The modern environmental movement differed from an early form of environmentalism that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, usually called conservationism. Led by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the conservationists focused on the wise and efficient use of natural resources. Modern environmentalism arose not out of a productionist concern for managing natural resources for future development, but as a consumer movement that demanded a clean, safe, and beautiful environment as part of a higher standard of living. The expanding post–World War II economy raised consciousness about the environmental costs of economic progress, but it also led increasingly affluent Americans to insist upon a better quality of life. Since the demand for a cleaner, safer, and more beautiful environment that would enhance the quality of life could not be satisfied by the free market, environmentalists turned toward political action as the means to protect the earth. Still, the preservationist strand of the conservationist movement was an important precursor to the modern environmental movement. As represented by such figures as John Muir of the Sierra Club and Aldo Leopold of the Wilderness Society, the preservationists argued that natural spaces such as forests and rivers were not just raw materials for economic development, but also aesthetic resources. Thus, they stated that the government needed to protect beautiful natural spaces from development through such measures as establishing national parks. In the post–World War II era, many more Americans gained the resources to pursue outdoor recreational activities and travel to national parks. Thus, preservationist ideas came to enjoy widespread popularity. No longer simply the province of small groups led by pioneers such as Muir and Leopold, preservationism became part of a mass movement.
Yet while preservationism was an important part of the environmentalism's goals, the movement's agenda was much broader and more diverse. While preservationism focused on protecting specially designated nonresidential areas, environmentalists shifted attention to the effects of the environment on daily life. In the 1960s and 1970s, the environmental movement focused its attention on pollution and successfully pressured Congress to pass measures to promote cleaner air and water. In the late 1970s, the movement increasingly addressed environmental threats created by the disposal of toxic waste. Toward the end of the century, the environmental agenda also included such worldwide problems as ozone depletion and global warming.
Environmentalism was based on the spread of an ecological consciousness that viewed the natural world as a biological and geological system that is an interacting whole. Ecologists emphasized human responsibility for the impact of their daily living on a wider natural world, fearing that human disruption of the earth's ecosystem threatened the survival of the planet. The spread of ecological consciousness from the scientific world to the general public was reflected in popular metaphors of the planet as Spaceship Earth or Mother Earth. An ecological consciousness was evident even in works of popular culture. For instance, in his 1971 hit song "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)," Marvin Gaye sang:
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and
south and east
Radiation underground and in the sky, animals and
birds who live near by all die
What about this overcrowded land
How much more abuse from man can she stand?
Growth of the Environmental Movement in the 1960s and 1970s
Many historians find the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 to be a convenient marker for the beginning of the modern American environmental movement. Silent Spring, which spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, alerted Americans to the negative environmental effects of DDT, a potent insecticide that had been used in American agriculture starting in World War II. The concern about the use of DDT that the book raised led John F. Kennedy to establish a presidential advisory panel on pesticides. More significantly, however, Silent Spring raised concerns that the unchecked growth of industry would threaten human health and destroy animal life—the title of the work referred to Carson's fear that the continued destruction of the environment would eventually make the birds who sang outside her window extinct. Thus, Silent Spring conveyed the ecological message that humans were endangering their natural environment, and needed to find some way of protecting themselves from the hazards of industrial society. Along with the problem of nuclear war, Carson stated, "The central problem of our age has … become the contamination of man's total environment with … substances of incredible potential for harm."
The 1960s was a period of growth for the environmental movement. The movement began with a newfound interest in preservationist issues. In that decade, membership in former conservationist organizations like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club skyrocketed from 123,000 in 1960 to 819,000 in 1970. President Lyndon Johnson also took an interest in preservationist issues. Between 1963 and 1968, he signed into law almost three hundred conservation and beautification measures, supported by more than $12 billion in authorized funds. Among these laws, the most significant was the Wilderness Act of 1964, which permanently set aside certain federal lands from commercial economic development in order to preserve them in their natural state. The federal government also took a new interest in controlling pollution. Congress passed laws that served as significant precedents for future legislative action on pollution issues—for instance, the Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1967, the Clean Water Act of 1960, and the Water Quality Act of 1965.
During the 1960s, environmentalism became a mass social movement. Drawing on a culture of political activism inspired in part by the civil rights and antiwar movements, thousands of citizens, particularly young middle-class white men and women, became involved with environmental politics. The popularity of the environmental agenda was apparent by 1970. In that year, the first Earth Day was organized on 22 April to focus the public's attention on threats to the environment. In New York City, 100,000 people thronged Fifth Avenue to show their support for protecting the earth. Organizers estimated that fifteen hundred colleges and ten thousand schools took part in Earth Day, and Time magazine estimated that about twenty million Americans participated in the event in some fashion.
Earth Day was organized by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, who wanted to send "a big message to the politicians—a message to tell them to wake up and do something." Thanks to widespread public support for environmental goals, the 1970s became a critical decade for the passage of federal legislation. In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for all "major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment." During the 1970s, twelve thousand such statements were prepared.
Along with the growth of the environmental movement, a series of well-publicized environmental crises in the late 1960s focused the nation's attention on the need to control pollution. Examples include the 1969 blowout of an oil well platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, which contaminated scenic California beaches with oil, and in the same year the bursting into flames of the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, Ohio, because of toxic contamination. In the 1970s, Congress passed important legislation to control pollution. The most significant of these new laws included the Clear Air Act of 1970, the Pesticide Control Act of 1972, the Ocean Dumping Act of 1972, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, the Clean Air Act of 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976. These laws established national environmental quality standards to be enforced by a federally dominated regulatory process known as command and control. The Clean Air Act, for instance, established national air quality standards for major pollutants that were enforced by a federal agency.
Other significant environmental legislation passed in the 1970s included the preservationist measures of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. Another significant piece of legislation, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, or Superfund Act, was passed in 1980. Designed to help control toxic hazards, the act established federal "superfund" money for the cleanup of contaminated waste sites and spills.
To enforce federal regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970. An independent federal agency, the EPA was given consolidated responsibility for regulating and enforcing federal programs on air and water pollution, environmental radiation, pesticides, and solid waste. In response to the flurry of environmental regulation passed by Congress in the 1970s, the EPA expanded its operations: it began with a staff of eight thousand and a budget of $455 million and by 1981 had a staff of nearly thirteen thousand and a budget of $1.35 billion. Enforcing environmental regulations proved to be a difficult and complex task, particularly as new legislation overburdened the agency with responsibilities. The enforcement process required the gathering of various types of information—scientific, economic, engineering, and political—and the agency needed to contend with vigorous adversarial efforts from industry and environmental organizations.
The flurry of federal environmental regulation resulted in part from the rise of a powerful environmental lobby. Environmental organizations continued to expand their ranks in the 1970s. Membership in the Sierra Club, for instance, rose from 113,000 in 1970 to 180,000 in 1980. During the 1970s, mainstream environmental organizations established sophisticated operations in Washington, D.C. Besides advocating new environmental legislation, these groups served a watchdog function, ensuring that environmental regulations were properly enforced by the EPA and other federal agencies. While these organizations focused on their own specific issues and employed their own individual strategies, a Group of Ten organizations met regularly to discuss political strategy. This group consisted of the National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Policy Institute, the Izaak Walton League, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council, the National Parks Conservation Association, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society. During this decade, mainstream environmental organizations became increasingly professionalized, hiring more full-time staff. They hired lobbyists to advocate for environmental legislation, lawyers to enforce environmental standards through the courts, and scientists to prove the need for environmental regulation and counter the claims of industry scientists.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of critics obtained an audience by asserting that the ecosystem placed limits on economic development and often giving a bleak outlook for the earth's future. For instance, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 work, The Population Bomb, which brought the issue of global overpopulation to the nation's attention, apocalyptically claimed that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and made a number of dire predictions that turned out to be false. The Club of Rome's best selling The Limits of Growth (1972), written by a team of MIT researchers, offered a melancholy prediction of environmental degradation resulting from population pressure, resource depletion, and pollution. But while such critics reached an audience for a short period of time, their calls to address long-term threats to the earth's ecosystem, such as world population growth, went unheeded.
The 1980s: Environmental Backlash and Radical Environmentalism
In the 1970s, environmental goals enjoyed a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 changed that. Espousing a conservative, pro-business ideology, Reagan sought to free American corporations from an expanding regulatory apparatus. Reagan capitalized on the late 1970s Sagebrush Rebellion of westerners who sought to have federal land transferred to the states in order to avoid federal environmental regulations. Reagan appointed a leader of the Sagebrush Rebellion, James Watt, as secretary of the Interior. Watt took a strong pro-development stand hostile to the traditional resource preservation orientation of the Interior Department. He used his post to portray all environmentalists as radicals outside the American mainstream. Reagan also appointed as EPA head Anne Burford, a person committed to curtailing the agency's enforcement of environmental regulations. Between 1980 and 1983, the EPA lost one-third of its budget and one-fifth of its staff. Underfunded and understaffed, these cuts had a lasting effect on the agency, leaving it without the resources to fulfill all of its functions.
Yet while Reagan was able to stalemate the environmental agenda, his anti-environmentalist posture proved unpopular. The American public still overwhelmingly supported environmental goals. Environmentalist organizations were able to expand their membership in response to Reagan's policies. Between 1980 and 1990, the Sierra Club's membership multiplied from 180,000 to 630,000, while the Wilderness Society's membership soared from 45,000 to 350,000. In 1983, Reagan was forced to replace Watt and Buford with more moderate administrators. In the mid-1980s, a number of new environmental laws were passed, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Amendments of 1984, the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1986, and the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986. As a testament to the continuing popularity of environmental goals, Reagan's Republican vice president, George Bush Sr., declared himself an "environmentalist" in his 1988 campaign for president. On Earth Day 1990, President Bush stated that "Every day is Earth Day" and even major industries that were the target of environmental regulation, such as oil and gas, took out advertisements in major newspapers stating, "Every day is Earth Day for us."
The 1980s saw a splintering of the environmental movement. A number of radical environmentalist groups challenged the mainstream environmental organizations, claiming that they had become centralized bureaucracies out of touch with the grassroots and were too willing to compromise the environmental agenda. One of the groups to make this challenge was Earth First!, which appeared on the national scene in 1981 espousing the slogan, "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth." Earth First! employed a variety of radical tactics, including direct action, civil disobedience, guerilla theater, and "ecotage," the sabotage of equipment used for clear cutting, road-building, and dam construction. Two other radical environmentalist organizations were Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace—each was a global organization formed in the 1970s that had significant support in the United States. Friends of the Earth was founded by the former Sierra Club director, David Brower. It pursued activist strategies and argued that protection of the environment required fundamental political and social change. Greenpeace's aggressive campaigns against nuclear testing, whaling, sealing, nuclear power, and radioactive waste disposal received increasing attention during the 1980s. In addition, some radical environmentalists showed a new interest in deep ecology, which challenged the traditional anthropomorphism of the environmental movement.
The 1980s also saw the growth of grassroots organizations that organized to oppose threats to their local environment: a contaminated waste site, a polluting factory, or the construction of a new facility deemed to be harmful. Because their concerns were locally oriented and generally consisted of the removal of a specific environmental threat, they were referred to as NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) organizations. The threat of contaminated waste sites raised concerns throughout the country, particularly after the publicity surrounding the evacuation of Love Canal, New York, in the late 1970s after it was revealed that the town had been built on contaminated soil. National organizations arose to support local efforts, including the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, founded by former Love Canal resident Lois Gibbs, and the National Toxics Campaign. Grassroots environmental groups continued to form throughout the 1980s. While Citizen's Clearinghouse worked with 600 groups in 1984, by 1988 it was working with over 4,500. NIMBYism often limited the impact of these groups, since they frequently disbanded once their particular issue of concern was resolved. Yet participation in these organizations often raised the consciousness of participants to larger environmental issues.
The late 1980s saw the growth of the environmental justice movement, which argued that all people have a right to a safe and healthy environment. Those concerned with environmental justice argued that poor and minority Americans are subjected to disproportionate environmental risks. It concentrated on such issues as urban air pollution, lead paint, and transfer stations for municipal garbage and hazardous waste. Environmental justice organizations widened the support base for environmentalism, which had traditionally relied upon the educated white middle class. The success of the environmental justice movement in bringing the racial and class dimension of environmental dangers to the nation's attention was reflected in the creation of the Office of Environmental Justice by the EPA in 1992.
The Global Environment and the 1990s
By the end of the 1980s, the environmental movement had increasingly come to focus its attention on global issues that could only be resolved through international diplomacy. Issues such as global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, biodiversity, marine mammals, and rain forests could not be dealt with merely on the national level. As residents in the world's largest economy, and consequently the world's largest polluter, consumer of energy, and generator of waste, American environmentalists felt a special responsibility to ensure their country's participation in international agreements to protect the earth.
While the United States was a reluctant participant in international efforts to address environmental concerns compared with other industrial nations, the federal government did take steps to address the global nature of the environmental issue. In 1987, the United States joined with 139 other nations to sign the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. The protocol pledged the signees to eliminate the production of chlorofluorocarbons, which cause destruction to the ozone layer. In 1992, representatives from 179 nations, including the United States, met in Brazil at the Conference on Environment and Development, where they drafted a document that proclaimed twenty-eight guiding principles to strengthen global environmental governance. Responding to criticism that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was likely to harm the North American environment, President Bill Clinton in 1993 negotiated a supplemental environmental agreement with Mexico and Canada to go along with NAFTA. While some environmental organizations endorsed that agreement, others claimed that it did not go far enough in countering the negative environmental effects of NAFTA. In 1997, Clinton committed the United States to the Kyoto Protocol, which set forth timetables and emission targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. President George W. Bush, however, rescinded this commitment when he took office in 2001.
Environmentalists were an important part of an "antiglobalization" coalition that coalesced at the end of the 1990s. It argued that the expansion of the global economy was occurring without proper environmental and labor standards in place. In 1999, globalization critics gained international attention by taking to the streets of Seattle to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization.
In 1996, environmentalists critical of mainstream politics formed a national Green Party, believing that a challenge to the two-party system was needed to push through needed environmental change. In 1996 and 2000, the Green Party ran Ralph Nader as its presidential candidate. In 2000, Nader received 2.8 million votes, or 2.7 percent of the vote. The party elected a number of candidates to local office, particularly in the western states.
Achievements and Challenges
As the twentieth century ended, American environmentalists could point to a number of significant accomplishments. The goal of protecting the planet remained a popular one among the general public. In 2000, Americans celebrated the thirty-first Earth Day. In a poll taken that day, 83 percent of Americans expressed broad agreement with the environmental movement's goals and 16 percent reported that they were active in environmental organizations. In 2000, the thirty largest environmental organizations had close to twenty million members. Meanwhile, the country had committed significant resources to environmental control. In 1996, the U.S. spent $120 billion on environmental control—approximately 2 percent of its gross domestic product.
Environmental regulations put in place in the 1960s and 1970s had led to cleaner air and water. In 1997, the EPA reported that the air was the cleanest it had been since the EPA began record keeping in 1970; the emissions of six major pollutants were down by 31 percent. In 2000, the EPA reported that releases of toxic materials into the environment had declined 42 percent since 1988. The EPA also estimated that 70 percent of major lakes, rivers, and streams were safe for swimming and fishing—twice the figure for 1970. The dramatic cleanup of formerly contaminated rivers such as the Cuyahoga and the Potomac was further evidence that antipollution efforts were having their desired effects.
Yet many environmentalists remained pessimistic about the state of the planet. Despite the nation's progress in reducing pollution, at the end of the 1990s sixty-two million Americans lived in places that did not meet federal standards for either clean air or clean water. The Super-fund program to clean up toxic areas had proven both costly and ineffective. In the mid-1990s, of the thirteen hundred "priority sites of contamination" that had been identified by the EPA under the program, only seventy-nine had been cleaned up. The political stalemate on environmental legislation that persisted for much of the 1980s and 1990s stymied efforts to update outdated pollution control efforts. In addition, a number of media sources in the late 1990s reported that America's national parks were underfunded and overcrowded because of cuts in the federal budget.
A more serious problem was related to do the nation's unwillingness to address long-term threats to the environment such as global warming, population growth, and the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources. Global warming threatened to raise ocean levels and generate violent and unpredictable weather, affecting all ecosystems; unrestrained world population growth would put greater pressure on the earth's limited natural resources; and the eventual exhaustion of fossil fuel resources would require the development of new forms of energy. The administration of George W. Bush represented the United States' lack of attention to these issues: not only did Bush pull the nation out of the Kyoto Protocol designed to control global warming, but his energy policy consisted of an aggressive exploitation of existing fossil fuel resources without significant efforts to find alternate sources of energy.
By the end of the twentieth century, many environmentalists showed a new concern with the goal of sustainable development, which sought long-term planning to integrate environmental goals with social and economic ones. Yet even as environmental organizations addressed global issues such as global warming, population growth, and the exhaustion of fossil fuel resources, the American public remained more concerned with more tangible issues such as air and water pollution. Indeed, the environmental movement had been successful because it had promised a tangible increase in the everyday quality of life for Americans through a cleaner, safer, and more beautiful environment. Mobilizing popular support to combat more abstract and long-term ecological threats thus presented environmentalists with a challenge. If they proved unable to prevent future degradation of the earth's environment from these long-term threats, few environmentalists would consider their movement a real success.
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—Daniel Geary
