Green Movement Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Green Movement Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Social movements are described as agents of social change. Green movements are collectives of actors pursuing environmental issues from a variety of political, class-based, and ethical persuasions whose tactics vary from direct action to policy reform. Green movements can be characterized as those that adhere or promote to one or more dimensions of environmentalism, which is seen as an interest group community. Green movements seek to promote social change based on a commitment to sustainability and environmental preservation, but for motivations that range from diverse sets of environmental values from the conservative Wise Use movement to the more radical Earth First!

In social movement theory, green movements are characterized as part of the new social movements. Separate from class-based movements, the specific grievances of new social movements are driven by changing ideas that permeate culture and society. Green movements emergence coincided with the emergence of the women’s liberation, anti-Vietnam War, and other leftist counterculture movements. Green movements are unified along the axes of environmental problems, though they constitute a diverse set of political perspectives and ethical orientations.

Early antecedents to green movements organized around concerns about hunting and conservation of natural resources. Soon, urban policy questions around sanitation, clean water, clean air, and public health became the driving concerns of green movements. Some attribute the success of green movements to the spread of values emerging out of the counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the critique of capitalist consumer society.

Others note the importance of the image a fragile earth, from the early space missions and connecting that image to arguments about a finite earth, presented in the report from MIT scientists called the Limits to Growth. Much support for green movements emerged with Louis Gibbs’ attention to Love Canal, where children were exposed to toxics in the soil below the site of a school that was previously a toxic dump. Soon after, green movements emphasized local issues and extended into households where mothers took up concerns about children’s exposure to toxins.

The philosophical orientations of green movements range from the conservation-oriented utilitarians that look to preserve resources for human use to those preservation-oriented perspectives that attribute intrinsic value to ecological systems, biodiversity, and species. Utilitarian perspectives are often characterized as anthropocentric because they ascribe rights only to humans, while the eco-centric and bio-centric perspectives extend the domain of ethical consideration to living species and assemblages of species. The eco-centric and bio-centric perspectives have their origins in the Romanticism of Thoreau and others writing about nature in the 19th century. These views come into conflict with questions about the human use of natural resource management and wilderness preservation. This often leads to contradictory goals across different green movements.

Green Movement Groups

Given the diversity of environmental problems, green movements are quite diverse in their foci, although the political power of these groups often varies with their political power of the opponents they encounter. Green movements shape environmental outcomes in various ways, some using the political system, some focusing on the promotion of green consumerism and stewardship, and ecological modernization, while others use more violent tactics like ecotage. There are over 10,000 green movement organizations in the United States, with 44 million members, and income of $2.7 billion and assets of $5.8 billion as of 1995.

Green movement organizations come from a variety of perspectives raising a diverse set of concerns ranging from those that focus on local, “not-in-my-backyard” issues; mainstream Washington-based lobby and policy-oriented NGOs like the Union Concerned Scientists and the World Watch Institute; political parties like the U.S. and German Green Parties; legal-action groups like Friends of the Earth, the Center for Foods Safety, and the Defenders of Wildlife; donor and member-driven groups like the Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, GreenPeace, the Wilderness Society, and World Wildlife Fund; and radical “direct-action” groups ranging from Greenpeace to Earth First!

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) is probably the most controversial group that could be characterized as a green movement, as the Unabomber’s lone actions probably do not qualify as a movement. ELF is a radical environmental group that seeks to use destructive tactics to achieve their aims. Listed as a terrorist organization by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the decentralized group has claimed responsibility for a handful of actions, including arsons committed in new suburban housing developments in Long Island and the widely-publicized destruction of new Hummers at a dealership in Southern California. Those acts of ecotage are inspired by the Edward Abbey classic the Monkey Wrench Gang, where a group of friends who gained inspiration from the wild, clandestinely sabotaged equipment used to extract natural resources. Sociologist Rik Scarce spent six months in jail for refusing to disclose the details of conversations protected under confidentiality agreements with ELF, demonstrating some of the challenges of studying green movements listed as potential terrorist organizations.

Radical environmentalists are often depicted as being adherents to deep ecology, an environmental ethical or worldview that advocates a duty to preserve nature. Deep ecology was coined by Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who has gone on to write extensively on the moral philosophy of environmentalism. Deep ecologists have been criticized for holding onto pristine myths about nature and for pressing for American-style national parks and wilderness areas in developing third-world countries.

In some cases, disparate groups like Earth First! and the Sierra Club have worked on issues that saw their tactics complement the other. In one case of salvage timber operations in the Warner Mountains in Oregon, a group of Earth First! activists locked down fire road that led to the site of the salvage operations. While the logging operation was being delayed, a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club was able to sue the Forest Service and temporarily reverse their policy on salvage logging.

Political and Ethical Clout

Green movement popularity has also lent itself to the mainstream programs of political parties. Political parties from all persuasions now seek to claim the environment for themselves. Political parties like the German Green, Die Grunen, have gained a populist popularity. The German Greens have leveled a searing critique of industrial society and colonialism and have brought questions about the environment, public health, and military spending into the central planks of their platform. Ralph Nader’s appearance as a Green Party candidate in the U.S. Presidential Elections of 2000 is often cited as the reason Gore lost to Bush. Former Vice President Al Gore characterized himself as a green movement leader because of the widespread popularity of environmentalism.

The sustainable agriculture movement is also considered a green movement. It overlaps with the appropriate technology movement that became an advocate of a new economy based on a reflection on the social consequences of technological change. The back-to-the-land movement was based on the influence of books such as Schumaker’s Small Is Beautiful, Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an attack on DDT serialized in The New Yorker in the early 1960s, and Murray Bookchin’s Our Synthetic Environment, and demonstrated the overlap between environmental and agricultural concerns. Part of the sustainable agriculture movement is linked to the anti-genetic engineering movement that delivers a blistering critique of technological change in agriculture, drawing on the environmental implications of the Green Revolution and top-down third-world agricultural development.

The question about what to eat is perhaps one of the most controversial topics among green movement activists. Animal rights activists and sustainable food system activists often have clashing opinions, but many overlapping agreements. While they differ on the question of local animals in food systems, for example, they are in agreement regarding the cruel punishment and wastefulness in the industrial production of animals.

These groups look at the problems of the global economy and focus inward at remaking communities based on the ideals of small, more local production-consumption linkages in farming systems, for example. Through popular distributions of the Whole Earth Catalogue, environmentalism became more rooted in the consumption counterculture. It fashioned an entire alternative economy by instilling a commitment to collective agriculture, particularly organics. Today the promotion of green consumption is directed at shortening commodity chains through more direct purchasing, such as farmers’ markets, to establish connections between producers and consumers of locally grown food as opposed to industrial and fast food.

Green movements have played a significant role discursively as well as materially in transforming the state to a green one. The heyday of the green movement is often depicted as the time period that saw the passing of the Water Pollution Control Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act during the Nixon Administration of the early 1970s. However, the codification of environmental problems through the state served to take the green movement’s momentum away from the left and take up environmentalism as a cause for the right. Nixon sought a consensus approach to environmental problems and his creation of a policy apparatus for environmental problems served to take away the political momentum of the left. While the EPA looked to regulate the harms of production practices, the failure to include the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, and Department of Transportation into the planning and regulatory sphere, leaving their interventions more at the whims of the market forces and political cronyism. The critique, entitled the Death of Environmentalism, blamed the failure of the environmental movement on a narrowly defined policy wonkism that fails to maintain political coalitions and win-win scenarios that promote jobs and environmental concern.

Institutionalized Greening

Some have questioned whether or not the institutionalization of mainstream green movement organizations qualifies them as a social movement, which to some is a contradiction: you cannot have a movement that is institutionalized. The institutionalization of green movements has led to an increase in passive members who simply write checks in the name of some environmental organization, many of which have to maintain large overheads to stay afloat. Another concern is that environmental organizations move away from protest tactics and critiques of multinational corporations to a more collaborative approach. Yet it is unclear whether the deradicalization of green movements makes them more or less effective in dealing with environmental problems. There is also a concern that the institutionalization of the green movement has led to the scientization of environmental problems. This has led to a narrow focus on the science of environmental problem that often neglects their social origins.

Green movement concerns merge with those of development in the developing Third World. Successful green movements in developing countries include the Chipko Andolan Movement, who protected trees in Northern India through acts of civil disobedience against transnational logging companies. Often, these campaigns rest their success on bringing concerns about livelihoods together with concerns about the environment. Chico Mendez led a group of rubber tappers in Brazil on a crusade to link their practices to the preservation of biodiversity in the Amazon.

Some have even characterized the social unrest in Chiapas as coming out of political persuasions that include green movements. But not all developing country environmental campaigns have been successful. The Three Gorges Dam project in China is one glaring example of mass relocation and devastating environmental impact that green movements have found difficulty in challenging.

More recently, environmental justice groups have refocused attention to environmental concerns in urban areas and cities. An executive order by President Clinton in the 1990s required U.S. Federal agencies to evaluate the consequences of agency actions on the distribution of environmental burdens. Many urban green movements draw attention to the problem of environmental racism where communities are disproportionately exposed to negative environmental consequences. Green movements in urban centers around the world have been successful in promoting the idea of community gardens in some cities. With the rapid rise of urban populations around the world the promotion of sustainable cities has been cited as a high priority by many green movement actors.

Bibliography:

John Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford University Press, 1997); Roger Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: the Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Island Press, 1993);
Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics (v.11, 1, Spring 1989);
Mayer, The German Greens: Paradox Between Movement and Party (Temple University Press, 1994);
Christopher Rootes, “Environmental Movements,” David Snow et al., eds., The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Blackwell, 2003);
Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).