The Politics of Saving the Environment

The Politics of Saving the Environment — page 7 — THE PoLITICS OF SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT GoALS AND METHODs The goals and methods of different envi ronmentalists are quite varied For example Some focus on raising public awareness of the need to reduce reuse and recycle materi als to cut back on the resources consumed in making packaging and transporting con sumer products Others work to enact local national or international laws that protect the environment such as by requiring that motor vehicles meet certain fuel efficiency and emissions standards creating nature reserves banning the killing of endangered species or regulating the chemicals that businesses can emit into the air and water Some environmentalists organize various kinds of protest actions to draw attention to or to disrupt activities by corporations and governments that harm the environment Others seek to establish alternative commu nities that live in closer harmony with nature Despite the diversity of the movement most environmentalists agree on four general principles protection of the environment democracy social justice and nonviolence However a few individuals and groups believe that violence in the name of environmen talism is justified if it is committed against 12

The Politics of Saving the Environment — page 8 — ENVIRONMENTALISMAN OVERVIEW CANS Many environmentalists suggest recycling plastics paper and metals to preserve the environment Shutterstock com businesses that damage the environment or that kill or abuse animals for profit such as mining and logging companies and the mak ers of fur coats Critics of this practice many of whom are not themselves environmental ists have referred to it as ecoterrorism Two BASIC APPROACHES In many cases environmentalists want protection of the natural world to directly improve or maintain human health and 13

The Politics of Saving the Environment — page 9 — THE POLITICS OF SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT well being However many believe that the environment should also be protected in other cases They claim that living things other than humans and the natural envi ronment as a whole should also be taken into account when people reason about the morality of political economic and social policies Environmentalists are often divided into two intellectual camps those whose thinking about the environment is anthropocentric or human centered and those whose thinking is biocentric or life centered This division has also been described as shallow ecology versus deep ecology The division between these two basic approaches played a central role in the development of environmental thought in the late 20th century ANTHROPOCENTRIC Schools of THOUGHT Anthropocentric approaches focus on the negative effects that environmental dam age has on human beings including harm to human health and quality of life They also tend to think of the value of the natural envi ronment in terms of its usefulness to humans 14

The Politics of Saving the Environment — page 10 — ENVIRONMENTALISMAN OVERVIEW According to this approach for example the problem with polluting the ocean or deplet ing the ozone layer is that doing so ultimately harms human beings who use the ocean as a source of food and rely on the ozone layer for protection against ultraviolet radiation from the Sun APOCALYPTIC ENVIRONMENTALISM The vision of the environmental movement of the 1960s and early 70s was generally pessimistic reflecting a belief that Earth's long termprospects were bleak Apocalyptic or survivalist environmentalism stressed the possible destruction of the planet Works such as Rachel Carson s Silent Spring 1962 and Paul Ehrlich s The Population Bomb 1968 suggested that the natural environment was reaching the limits of what it could sustain Influenced by such books some environ mentalists began to call for increasing the powers of central governments to limit human activities thought to be environment tally harmful Robert Heilbroner s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect 1974 for example argued that human survival ultimately required the sacrifice of human freedom 15

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