Though some of the
first local environmental organizations in the US were founded before the Civil
War, the environmental movement only gathered momentum around the turn of the
19th century. The
first decades of the 20th century witnessed growing concerns about
the over-exploitation of natural resources and the process of industrialization,
which led to the creation of the ‘Conservation Movement.’ With multiple
discourses on ‘conservation,’ ‘preservation,’ and deep ecology, the American environmental
movement has become all the more diverse and popular ever since. Nevertheless,
throughout its successive phases from the 1970s up to now, this movement has
undergone important changes that have significantly broadened its agenda from
mere demands for the protection of the environment to a whole
re-conceptualization of the current model of growth. This movement has also
grown into one of the largest social movements in the US today with over 6000
national and 20,000 local environmental organizations, along with an estimated
30 million members. With the popularization of the concept of ‘sustainable
development’ during the 1980s and 1990s, the agenda of this movement grew
global. Throughout the different phases of its evolution, this movement has
significantly marked modern American history as academic studies of its
structure and evolution have become a hot topic in American studies. Hence, the
field of sustainable development has become closely intertwined with American
studies given that the seeds of the environmental movement date back to the era
of ‘conservationism’ in the early 20th century America and were
consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. before the movement grew
global.
Whether today’s socio-economic
paradigm of development is able to handle a whole range of new environmental,
social, and developmental challenges constitutes the subject of endless debates
at the global scale today.
In
fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the different initiatives
in recent years to establish new approaches to development that aim at curbing
and reversing environmental degradation and attempt to be more responsive to the social
and cultural needs of people in both the developed and developing countries. Some
of these attempts were triggered by a surge in public awareness of the negative
environmental consequences of continuous economic growth and the high rates of consumption
in the developed countries.
The same period
also witnessed a noticeable prominence of the environmental issue on the global
agenda following some important post-WWII geo-political changes such as the
ebbing of the Cold War, thus creating more room for cooperation between the two
superpowers. In the US, the
post-WWII period also witnessed the proliferation of environmentally informed
writings that criticized the abuse of the environment. These writings include
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Charles A. Reich’s The Greening
of America (1970), Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture
(1969) and Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), and E.F. Schumacher’s Small
is Beautiful (1973), among others.
Many
of these American writers pointed to the the rise of neo-liberal capitalism, based largely on free market policies
and the primacy of economic growth, as the starting point of environmental degradation.
Their concerns were substantiated by the publication of The Limits to
Growth
in 1972 which was a scientific exploratory report that highlighted the urgent need for adjusting current rates of
economic and population growth to the carrying capacity of the earth. This report triggered
also a heated debate between neoliberal economists who contended that the
solutions for environmental problems necessitated more economic growth, and other economists who argued that unfettered economic
growth and sustainable development had mutually exclusive goals. In 1987, the
World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published its first
report, Our Common Future, also popularly known as the Brundtland Report,
setting forth what has come to be the official, UN-sponsored definition of
sustainable development. Ever since that date, the project of sustainable
development has become part and parcel of global environmental politics thanks mainly
to the popularization it has received from activists and NGOs.
