented by an effort to express positive environmental attitudes and values in terms of popular, pre-scientific worldviews—such as that of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.

Different Shades of Green

Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. 2002. The Environmental justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. $45.00 hc. $22.95 sc. c + 395 pp.Gilcrest, David. W 2002. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno: University of Nevada Press. $34.95 hc. xii + 169 pp.Rosendale, Steven, ed. 2002. The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $39.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xxix + 275 pp.The first wave of ecological cultural criticism crashed onto these shores in the 1970s and 1980s. The genesis of this wave and its subsequent diffusion into the mainstream during the 1990s is charted in Cheryl Glotfelty's introduction to the highly influential Ecocriticism Reader. As Glotfelty notes, the presiding spirit of this first wave of ecocriticism was the theory known as with its radical of anthropocentrism (1996, xxiv). Two books named deep ecology, one edited by Michael Tobias (1985) and the other written by Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985), outline the basic principles of this theory. Each collection traces the beginnings of ecology to the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Devall and Sessions point to Naess's ultimate norms-self-realization and biocentric equality-as the sine qua non of ecology. Naess himself contributes an essay to Tobias's collection that makes a series of contrasts between Shallow Ecology and Deep Ecology, which essentially come down to androcentrism (nature has value for humans) versus biocentrism (nature has intrinsic value). Based on this model, the first wave of ecocriticism valorized those critics, texts, and traditions that are thought to be more earth-centered than human-centered-the highest approbation is saved for the deepest shade of green.Thus, the first wave of ecocriticism embraced those environments at furthest remove from human habitation-the pastoral and the wild-as represented by a narrowly defined genre of writing. In contrast, the new wave of ecocriticism is interested in the interconnections between urban and non-urban space, humans and nonhumans, traditional and experimental genres, as well as the impact of race, class, gender, and sexuality on how we use and abuse nature. In other words, this wave of ecocriticism is concerned less with proving itself to be a shade of green than with trying to reflect the different shades of green that make up the contemporary environmental movement. Rather than taking ecology as their main theoretical investment, these works are more influenced by social urban environmentalism, and the environmental justice movement. To a greater or lesser extent, each of the three works under review is part of this new wave of ecocriticism.The focus of David Gilcrest's Greening the Lyre on contemporary poetry and the presiding sprit of Robert Frost connects it to the first wave of ecocriticism. However, drawing on the pragmatist hermeneutics of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, Gilcrest's analysis, in each of his book's five chapters, of the epistemology, poetics, and ethics of environmental poetry also challenges many of the central tenets of green criticism. In the first half of Greening the Lyre, Gilcrest carefully questions the undue self-confidence of those ecopoets and ecocritics who seem to believe that they can speak for nature. Though he welcomes normative ecology's productive of homocentric values (2002, 5), Gilcrest suggests that it is an epistemological impossibility and an aesthetic error to claim certainty about what a biocentric perspective exactly entails. How, for instance, would one judge between two competing biocentric claims? Ask the earth? Hardly. As Gilcrest explains in the second chapter, the very trope of speaking nature (38) is suspect. In fact, Gilcrest refers to the notion that a poet or critic can speak for as a colonizing move that remains susceptible to serious epistemological and ethical critique (6). …

Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

The work of John Charle Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Yet despite their range of genres - including exploration narratives, technical reports, natural histories, scientific autobiographies, fictional utopias, nature writing, and popular scientific literature - these seven authors produced strikingly connected representations of nature and the practice of science in America from about 1840 to 1970. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of the authors, their work and the ways in which science and nature unite them. This title explores how our environmental attitudes have been influenced and shaped by various scientific perspectives from the time of western expansion and geographic exploration in the mid-19th century to the start of the contemporary environmental movement in the 20th century. Bryson offers a literary-critical analysis of how writers of different backgrounds, scientific training and geographic experiences represented nature through various kinds of natural science, from natural history to cartography to resource management to ecology and evolution, and in the process, explored the possibilities and limits of science itself.

Popular Environmental Education: Lessons from the Labor and Civil Rights Movements

This paper provides a historical account of the main public education tactics used in the early American labor and civil rights movements, and draws a number of lessons for the contemporary environmental movement. Broad - based public education is defined in terms of raising public awareness, changing worldviews and engaging citizen participation. Revisiting earlier, vibrant, progressive social movements for lessons for the present is justified by the continual drawing of ideas, tactical experience, activists and non - governmental organizations across social movements in practice. The paper finds that both the early labor and civil rights movements relied on a rather similar mix of societal learning tools, including informal schools, independent media and/or communication networks, mass meetings, and protest songs. The environmental movement needs to develop these public education tools much more fully if it hopes to revert the global environmental crisis.

Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement.

Forcing the Spring challenges standard histories of the environmental movement by offering a broad and inclusive interpretation of past environmentalist thought and a sweeping redefinition of the nature of the contemporary environmental movement. Robert Gottlieb demonstrates the centrality of environmental concerns to a wide range of social movements of the past century as he explores the connections between pressures on human and natural environments and the role of these pressures in shaping society. His analysis provides fundamental new insights into the past and future of the American environmental movement by placing it within the larger context of American social history.After considering the historical roots of environmentalism from the 1890s through the 1960s, Gottlieb discusses the rise and consolidation of environmental groups in the years between Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 1990. He examines the increasing professionalization of the major environmental organizations and the parallel rise of community-based groups over the past decade, and ends with an in-depth consideration of the role of ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation and definition of movements.

Old Theories in New Places? Environmental Determinism and Bioregionalism∗

Bioregionalism is a contemporary environmental movement containing deterministic ideas similar to those of geography's environmental determinism. This paper examines the theoretical and practical i...

The environmentalists: a biographical dictionary from the 17th century to the present

More than 600 entries profile the major figures and organizations in the development of ecological science and of the contemporary environmental movement.

Earth first! and the rhetoric of moral confrontation

Extreme elements within any major social movement create a tension that can threaten or energize the movement. In an examination of Earth First!, a small but vocal environmental group, this paper analyzes the function of agitative rhetoric in the context of the contemporary environmental movement. Consisting of sit‐ins, sabotage, pranks, and other nondiscursive forms of persuasion, Earth First!'s agitative rhetoric illuminates the rhetorical dimensions of social movements in three areas. First, agitative rhetoric is both instrumental and consummatory as a form of communication and thus is symbolic at two levels. Second, such discourse forces the social movement to reexamine its goals as well as the strategies and tactics used to achieve such goals. Third, agitative rhetoric generates public attention for specific issues and gives the public a touchstone to differentiate extreme and moderate elements within the social movement.

Social Movements and the State

This article modifies resource mobilization theory to emphasize interaction among social movements, countermovements, and government agencies. The framework developed for tracing social movement-state relationships gives special attention to movement and countermovement agency alignments. There are six stages of movement-state relationships illustrated with an analysis of the contemporary environmental movement.