Environmentalism Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Environmentalism is a social and political movement emerging in the mid-20th century in various Western countries like Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Environmentalism is not just a mere concept for the defense of the environment; rather, environmentalism argues that the protection of nature is more important than economic matters, industry, corporations, governments, and private interests. In other words, creating new jobs for a future nuclear power plant would be meaningless for environmentalists if it also brought pollution, hazardous waste, and industrial risks to a region. Therefore, environmentalism implies bringing environmental concern into a political sphere.

Environmentalism promotes environmental consciousness and cries for a social change on varied issues such as deforestation, desertification, global warming, greenhouse gases, nuclear hazards, and genetically modified organisms.

Some observers see environmentalism as a democratic mode of civic participation-civic environmentalism-while other scholars perceive it as an ideology with a coherent worldview, or even as a kind of religion, as argues environmental historian Thomas Dunlap in his 2005 book Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest.

Because it carries more values than just the respect of the protection of natural resources and land management, environmentalism is often linked with other ideologies or political movements not necessarily related with the environment, such as antiglobalization, anticapitalism, counterculture, and even anti-Americanism. As a consequence, corporations and their lobbyists who seek to legitimize industrialization are often the targets of environmentalists and social activists. On the other side, most groups that promote environmentalism usually emerge from civil society.

The main ideas of environmentalism-respect for nature, protection of wildlife, and green energy production-have historic roots that have been passed through the generations as many environmentalists advocate for the preservation of natural resources, even beyond their own life spans, for the benefit of future generations. Specifically, advocacy groups like the Sierra Club (founded in 1892 by John Muir), the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace are now global organizations using and adapting some of the strategies of public funding and advertising in order to bring their messages to a large public audience. These organizations use the media in various ways in attempt to influence public opinion on debated issues such as the defense of wildlife, global warming, and air and water quality.

In many cases, environmentalist movements are the result of a strong reaction to major events that are seen as a threat to health, wildlife, landscapes, or security. For example, when U.S. biologist Rachel Carson (1907-64) published her book Silent Spring in 1962, it created a whole movement against the use of DDT, a now illegal toxic insecticide that was initially used to control mosquito populations in battle against malaria. Typically, average citizens are converted to environmental activists when they believe that their governments do not act in order to protect their land against pollution, or when they feel there is no one else who would care as much as they do about the future of nature. For instance, a large international network of environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969 in the United States by David Brower to promote a fair use of nature. Similarly, Greenpeace was a pacifist organization created in 1971 to oppose the United States nuclear testing in the Pacific region.

Important Distinctions

Environmentalism should not be confused with all environmental movements, since there are many degrees and perspectives. Other ecological movements, such as deep ecology and ecological radicalism, take a more radical perspective on the environment stating that the preservation of nonhuman nature is even more important than the interests of human beings, and therefore nature and wildlife must be protected and defended as such against abusive human activity. Because environmentalism carries a will to advocate a form of social change, it is not a synonym for environmental education, and it should also not be confused with sustainable development, which promotes industrialization in harmony with the environment.

Sociologist Steven Yearley, a leading expert on environmental issues, has explained that environmentalism can be interpreted either as a social construction or as a characteristic of anxiety over environmental risks in contemporary Western societies. Yearley also sees these networks of environmental groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as competitive with each other in their common quest for legitimate causes, new members, funding, and media exposure.

Because environmentalism opposes itself to official discourses from corporations and governments, the counter-discourses get a high level of credibility from their members, even about debated issues such as global warming. Most citizens are not scientists; therefore, their opinions do not rely on their own observations, measures, and evaluation of scientific data, but rather on their beliefs and sometimes the contradictory testimony of scientific experts. In that sense, environmentalism can be similar to an ideology that is in conflict with other ideologies in the public sphere.

Countless films related to environmentalism and similar issues have been produced. In recent decades, some documentary films have brought the ideas of environmentalism to a wide audience such as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which focused global warming. Also well known is Peter Watkins’s 1987 film The Journey, which shows not only how the environmentalist movements work, but how many activists are perceived and often rejected by some members of the media in Canada, Scotland, Norway, Japan, Australia, and the United States.

Bibliography:

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Directed by Davis Guggenheim with Albert Gore Jr., (Paramount Home Video, 2006);
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962);
Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (University of Washington Press, 2005);
Albert Gore Jr., An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (Rodale Press, 2006);
The Journey, Directed by Peter Watkins, Produced by Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society (SPAS and the National Film Board of Canada, (Facets Multimedia, 1987);
Yves Laberge “Peter Watkins’ The Journey,” Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, Ian Aitken (v.2, Routledge, 2006);
Steven Yearley, “The Sociology of the Environment and Nature,” The SAGE Handbook of Sociology (Sage Publications, 2005).