The Global Environmental Movement

Revised and updated to take account of recent political changes, this volume provides a study of environmentalism as a global social and economic phenomenon.

Despite growing evidence of the universality of environmental problems and of economic and cultural globalization, the development of a truly global environmental movement is at best tentative. The dilemmas which confront environmental organizations are no less apparent at the global than at national levels. This volume is a collection of 1990s research on environmental movements in western and southern Europe, the US and the global arena.

What motivates people to become involved in issues and struggles beyond their own borders? How are activists changed and movements transformed when they reach out to others a world away? This adept study addresses these questions by tying together local, national, regional, and global historical narratives surrounding the contemporary Japanese environmental movement. Spanning the era of Japanese industrial pollution in the 1960s and the more recent rise of movements addressing global environmental problems, it shows how Japanese activists influenced approaches to environmentalism and industrial pollution in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, and Europe, as well as landmark United Nations conferences in 1972 and 1992. Japan’s experiences with diseases caused by industrial pollution produced a potent “environmental injustice paradigm” that fueled domestic protest and became the motivation for Japanese groups’ activism abroad. From the late 1960s onward Japanese activists organized transnational movements addressing mercury contamination in Europe and North America, industrial pollution throughout East Asia, radioactive waste disposal in the Pacific, and global climate change. In all cases, they advocated strongly for the rights of pollution victims and people living in marginalized communities and nations—a position that often put them at odds with those advocating for the global environment over local or national rights. Transnational involvement profoundly challenged Japanese groups’ understanding of and approach to activism. Numerous case studies demonstrate how border-crossing efforts undermined deeply engrained notions of victimhood in the domestic movement and nurtured a more self-reflexive and multidimensional approach to environmental problems and social activism. Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement will appeal to scholars and students interested in the development of civil society, social movements, and environmentalism in contemporary Japan; grassroots inter-Asian connections in the postwar period; and the ways Asian countries and their citizens have shaped and been influenced by global issues like environmentalism.

In this book the author traces the intellectual, political, social and economic roots of environmental activism, and shows how concern for the environment has emerged from relative obscurity to centre-stage and made the environment a public rather than a private issue.

This handbook provides readers with up-to-date knowledge on environmental movements and activism and is a reference point for international work in the field. It offers an assessment of environmental movements in different regions of the world, macrostructural conditions and processes underlying their mobilization, the microstructural and social-psychological dimensions of environmental movements and activism, and current trends, as well as prospects for environmental movements and social change. The handbook provides critical reviews and appraisals of the current state of the art and future development of conceptual and theoretical approaches as well as empirical knowledge and understanding of environmental movements and activism. It encourages dialogue across the disciplinary barriers between social movement studies and other perspectives and reflects upon the causes and consequences of citizens’ participation in environmental movements and activities. The volume brings historical studies of environmentalism, sociological analyses of the social composition of participants in and sympathizers of environmental movements, investigations by political scientists on the conditions and processes underlying environmental movements and activism, and other disciplinary inquiries together, while keeping a clear focus within social movement theory and research as the main lines of inquiry. The handbook is an essential guide and reference point not only for researchers but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for policymakers and activists.

What it means for global sustainability when environmentalism is dominated by the concerns of the affluent—eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation. Over the last fifty years, environmentalism has emerged as a clear counterforce to the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, colonialism, and globalization. Activists and policymakers have fought hard to make the earth a better place to live. But has the environmental movement actually brought about meaningful progress toward global sustainability? Signs of global “unsustainability” are everywhere, from decreasing biodiversity to scarcity of fresh water to steadily rising greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, as Peter Dauvergne points out in this provocative book, the environmental movement is increasingly dominated by the environmentalism of the rich—diverted into eco-business, eco-consumption, wilderness preservation, energy efficiency, and recycling. While it's good that, for example, Barbie dolls' packaging no longer depletes Indonesian rainforest, and that Toyota Highlanders are available as hybrids, none of this gets at the source of the current sustainability crisis. More eco-products can just mean more corporate profits, consumption, and waste. Dauvergne examines extraction booms that leave developing countries poor and environmentally devastated—with the ruination of the South Pacific island of Nauru a case in point; the struggles against consumption inequities of courageous activists like Bruno Manser, who worked with indigenous people to try to save the rainforests of Borneo; and the manufacturing of vast markets for nondurable goods—for example, convincing parents in China that disposable diapers made for healthier and smarter babies. Dauvergne reveals why a global political economy of ever more—more growth, more sales, more consumption—is swamping environmental gains. Environmentalism of the rich does little to bring about the sweeping institutional change necessary to make progress toward global sustainability.

The tide is turning against environmentalism as the political right, industry and governments fight back. Green Backlash is a controversial expose of the anti-environmental movement. Tracing the rise of the backlash from the Wise Use movement in the USA, the author reveals its rapid spread worldwide: the anti-roads movement in the UK, forestry debates in Canada and Australia, marine resource issues in Europe, South-East Asia, and controversies such as the Brent Spar. The backlash is set to get worse as the resource wars intensify. This book offers a greater understanding of the challenges and threats facing global environmentalism, concluding that the environmental movement now has a chance to re-evaluate and change for the better to beat the backlash - a chance that must not be missed.