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Environmentalism: Ideology & Collective Action

Environmentalism: Ideology & Collective Action . Components of Environmentalism: 1. Environmental problems recognized, described and defined 2. Problems situated within an ideology 3. Actions taken to change the way humans interact with the environment . Manifest Destiny .

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Environmentalism: Ideology & Collective Action

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  1. Environmentalism: Ideology & Collective Action • Components of Environmentalism: • 1. Environmental problems recognized, described and defined • 2. Problems situated within an ideology • 3. Actions taken to change the way humans interact with the environment

  2. Manifest Destiny • Nature has no intrinsic value • Nature is unproductive and valueless without human labor to convert it into commodities that increase human welfare • Natural resources are abundant and humans have the right to use them to meet their needs

  3. The Idea of Wilderness and Origins of Ecosystem/Forest Management in the US 1854- Walden or Life in the Woods 1864- The Maine Woods Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

  4. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

  5. “In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World”

  6. Changes in the Late 1800s… • Western frontier closes • Deforestation, flooding and fires • Wilderness disappearing • John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot • Conservationism, was rooted in the upper and upper middle classes. Concerned about outdoor recreation, shrinkage of public lands, and destruction of forests.

  7. Formation of the National Forests • 1880s –destructive logging across the Great Lake states created calls for forest protection. • Movement in the 1880s for a federal forest protection policy to guard watersheds of major rivers and reserve a portion of federal timberlands from commercial logging. • President Benjamin Harrison, from 1891-1893, established 14 million acres of forest reserves (only 1.5 percent of billion acres then in federal ownership

  8. Gifford Pinchot, First Chief of the US Forest Service, 1905-1910 First professionally trained US forester When I came home [from France] not a single acre of Government, state, or private timberland was under systematic forest management anywhere on the most richly timbered of all continents....When the Gay Nineties began, the common word for our forests was "inexhaustible." To waste timber was a virtue and not a crime. There would always by plenty of timber....The lumbermen...regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools....And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads

  9. Pinchot invented the term “conservation”. “Conservation means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time” 1910 • Advocated “preservation through use”. • Opposed establishment of National Park Service • Proposed to open up Adirondack State Park in New York to logging.

  10. Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation • “Forest Protection is not an end of itself; it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity…Whatever destroys the forest destroys our well-being…..the fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use”. First State of the Union Address

  11. Pinchot grows in influence • 1907-forest reserves officially renamed “national forests” • 1907-Roosevelt created 16 million acres of national forests just before authority to do so taken away by Congress (Western interests) “midnight reserves” • Pinchot given title “Chief Forester of the United States Forest Service

  12. John Muir (1838-1914)

  13. John Muir : Nature Mystic • “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” • -- Our National Parks, 1901, page 56. • “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” • -- My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110

  14. Benton MacKayeFounder of the Appalachian Trail • If these people were on the skyline, and kept their eyes open, they would see the things that the giant could see." • - Benton MacKaye, 1921

  15. 1930s a second wave, the Dust Bowl, soil conservation programs

  16. FDR: Conservation and the New Deal Many CCC projects centered around forestry, flood control, prevention of soil erosion, and fighting forest fires. In response to the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created many programs designed to put America back to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of the first emergency agencies, was established in early 1933. The CCC's mission was two-fold: to reduce unemployment, especially among young men; and to preserve the nation's natural resources.

  17. Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) 1906Begins coursework at Yale Forest School (Master of Forestry, 1909). 1939Becomes chairman of a new Department of Wildlife Management at the University of Wisconsin. 1947In December, submits revised book manuscript titled "Great Possessions" to Oxford university Press which notifies him of acceptance on April 14, 1948. 1949  "Great Possessions" final editing overseen by Luna B. Leopold andpublished as A Sand County Almanac.

  18. The Land Ethic and Aldo Leopold “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.” “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

  19. Leopold's land ethic rests on the premise that all elements of the biotic community are interdependent. Leopold first came to this realization during a hunting trip in the Southwest where his party killed a female wolf. He reached the animal in time to see "a fierce green fire" dying in her eyes. "I realized then, and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountain."

  20. Rachel Carson (1907-1964) • Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. • She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

  21. Silent Spring In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world. Established relationship between DDT and fragile bald eagle egg shells.

  22. The Sky is Falling: More Contemporary Environmentalism • "Silent Spring" is published1962 • "Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song."(from Silent Spring) • Rachel Carson received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts in the summer of 1957. Her friend wrote that an airplane hired by the state had flown back and forth over her two acres of woods, spraying DDT to control mosquitos. The next day, there were dead songbirds in her yard.

  23. Silent Spring • Her book is often cited as the kick-off of the modern environmental movement. • In 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Cancer Institute announced its findings that DDT could produce cancer. In 1972, a federal ban was placed on the pesticide.

  24. 1950s-1970s-conservationism became environmentalism • Between the 1950s-1970s-conservationism became environmentalism • 1962-Rachel Carson-The Silent Spring • 1968-Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb • Barry Commoner-more politically radical-modern technology and the power of corporations were the villians-1972 The Closing Circle

  25. Environmental events-major oil spill along the coast of California in 1969, the bursting into flames of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Lake Erie declared a dying sinkhole

  26. What stimulated this 1960s transformation 1) the activist culture of the period 2) greater scientific knowledge of environmental problems 3) a rapid increase in outdoor recreation 4) post World War II economic expansion…

  27. Earth Day 1970

  28. Gave Rise to Environmental Organizations • Four different kinds of environmental organizations; the expression of civil society • 1. National Organization and the Washington Lobby. They may have different specialties-some do environmental lobbying, some do scientific research and education, some do litigation, law suits, some purchase land to set aside. Example: NC.

  29. 2. Grassroots Environmental Organizations-triggered by toxic waste dumps, radioactive wastes, nuclear plants, and proposals to build garbage incinerators. • Issues of environmental health. • Love Canal and the emergence of a housewife, Lois Gibbs, who won her spurs by holding some EPA officials hostage, resulting in the declaring of a federal disaster area two days later. • She founded in 1981 the Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. (NIMBY to NIABY

  30. Environmental Justice • "Environmental racism refers to any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race or color."~ Dr. Robert Bullard, Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University

  31. Radical Environmentalism-Deep Ecology. Ecological equality-the right of every species to survive because of its intrinsic value, not because of it usefullness to man. Just one of many species, and we should act according, be self effacing • Earth First! The Gaia Hypothesis-the notion that earth is a single, living organism. Direct Action Organizations: • Anti-environmentalist movements-wise use movements

  32. Deep Ecology and Direct Action

  33. Ecotheology

  34. Real Change? • Legislation, politics • Attitudes, beliefs vs. actions. • Much still needs to be done

  35. Pop Assignment Go to one of the three following websites and write one single-spaced page describing one or more of the activities of that environmental organization. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)-www.nrdc.org/ Sierra Club-www.sierraclub.org/ Conservation International-www.conservation.org

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