John Treat* traces the history of the envirnmental movement and argues that experience has come to shape perspectives, which were already developed theoretically in the 19th century by karl max
In this paper I give broad-strokes of some of the major developments in the environmental movement, drawing on Joan Martinez-Alier’s, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation.
Protection and Conservation: Alternative False Optimisms
Some of the earliest activities associated with the environmental movement were oriented toward the preservation and/or conservation of areas mainly in the United States, the west and midwest (still largely unaltered by human activity) in the final decades of the 19th century.
There are important differences between preservation and conservation. Leading preservationists like John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, wanted to create protected areas to preserve natural systems in their pristine state. Muir was largely responsible for the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 – the world’s first national park. Muir, a deeply religious man, and valued the wild, unspoiled places for the spiritual significance he understood them to have. Muir saw the world through the Bible, “the book of Nature,” which he thought anyone could read, if only we could preserve sections of the original text for them in the form of natural parks, untouched wilderness, etc.
In contrast, conservationists like Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the US Forest Service, were more interested in managing natural resources for human use, along “sustainable commercial” lines:
Pinchot used the rhetoric of the market economy to disarm critics of efforts to expand the role of government: scientific management of forests was profitable. While most of his ba�les were with timber companies that he thought had too narrow a time horizon, he also ba�led the forest preservationists like John Muir, who were deeply opposed to commercialising nature.
As a professional forester, “forestry is tree farming,” without destroying the long-term viability of the forests. Muir [by contrast] valued nature for its spiritual and transcendental qualities.
These two tendencies, and the tensions between them, were quite influential in shaping the dominant or Western debates around the environment. But as Martinez-Alier points out, there were in fact even earlier attempts in some European colonies to deal with the consequences of environmental degradation, including especially on some of the islands – like for example, Mauritius, Cuba, St. Vincent, St. Helena – where limited efforts were made to preserve sections of forest against being felled to accommodate sugar plantations, in recognition that the forests were actually integral to ensuring rainfall. But these were largely pragmatic responses to immediate pressures of productivity, and as such seemed not to have had an explicit, lasting impact on the environmental movement as such. Likewise, even earlier indigenous practices that we commonly think of as being more ecologically sustainable, more morally defensible, or more spiritually uplifting have had relatively little influence on the politics of the mainstream environmental movement until quite recently.
This early contrast in thinking illustrated in the U.S. context – between “preservation of wild nature” and “responsible exploitation of natural resources” – was indicative of a lasting ideological divide affecting the politics of the environmental movement.
In the latter half of the 19th century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism also has bearing on these questions in important ways. However, Marx’s theoretical and critical work would go largely unappreciated for more than a century he would be considered an arch-industrialist and anti-ecological thinker and writer.
So, the earliest elements of the environmental movement was grounded in an optimism, the ability to protect and preserve parts of the natural world, and that this is in some sense a sufficient response to the issue of humanity’s relation to the environment. This had to do with a certain way of relating to nature as primarily a source of value either spiritual or commercial – with an important struggle between the two.
The Loss of Innocence
If we fast forward a few decades, a new set of concerns emerge. Over the decades following WW2, several high-profile events and research publications imposed a reckoning with the potentially massive damage already done by human activities. In some case, real or imagined, there were limits facing the growth and development of human societies and economies.
- In 1954, the twenty-three-man crew of the Japanese fishing vessel, Lucky Dragon 5, was exposed to radioactive fallout from a hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll.
- The publication of the book, Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson, drew attention to the impact of chemicals on the natural environment.
- In 1967, the oil tanker, Torrey Canyon, went aground off the southwest coast of England; and in 1969 oil spilt from an offshore well in California’s Santa Barbara Channel.
- In 1971, the conclusion of a lawsuit in Japan drew international attention to the effects of decades of mercury poisoning on the people of Minamata.
- Among them was Paul R. Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968), revived concerns about the impact of exponential population growth.
- Biologist Barry Commoner generated a debate about growth, affluence and “flawed technology.”
- The Club of Rome published their report, The Limits to Growth in 1972, and drew attention to the growing pressure on natural resources from human activities.
This period experienced rapid nuclear proliferation due to the Cold War. Then in 1972, the oil crisis raised the need for cheap energy. In the 1970s the ozone hole appeared, due to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and concerns with acid rain from sulfur compounds in the atmosphere.
Emerging out of this series of “shocks” or “reality checks” came a new and different emphasis, on minimising or undoing the damage that had been done, etc. It was during this period that the extent of human activities’ damage to the planet began to penetrate the dominant public discourse and consciousness. The earlier comparative optimism of the environmental movement found itself having to come to terms with some harsh realities.
Environmental Justice: From Optimism to Emancipatory Struggle
At this point I want to introduce the framework from Martinez-Alier, and what she calls ‘three clusters of environmental concern and activism’:
- The ‘cult of wilderness’ is concerned with the preservation of wild Nature but says nothing about industry and urbanisation, and is indifferent or opposed to economic growth. It i worried by population growth, backed up scientifically by conservation biology.
- The ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ is concerned with the sustainable management of natural resources and the control of pollution in industry, agriculture, fisheries and forestry. It rests on a belief in new technologies and the ‘internalisation of externalities’ as instruments for ecological modernisation, backed up by industrial ecology and environmental economics.
- The environmental justice movement is about popular environmentalism, the environmentalism of the poor, livelihood ecology, and liberation ecology, grown out of local, regional, national and global ecological distribution conflicts caused by economic growth and social inequalities. Examples are conflicts over water use, access to forests, the burdens of pollution and ecologically unequal exchange. Actors in such conflicts have often not used an environmental idiom, one reason why this third current of environmentalism was not identified until the 1980s and 1990s.
This framework seems to project a kind of class- analysis: the “gospel of eco-efficiency” seems to coincide with the interests of the capitalist class; the “cult of wilderness” with a bourgeois fascination; and the environmental justice movement clearly represents the interests of the working class (where this is understood to include not only labourers but the unemployed, students, etc.). The use or non-use of an “environmental idiom” is important, because it highlights an important point that I will return to later.
First, it is important to note that while we’ve looked at key events that shaped at least the dominant, Western public discourse regarding the environment and environmentalism, another very important development in environmental thinking occurred long before: throughout Karl Marx’s work. John Bellamy Foster has done a lot to excavate and reclaim the powerful thread of ecological insight that in fact seems to pervade Marx’s thought.
According to Foster:
Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonised was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Writing in Capital in 1867 on England’s ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx stated: “For a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.” Marx was drawing here on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig. In the introduction to the seventh (1862) edition of his Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology Liebig argued that “Great Britain robs all countries of the conditions of their fertility” and singled out Britain’s systematic robbing of Ireland’s soil as a prime example. For Liebig a system of production that took more from nature than it put back could be referred to as a “robbery system,” a term that he used to describe industrialized capitalist agriculture.
Foster shows that the kind of dualism of humanity vs. nature that we traditionally think of is a false dichotomy, and that a genuinely dialectical understanding of human social relations is possibly the only way to move beyond this dualism.
Two points need to be wrapped up. First, it is hard to escape the conclusion that perhaps the “loss of innocence” in the dominant environmental movement (discussed above) wasn’t actually necessary as many of the most important dimensions of an ecological understanding of human social relations had already been worked out a century or so previously. In other words, there is a lesson here about the role of theory as against experience: perhaps we tend only to take valid theoretical insights seriously once we have been forced to confront the negative impacts toward which those insights attempted to warn us.
Second, it’s important to note that Marx’s ecological insights didn’t occur in a book on “the environment” but on Capital, as part of an account of human social relations and their origins and key transformations. Perhaps the discourse of the “environmental movement” already plays into a capitalist – or at least a bourgeois – set of interests, priorities, or concerns. Perhaps, environmental justice just is social justice, which just is political justice, which just is gender justice. The unity of rights implies the unity of justice: no rights are safe until justice is secured.
In the same way that we will only discover the concrete forms of emancipatory social relations through struggle, so also is it only through struggle that we will discover the ways of relating to our surrounding environments that are ecologically viable, sustainable and that accord with our sense of justice as inhabitants of the earth. Perhaps the only truly emancipatory “environmental movement” is one that rejects the very notion of an “environmental movement” as something distinct from the struggle for a transformed set of social relations.
Finally, to close with a passage from John Bellamy Foster, in his preface to The Ecological Revolution:
My premise in this book is that we have reached a turning point in the human relation to the earth: all hope for the future of this relationship is now either revolutionary or it is false.