Chapter 11.2 Debates about the Environment
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Explain the reasons for the rise of environmentalism around the western world
- Identify ways in which environmental groups have faced resistance
- Describe the ways in which the western community has attempted to address environmental issues like climate change
While concern for the Earth and anxiety about the negative effects humans have wrought are hardly new, the modern environmental movement, with its characteristic public activism, has roots in nineteenth-century reactions to industrialization. Writers of that time, like George Perkins Marsh, John Ruskin, Octavia Hill, and many others, expressed a romantic view of nature that contrasted sharply with the industrial transformations they witnessed around them. Their ideas gave birth to preservation efforts and the creation of national parks, first in the United States and later in Australia, and nations in Europe. Environmental concern has only grown stronger as societies around the world must now grapple with the enormous and ongoing consequences of increasing industrialization, manifested particularly in the global threat of climate change.
The Rise of Environmentalism
In the post–World War II period, as the United States and Europe experienced unprecedented economic growth and a rapidly rising standard of living, anxiety regarding the condition of the environment rose to the surface and gained political significance. In the developed West, members of the generation reaching maturity in the 1960s occasionally struggled with their affluence and the recognition that it came with disastrous environmental consequences. These consequences were not limited to the developed world. In the 1950s and 1960s, as part of the Green Revolution, agricultural scientists developed new high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that increased food production in both the developed and the developing world. The result was that millions were saved from hunger, and infant mortality in developing nations decreased. Scientist Norman Borlaug, who was considered largely responsible for the Green Revolution, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work. Such benefits, however, came with a heavy price tag, in many ways. Small farmers had to borrow money to purchase the new high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, and many found themselves deeply in debt. Reliance on the new varieties of crops reduced biodiversity, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides polluted the soil and water.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published her bestselling book Silent Spring, which railed against the proliferation of dangerous pesticides like DDT (Figure 11.8). Carson drew connections between the political power of the chemical industry and the many adverse effects of chemicals that made their way into food supplies and human bodies. Though strongly condemned by large chemical comp