Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:40:23.873Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Place-Based Environmentalism and Global Warming: Conceptual Contradictions of American Environmentalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Daniel Somers Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Until recently, the history of environmentalism was primarily a history of attention to place. In the United States, environmentalists have gotten rather good at protecting and managing particular places such as mountains, forests, and watersheds and specific resources such as trees, soil, wildlife, air, and water. Environmentalism has become an enormously popular social movement, with, by some measures, more than 80 percent of Americans considering themselves environmentalists. Thousands of organizations, ranging from local volunteer groups to national nonprofits, address issues as diverse as open space, air and water pollution, biological diversity, environmental justice, and environmental effects on human health. The successes of this movement have been striking. Our National Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas are touted as models for the world and are well complemented by state, municipal, and private protected areas. The Endangered Species Act successfully resolves many conflicts between rare creatures and development. Rivers have been cleaned up, and once-spurned urban waterfronts now draw real estate and tourism development. Americans drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air than much of the rest of the world, and attempts to weaken regulatory frameworks are consistently met with public disapproval.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 2001 , pp. 117 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 I use the term “environmentalism” inclusively to cover a range of more specific orientations, including the “preservation” of natural areas, “conservation” of natural resources, and “regulation and management” of environmental contaminantsGoogle Scholar.

2 Dowie, Mark, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995Google Scholar).

3 Intergovernmental Panel on Change, Climate, Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: A Report of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001Google Scholar).

4 Ibid.; see also National Assessment Synthesis Team, Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001Google Scholar).

5 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001Google Scholar.

6 For examples, see Bryson, Reid A., Climates of Hunger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977Google Scholar); and National Research Council, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Second Assessment (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1982Google Scholar).

7 Shue, Henry, “Global Environment and International Inequality,” International Affairs 75, No. 3 (1999), pp. 531–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001Google Scholar.

9 For examples, see Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995Google Scholar); and the essays in Mander, Jerry and Goldsmith, Edward, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996Google Scholar).

10 For other examples of this approach, which stems from the work of Michel Foucault, see Ferguson, James, The Anti-Politics Machine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Escobar, Encountering Development.

11 Cronon, William, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon, William, ed., Uncommon Ground (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 69–90Google Scholar; and Brown, Donna, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995Google Scholar).

12 Judd, Richard, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997Google Scholar); and Terrie, Philip G., Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997Google Scholar).

13 See Brown, , Inventing New England.Google Scholar

14 Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze: Travel and Leisure in Contemporary Societies (New York: Sage, 1990Google Scholar); see also Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”

15 See, for example, Escobar, Encountering Development., Brosius, Peter, “Environment Representations of Indigenous Knowledge,” Human Ecology 25, No. 1 (1997), pp. 47–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dove, Michael L, “Writing for, Versus about, the Ethnographic Other: Issues of Engagement and Reflexivity in Working with a Tribal NGO in Indonesia,” Identities 6, No. 2 (1999), pp. 47–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cronon, , “The Trouble with Wilderness,” p. 81Google Scholar.

17 Wackernagel, Mathis and Rees, William, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998), p. 13Google Scholar.

18 Dobbs, Richard and Ober, David, The Northern Forest(White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 1995)Google Scholar; McGrory Klyza, Christopher and Trombulak, Stephen C., The Future of the Northern Forest (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994Google Scholar); and Luloff, A. E. and Nord, Mark, “The Forgotten of Northern New England,” in Lysine, Thomas A. and Falk, William W., eds., Forgotten Places: Uneven Development in Rural America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993Google Scholar).

19 Northern Forest Alliance, Wildlands: A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Forest (Montpelier, Vt.: Northern Forest Alliance, 1997Google Scholar).

20 This quote comes from a color poster created by the Northern Forest Alliance in 1998 that bears the heading “Explore the Northern Forest” and features images of wilderness recreation and dramatic sceneryGoogle Scholar.

21 Luloff, and Nord, , “The Forgotten of Northern New England”; Harper, Stephen, Rankin, Ted, and Falk, Laura, The Northern Forest Lands Study (Rutland, Vt.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Forest Service, 1990)Google Scholar.

22 See Luloff, and Nord, , “The Forgotten of Northern New England”; and Vail, David, “The Internal Conflict: Contract Logging, Chainsaws, and Clearcuts in Maine Forestry,” in Banuri, Tariq and Apffel Marglin, Frederique, eds., Who Will Save the Forests: Knowledge, Power and Environmental Discourse (New York: Zed, 1993Google Scholar).

23 Bruns, Paul E., A New Hampshire Everlasting and Unfallen (Concord, N.H.: Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 1969Google Scholar); and Dodds, Gordon B., “The Stream-Flow Controversy: A Conservation Turning Point,” Journal of American History 56, No. 1 (1969), pp. 59–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See Demeritt, David, “Knowledge, Nature and Representation: Clearings for Conservation in the Maine Woods,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1996Google Scholar; and Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959Google Scholar).

25 See, for example, Escobar, Arturo, “Constructing Nature: Elements for a Poststructural Ecology,” in Peet, Richard and Watts, Michael, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996Google Scholar).

26 See Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998Google Scholar); and Demeritt, “Knowledge, Nature, and Representation.”

27 For examples, see Nancy Peluso, Lee, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991Google Scholar); Sivaramakrishnan, K., Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999Google Scholar); and Jacoby, Karl, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001Google Scholar).

28 Northern Alliance, Forest, Wildlands: A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Forest (Montpelier, Vt.: Northern Forest Alliance, 1997Google Scholar).

29 Ibid.; see also Club, Appalachian Mountain, An Inventory of Biological, Recreational, and Forest Resources in the Northern Forest (Gorham, N.H.: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1993Google Scholar).

30 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001; and National Assessment Synthesis Team, Climate Change Impacts on the United StatesGoogle Scholar.

31 In addition to literature from the NFA, I examined publications and Web sites of the Appalachian Mountain Club, Vermont Natural Resources Council, The Wilderness Society, Northern Appalachian Restoraton Project/The Northern Forest Forum, and Restore: The North WoodsGoogle Scholar.

32 Robert Braile, “Warming Would Bring Regional Disruptions,”Boston Globe, New Hampshire Weekly, September 10, 2000, p. 1; and Curt Suplee, “Drastic Climate Changes Forecast; Global Warming Likely to Cause Droughts, Coastal Erosion in U.S., Report Says.”Washington Post, June 12, 2000, p. A3.Google Scholar

33 Glen Scherer, “Hot Enough for You? Computers Model a Warming New England,” AMC Outdoors (January/February 2001), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.

34 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001Google Scholar.

35 These figures come from the EPA's climate change Web site: http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/emissions/individual/index.htmlGoogle Scholar.

36 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992), p. 75Google Scholar.

37 From an interview on Fresh Air, WHYY, Philadelphia, May 1995Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 150Google Scholar.

39 For example, see Stonich, Susan, “Globalization and the Shrimp Mariculture Industry: The Social Justice and Environmental Quality Implications in Central America,” Society and Natural Resources 10, No. 2 (1997), pp. 161–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See the Web sites for Clean Air–Cool Planet (http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org), Cities for Climate Protection (http://www.iclei.org), Climate Solutions (http://www.climatesolutions.org), and the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (http://www.massclimateaction.org).

41 Graedel, Thomas E. and Allenby, Braden R., Industrial Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994Google Scholar).