Environmentalism: Ideology

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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

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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

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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)
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"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."
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In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World
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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.

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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

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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
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• 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.

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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 necessityWhatever 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

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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

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John Muir (1838-1914)
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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

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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

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1930s a second wave, the Dust Bowl, soil
conservation programs
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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.
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Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
1906  Begins coursework at Yale Forest School
(Master of Forestry, 1909). 1939  Becomes
chairman of a new Department of Wildlife
Management at the University of Wisconsin. 1947 
In 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 and published
as A Sand County Almanac.
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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."
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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."
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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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

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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
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• 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

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Earth Day 1970
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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.

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• 2. Grassroots Environmental Organizations-triggere
  d 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 Citizens Clearinghouse
  for Hazardous Wastes. (NIMBY to NIABY

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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

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• 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

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Deep Ecology and Direct Action
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Ecotheology
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Real Change?

• Legislation, politics
• Attitudes, beliefs vs. actions.
• Much still needs to be done

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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