Discussion
Read Chapter 11 of McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun.
Read “Let’s Call Environmentalism What It Is” by Bela Williams in YES! Magazine.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/12/24/lets-call-environmentalism-what-it-is/?fbclid=IwAR3SvO344Hm32oDJbVKhDgpXJvtXeofc9WpNkGIrCRMsIrtGk_DPD2YJFxo
You will read 2 more articles as linked in “C” in the Statement direction below.
“Statement by (your last name)”
1. You will post a “Statement by (your last name).” (Worth 60 points – review Discussion Rubric) If you want to draft your statement in a Word document so you can easily proof-read it before posting, that is great, but you must copy and paste your entire Statement into the Discussion area text box (after you click on Create Thread). Do not attach the Word document. (I know we do attach Worksheets but other students need to read your Statement, so it is better to use the text box.)
In your statement answer the following questions. You can copy and include the questions in your post or just restate the question in your opening sentence. Write in complete sentences, several sentences or a paragraph. Please do use the labels A, B, C.
A. What term does Bela Williams want us to use instead of “environmentalism”? Why is the term she recommends better than just “environmentalism”? (2-3 sentences)
B. Give one example from Williams article of a situation where an environmental effort, event or idea actually caused harm. You will need to read one of the articles that is linked in this article. Watch for underlined words in this article, right click and “open in a new tab”.Copy and paste that link directly into your Statement (after you go to it). Explain what the environmental effort was, how it caused harm and to who or what, and finally was the harm an unintended consequence or an intended consequence. This paragraph needs to be 5-7 sentences long. If you quote the article be sure to use “quotation marks” and cite it by putting the authors last name in parenthesis after your quote.
C. How does the example of American environmentalism in the creation of Yellowstone National Park compare to the environmentalism of the Green Belt movement as described in your textbook (McNeill pages 350-352) and the Green Belt Movement according to their own website’s history page (
http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/who-we-are/our-history
) ? To answer this question you need to read the linked article about Yellowstone’s creation (
https://time.com/5562258/indigenous-environmental-justice/
) How are these two environmental efforts different? Discuss who was promoting the effort and the differences between those people, and who benefited from the effort and/or who was harmed by the effort. Use specific examples from the text and the Yellowstone article. Use quotation marks if you quote a source and just site your source by either (Gilio-Whitaker) (the author of the Yellowstone article), or (McNeill WITH THE PAGE number, or electronic location number). This answer should be one or two paragraphs and 7-10 sentences long.
Discussion
Read Chapter 11 of McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun.
Read “Let’s Call Environmentalism What It Is” by Bela Williams in YES! Magazine.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/12/24/lets-call-environmentalism-what-itis/?fbclid=IwAR3SvO344Hm32oDJbVKhDgpXJvtXeofc9WpNkGIrCRMsIrtGk_DPD2YJFxo
You will read 2 more articles as linked in “C” in the Statement direction below.
“Statement by (your last name)”
1. You will post a “Statement by (your last name).” (Worth 60 points – review Discussion
Rubric) If you want to draft your statement in a Word document so you can easily proof-read it
before posting, that is great, but you must copy and paste your entire Statement into the
Discussion area text box (after you click on Create Thread). Do not attach the Word document.
(I know we do attach Worksheets but other students need to read your Statement, so it is
better to use the text box.)
In your statement answer the following questions. You can copy and include the questions in
your post or just restate the question in your opening sentence. Write in complete sentences,
several sentences or a paragraph. Please do use the labels A, B, C.
A. What term does Bela Williams want us to use instead of “environmentalism”? Why is the
term she recommends better than just “environmentalism”? (2-3 sentences)
B. Give one example from Williams article of a situation where an environmental effort, event
or idea actually caused harm. You will need to read one of the articles that is linked in this
article. Watch for underlined words in this article, right click and “open in a new tab”. Copy and
paste that link directly into your Statement (after you go to it). Explain what the environmental
effort was, how it caused harm and to who or what, and finally was the harm an unintended
consequence or an intended consequence. This paragraph needs to be 5-7 sentences long. If
you quote the article be sure to use “quotation marks” and cite it by putting the authors last
name in parenthesis after your quote.
C. How does the example of American environmentalism in the creation of Yellowstone
National Park compare to the environmentalism of the Green Belt movement as described in
your textbook (McNeill pages 350-352) and the Green Belt Movement according to their own
website’s history page ( http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/who-we-are/our-history ) ? To
answer this question you need to read the linked article about Yellowstone’s creation (
https://time.com/5562258/indigenous-environmental-justice/ ) How are these two
environmental efforts different? Discuss who was promoting the effort and the differences
between those people, and who benefited from the effort and/or who was harmed by the effort.
Use specific examples from the text and the Yellowstone article. Use quotation marks if you
quote a source and just site your source by either (Gilio-Whitaker) (the author of the
Yellowstone article), or (McNeill WITH THE PAGE number, or electronic location number).
This answer should be one or two paragraphs and 7-10 sentences long.
CHAPTER 11
Ideas and Politics
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
“Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
—Katharine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in
The African Queen (1951)
The twentieth century witnessed a kaleidoscopic variety of ideologies and policies.
Turbulent times invited reconsideration of old verities. For environmental history the
powerful, prevailing ideas mattered more than the explicitly environmental ones.
Environmental ideas and politics, although part of the new grand equations that
governed societies after the 1960s, never came close to dislodging reigning ideas and
policies, which fit so well with the realities of the times. Even when they did not fit, they
had the staying power of incumbents. One reason the environment in the twentieth
century changed so much is because prevailing ideas and politics—from an ecological
perspective—changed so little.
Big Ideas
What people thought affected the environment because to some extent it shaped their
behavior. And of course, the changing environment played a part in affecting what
people thought. Here there are two related points. First, what people thought
specifically about the environment, nature, life, and such mattered only very marginally
before 1970. Second, at all times, but more so before 1970, other kinds of ideas
governed the human behavior that most affected the environment. So this section is
divided into two parts: big ideas and environmental ideas.
Big ideas are the ones that somehow succeed in molding the behavior of millions. They
are usually ideas about economics and politics. Ideas, like genetic mutations and
technologies, are hatched all the time, but most of them quickly disappear for want of
followers. Ruthless selection is always at work, but, again like mutations and
technologies, the notion of increasing returns to scale often applies. When an idea
becomes successful, it easily becomes even more successful: it gets entrenched in
social and political systems, which assists in its further spread. It then prevails even
beyond the times and places where it is advantageous to its followers. Historians of
technology refer to analogous situations as “technological lock-in.” For example, the
narrow-gauge railway track adopted in the nineteenth century, once it became the
standard, could not be replaced even after it prevented improvements that would allow
for faster trains. Too much was already invested in the old ways. Ideological lock-in,
the staying power of orthodox ideas, works the same way. Big ideas all became
orthodoxies, enmeshed in social and political systems, and difficult to dislodge even if
they became costly.
The spread of successful ideas is governed mainly by communications technology and
politics. Five great changes—language, writing, printing, mass literacy, and electronic
transmission—dominated the evolution of communications technology. This
cumulation made successful ideas yet more successful, reducing the variety of
influential ideas and adding to the sway of the ever fewer winners.1 Political factors
also influenced the success of many ideas. Centuries ago, Christianity benefited from
states (such as the Roman Empire) devoted to its propagation. In the twentieth
century, Anglo-American economic thought spread with help from the prominence
achieved by the United States.
At the outset of the century the ideas with mass followings remained the great
religions. Their doctrines include various injunctions about nature. The God of the
ancient Hebrews enjoins believers to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and
subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and
over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26–29). This and other
biblical passages2 inspired an argument to the effect that Christianity, or the JudeoChristian tradition, uniquely encouraged environmental despoliation. But the record of
environmental ruin around the world, even among followers of Buddhism, Taoism, and
Hinduism (seen in this argument as creeds more reverent of nature), suggests this is
not so: either other religious traditions similarly encouraged predatory conduct, or
religions did not notably constrain behavior with respect to the natural world.3
The latter proposition makes more sense. Few believers knew more than a smattering
of the sacred scriptures. And most of those who did, being human, easily allowed
expediency and interest more than the scriptures of religious texts to govern their
behavior. Every durable body of scripture is ambiguous, self-contradictory, and
amenable to different interpretations to suit different circumstances. Islamic and
Hindu societies maintained some sacred groves; observant Jains tried not to kill any
animals. But these and other constraints affected environmental outcomes only
modestly. In the unusually secular age of the twentieth century, the ecological impact
of religions, rarely great, shrank to the vanishing point.
A variation on the Judeo-Christian theme is the notion that Western humanism,
rationalism, or the Scientific Revolution uniquely licensed environmental mayhem by
depriving nature of its sacred character.4 While the lucubrations of Erasmus,
Descartes, and Francis Bacon probably did not filter into the calculations of peasants,
fishermen, or most landowners in the twentieth century or before, there is something to
be said for this proposition. Western science helped recast environments everywhere
indirectly, by fomenting technological change.2 Sir Isaac Newton said that if he had
seen further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Scientists
of the twentieth century, such as Haber and Midgley, whose work proved enormously
consequential in ecological terms, stood on the shoulders of giants of scientific
method who held the notion that the job of science was to unlock the secrets of nature
and to deploy scientific knowledge in the service of human health and wealth. This
persuasive and pervasive idea legitimated all manner of environmental manipulation
wherever modern science took hold. Applied science brought, for example, the
chemical industry, which came of age in the mid-to late nineteenth century. By 1990 it
had generated some 80,000 new compounds that found routine use, and inevitably
also found their way into ecosystems unadapted to them. A small proportion of these,
even at tiny concentrations, proved disruptive, poisoning birds and fish, damaging
genes, and causing other usually unwelcome effects. Some entered ecosystems at
high concentrations, because while the world’s chemical industry in 1930 produced
only a million tons of organic chemicals, by 1999 the total had grown a thousandfold.6
Slowly but surely the chemical industry came to play a part in ecology, introducing new
selective criteria in biological evolution, namely compatibility with existing chemicals
present in the environment. Such a development and others like it were an accidental
result of rigorous scientific work over a century or more. In science more than religion,
ideas from earlier eras exerted an impact on environmental history in the twentieth
century.
Modern political ideas did too. Nationalism, born of the French Revolution, proved an
enormously successful idea in the twentieth century. It traveled well, across cultures
and continents, better than any other European idea, appearing in several guises. It
powerfully affected environmental change, although in no single consistent direction.
In some contexts, nationalism served as a spur to landscape preservation. As Europe
industrialized quickly after 1880, nostalgic notions of German, Swiss, or English
countryside acquired special patriotic overtones. In 1926 an Englishman could write
that “the greatest historical monument that we possess, the most essential thing that
is England, is the countryside, the market town, the village, the hedgerow, the lanes, the
copses, the streams and farmsteads.”7 The Swiss waxed sentimental and patriotic
about their mountains and farms, resisting railroads near the Matterhorn and other
threatening manifestations of what they often called “Americanism.”8 Germans honed
such forms of nationalism to a fine edge, alloyed them with idyllic romanticism, and
organized countless countryside preservation societies. Such ideas added a current to
Nazism. Himmler’s SS (the Nazi special forces) dreamed of converting Poland into a
landscape redolent of German tribal origins, with plenty of primeval forest to reflect the
peculiarly German love of nature.9
Similar equations of national identity with rural righteousness, the sanctity of (our)
land, and nature preservation cropped up wherever cities and industrialization spread.
Russian populism before 1917; Russian (not Soviet) nationalism after 1917; western
Canada’s Social Credit movement; D.H. Lawrence’s nature worship; the best-selling
and Nobel prize-winning Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun; the intellectual hodgepodge underlying Mediterranean fascism and Japanese militarism;10 Mao’s peasant
populism; and all manner of back-to-the-land, antimodern currents—all these reflected
political and cultural revulsion at urban and industrial transformations. In the
Mediterranean, they provoke dsome small-scale reforestation schemes, including ones
that won Mussolini’s favor because he thought they would make Italy colder and
thereby make Italians more warlike.11
In Russia, the connection between nationalism and nature crystallized around the
struggle to save Lake Baikal from pollution, a brave fight under Soviet conditions. Lake
Baikal, the pearl of Siberia, is the world’s deepest lake and one of the oldest. Its biota is
unique, containing many species found nowhere else on earth. In its limpid waters
some Soviet engineers saw an ideal cleaning fluid well-suited to the needs of the
country’s military-industrial complex. In 1957, authorities secretly planned a factory
for viscose fibers used in jet aircraft tires to be located on Baikal’s shores. Members of
the Soviet scientific and cultural elite took advantage of the Khrushchev thaw—a time
of unusual freedom of expression in Soviet life—to dissent publicly. In the end,
vociferous objections failed to prevent two cellulose plants from opening in 1966–
1967, by which time new plastics had made the fibers obsolete for jet tires. The dissent
did bring an unusual degree of attention, by Soviet standards, to pollution control. The
campaign may have helped deter another 1950s plan, one in which nuclear explosions
were to open up the southern end of Baikal, raising the water flow through power
stations on the Angara River.12
In India, Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948), who shared little with Mussolini, the Nazi
SS, or the USSR, crystallized a nostalgic nationalist vision of an artisan and peasant
India, free from the corrosive influences of modern industry as exemplified by Britain:
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West….
If an entire nation of 300 million [this was in 1928] took to similar economic
exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”13 Gandhi was exceptional:
most Indian nationalists, like Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted an industrial India, locustlike if
need be.
The SS did not carry out its plans for Poland, nor did India pursue Gandhi’s vision
instead of Nehru’s. In general, the preservationist, arcadian component in nationalism
lost out to a rival one that emphasized power and wealth, and therefore favored
industrialization and frontier settlement, regardless of ecological implications. The
nationalism unleashed in the Mexican Revolution, for instance, quickly abandoned
peasant causes in favor of accelerated industrialization. Argentina and Brazil pursued
the same vision, without the revolutions, after 1930. In Japan, nationalism and
industrialization were yoked together from the Meiji restoration to World War II (1868–
1945), and in a more subdued and less militaristic way, after 1945 as well. The vast
changes in land use and pollution patterns brought on by industrialization, then, were
in part a consequence of nationalisms.
So were the changes provoked by efforts to populate “empty” frontiers. States earned
popular support for steps to settle (and establish firm sovereignty over) the Canadian
Arctic, Soviet Siberia, the Australian Outback, Brazilian (not to mention Peruvian and
Ecuadorian) Amazonia, and the outer islands of Indonesia. Settling and defending such
areas involved considerable environmental change, deforestation in some cases, oil
infrastructure in others, and road building in nearly all.
Nationalism lurked behind other population policies too, notably pronatalism. Many
twentieth-century states sought security in numbers, especially in Europe where birth
rates were sagging. Hypernationalist regimes in particular tried to boost birth rates, in
France after the humiliation at the hands of Prussia in 1871, in fascist Italy, and in Nazi
Germany. The most successful was Rumania, under Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918–1989).
In 1965 he set a growth target of 30 million Rumanians by the year 2000, banned all
forms of birth control including abortion, and subjected women of childbearing age to
police surveillance to make sure they were not shirking their reproductive duties. At the
time, abortions outnumbered live births 4 to 1 in Rumania. After 1966, Rumanian
maternity wards were deluged, sometimes obliged to wedge two delivering mothers
into a single bed. Ceauşescu temporarily reversed the demographic transition and
doubled the birth rate, all for the greater glory of Rumania.14 Other embattled societies,
such as Stalin’s USSR, Iran after the 1979 revolution, the Syria of Hafiz al-Assad (ruled
1971–) also sought to maximize population to safeguard the nation. Nationalism, in its
myriad forms and through the multiple policies it inspired, was a crucially important
idea for its effects on the environment, especially when its adherents gave this
connection no thought.15
Communism, another European idea that traveled well, was in some respects the
highest form of nationalism. Its political success in Russia and China, in Cuba and
Vietnam, depended as much on its promise of independence from foreign domination
as on its promise of social justice. The same ambitions—economic development and
state power—that inspired state-sponsored industrialization elsewhere drove the
heroic sprints of communist five-year plans.
But communism had other components too. Deep in Marxism is the belief that nature
exists to be harnessed by labor. Friedrich Engels believed, like today’s most cheerful
optimists, that “the productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the
application of capital, labour and science.” Karl Marx endorsed the French socialists
who urged that the “exploitation of man by man” give way to the “exploitation of nature
by man.” Explicitly linking communist progress with environmental transformation, the
wordsmith V. Zazurbin in 1926 addressed the Soviet Writers Congress:
Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armor of cities, armed
with the stone muzzle of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads. Let
the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled. Let this be, and so it will be
inevitably. Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron
brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.
A Soviet historian, M. N. Pokrovsky, in 1931 foresaw the day “when science and
technique have attained to a perfection which we are as yet unable to visualise, [so
that] nature will become soft wax in [man’s] hands, which he will be able to cast in
whatever form he chooses.” Any ecological cost could be borne in the quest for such
lofty goals.16
Communists, especially in the USSR and eastern Europe, liked things big. Ostensibly
this was to realize economies of scale, but it became an ideology, a propaganda tactic,
and eventually an end in itself. Gigantism most famously affected architecture and
statuary but also industry, forestry, and agriculture. The Soviets typically built huge
industrial complexes, like Norilsk and Magnitogorsk, concentrating pollution. When the
USSR faced a timber shortage in the First Five-Year Plan (1929–1933), millions of
prisoners and collective farmworkers were sent to the forests to cut trees as quickly as
possible. The resulting deforestation and erosion put sandbars in the Volga, inhibiting
traffic on the country’s chief waterway.17 In collectivizing agriculture, they created not
merely huge farms but huge fields, stretching as far as the eye could see, far larger
than necessary to realize efficiencies from mechanization. This maximized wind and
water erosion.18 Gigantism, together with the Marxist enthusiasm for conquering
nature, led to the slow death of the Aral Sea, the creation of the world’s biggest
artificial lake and the world’s biggest dam, and countless efforts “to correct nature’s
mistakes” on the heroic scale.19
Communism, at least after its initial consolidation in power, also resisted technological
innovation. With fixed production quotas pegged to Five Year Plans, Soviet and eastern
European factory bosses could ill afford to experiment with new technologies.
Subsidized energy prices helped to ossify industry in the USSR and eastern Europe, so
that, for example, most steel mills in 1990 still used the open-hearth process, an
obsolete nineteenth-century invention long since replaced in Japan, Korea, and the
West. The political system stymied decarbonization and dematerialization, leaving the
communist world with an energy-guzzling, pollution-intensive coketown economy to
the end—a fact that helped bring on that end in the Soviet sphere.
Communism aspired to become the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a
more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where communism failed: the quest for
economic growth. Capitalists, nationalists—indeed almost everyone, communists
included—worshiped at this same altar because economic growth disguised a
multitude of sins. Indonesians and Japanese tolerated endless corruption as long as
economic growth lasted. Russians and eastern Europeans put up with clumsy
surveillance states. Americans and Brazilians accepted vast social inequalities. Social,
moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed,
adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills.
Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere.
How?
This state religion had deep roots in earlier centuries, at least in imperial China and
mercantilist Europe. But it succeeded fully only after the Great Depression of the
1930s. Like an exotic intruder invading disturbed ecosystems, the growth fetish
colonized ideological fields around the world after the dislocations of the Depression: it
was the intellectual equivalent of the European rabbit. After the Depression, economic
rationality trumped all other concerns except security. Those who promised to deliver
the holy grail became high priests.
These were economists, mostly Anglo-American economists. They helped win World
War II by reflating and managing the American and British economies. The
international dominance of the United States after 1945 assured wide acceptance of
American ideas, especially in economics, where American success was most
conspicuous. Meanwhile the USSR proselytized within its geopolitical sphere, offering
a version of the growth fetish administered by engineers more than by economists.
American economists cheerfully accepted credit for ending the Depression and
managing the war economies. Between 1935 and 1970 they acquired enormous
prestige and power because, or so it seemed, they could manipulate demand through
minor adjustments in fiscal and monetary policy so as to minimize unemployment,
avoid slumps, and assure perpetual economic growth. They infiltrated the corridors of
power and the groves of academe, provided expert advice at home and abroad, trained
legions of acolytes from around the world, wrote columns for popular magazines—they
seized every chance to spread the gospel. Their priesthood tolerated many sects, but
agreed on fundamentals. Their ideas fitted so well with social and political conditions
of the time that in many societies they locked in as orthodoxy. All this mattered
because economists thought, wrote, and prescribed as if nature did not.
This was peculiar. Earlier economists, most notably the Reverend Thomas Malthus
(1766–1834) and W. S. Jevons (1835–1882), tried hard to take nature into account.
But with industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of the service sector, economic
theory by 1935 to 1960 crystallized as a bloodless abstraction in which nature figured,
if at all, as a storehouse of resources waiting to be used. Nature did not evolve, nor did
it twitch and adjust when tweaked. Economics, once the dismal science, became the
jolly science. One American economist in 1984 cheerfully forecast 7 billion years of
economic growth—only the extinction of the sun could cloud the horizon. Nobel Prize
winners could claim, without risk to their reputations, that “the world can, in effect, get
along without natural resources.”20 These were extreme statements but essentially
canonical views. If Judeo-Christian monotheism took nature out of religion, AngloAmerican economists (after about 1880) took nature out of economics.
The growth fetish, while on balance quite useful in a world with empty land, shoals of
undisturbed fish, vast forests, and a robust ozone shield, helped create a more
crowded and stressed one. Despite the disappearance of ecological buffers and
mounting real costs, ideological lock-in reigned in both capitalist and communist
circles. No reputable sect among economists could account for depreciating natural
assets. The true heretics, economists who challenged the fundamental goal of growth
and sought to recognize value in ecosystem services, remained outside the pale to the
end of the century.21 Economic thought did not adjust to the changed conditions it
helped to create; thereby it continued to legitimate, and indeed indirectly to cause,
massive and rapid ecological change. The overarching priority of economic growth
was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century.
From about 1880 to 1970 the intellectual world was aligned so as to deny the massive
environmental changes afoot. While economists ignored nature, ecologists pretended
humankind did not exist. Rather than sully their science with the uncertainties of
human affairs, they sought out pristine patches in which to monitor energy flows and
population dynamics. Consequently they had no political, economic—or ecological—
impact.
Environmental Ideas
In contrast to the big ideas of the twentieth century, explicitly environmental thought
mattered little before 1970. Acute observers, such as Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) in the
United States, remarked upon changes to forests, wildlife, soils, and biogeochemical
flows.22 Fears of global resource exhaustion, although almost always mistaken,
provoked laments and warnings. But the audience was small and the practical results
few. Environmental thinking appealed only to a narrow slice of society. Small nature
conservation societies arose almost everywhere in the Western world by 1910. Nature
preserves and national parks, more or less isolated from economic use, emerged after
1870, first in Australia and North America, where after the near elimination of
Aboriginal and Amerindian peoples, there was plenty of open space. These efforts
inspired widespread imitation, but in most countries preserves and parks had to be
small and had to accommodate existing economic activity. So these developments
scarcely slowed the momentum of environmental change. The ideas, however sound
and elegantly put, did not mesh with the times.23 That began to change in the 1960s.
The 1960s were turbulent times. From Mexico to Indonesia and from China to the
United States, received wisdom and constituted authority came under fierce attack. Of
the many ideas and movements nurtured in these heated conditions, two lasted better
than the rest: women’s equality and environmentalism. The success of
environmentalism (loosely defined as the view that humankind ought to seek peaceful
coexistence with, rather than mastery of, nature) depended on many things. In the
industrial world, pollution loads and dangerous chemicals had built up quickly in the
preceding decades. Wealth had accumulated (and diffused through Fordism) to the
point where most citizens could afford to worry about matters beyond money. In a
sense, the economic growth of the industrial countries in the era 1945 to 1973
provoked its own antithesis in environmentalism.24
Successful ideas require great communicators to bring about wide conversion. The
single most effective catalyst for environmentalism was an American aquatic zoologist
with a sharp pen, Rachel Carson (1907–1964). While working for the U.S. Bureau of
Fisheries (later the Fish and Wildlife Service) she began to publish articles and books,
mostly on marine life, that reached wide audiences. In 1962 her salvo against
indiscriminate use of pesticides, Silent Spring, appeared. She compared the
agrochemical companies to the Renaissance Borgias with their penchant for
poisoning. This earned her denunciations as a hysterical and unscientific woman from
chemical manufacturers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The resulting hue and
cry got her, and her detractors, onto national television in 1963. But her scientific
information, mainly concerning the deleterious effects of DDT and other insecticides
upon bird life, was mostly sound and her message successful. After serialization in an
influential magazine (The New Yorker), her book became a bestseller in several
languages. President John F. Kennedy, against the wishes of the USDA, convened a
government panel to look into pesticide problems, and its findings harmonized with
Carson’s. Eventually she had elementary schools named for her and her face graced
postage stamps.25
In another age Rachel Carson’s ideas might have been ignored.26 Instead she, and
hundreds like her, inspired followers and imitators. Millions now found the pollution
they had known most of their lives to be unnecessary and intolerable. Earth Day in
1970 mobilized some 20 million Americans in demonstrations against assaults on
nature. By the 1980s, anxieties about tropical deforestation, climate change, and the
thinning ozone shield added a fillip (and a new focus) to environmentalism. Earth Day
in 1990 attracted 200 million participants in 140 countries. American popular music—a
global influence—added the environment to its repertoire of subjects.27 Mainstream
religious leaders, from the Dalai Lama to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch (of Istanbul),
embraced aspects of environmentalism, as did some fundamentalist religious
groups.28 Big science and its government funders converted too. The United Nations
launched its Man and the Biosphere research program in 1971, and by 1990 most rich
countries had global-change science programs. Taken together, by 1998 these
amounted to the largest research program in world history.29
Between 1960 and 1990 a remarkable and potentially earth-shattering (earth-healing?)
shift took place. For millions of people swamps long suited only for draining had
become wetlands worth conserving. Wolves graduated from varmints to noble
savages. Nuclear energy, once expected to fuel a cornucopian future, became
politically unacceptable. Pollution no longer signified industrial wealth but became a
crime against nature and society. People held such views with varying emphases and
degrees of commitment. Movements based on them proved schismatic in the extreme,
but all shared in a common perceptual shift. The package of ideas proved highly
successful, to the point where by the late 1980s, oil companies and chemical firms
caved in and instructed their public relations staff to construct new “green” identities.
While the sincerity of their conversions remained open to doubt, their fig leaves
showed that in the realm of ideology, environmentalism had arrived.
This extraordinary intellectual and cultural shift started in the rich countries but
emerged almost everywhere. Environmentalism had many faces, each with its own
issues and agendas. Where it was once systematically repressed—in some countries
of the Soviet bloc ecological data were state secrets—it soon helped topple regimes. In
countries as poor as India, vigorous environmental groups emerged by 1973 and
coalesced by the 1980s. In poor countries environmentalism normally was entwined in
one or another social struggle over water, fish, or wood and had little to do with nature
for nature’s sake. A 1997 poll found the people most willing to part with their own
money to check pollution were Indians, Peruvians, and Chinese.30 The full meaning of
this new current will take decades, conceivably centuries, to reveal itself.31
International Politics and War
As with ideas, so with politics. By far the most important political forces for
environmental change were inadvertent and unwitting ones. Explicit, conscious
environmental politics, while growing in impact after 1970, still operated in the shadow
cast by conventional politics. This was true on both the international and national
scales.
SECURITY ANXIETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL NONCHALANCE. The dominant
characteristic of the twentieth-century international system was its highly agitated
state. By the standards of prior centuries, the big economies and populous countries
conducted their business with war very much on their minds, especially from about
1910 to 1991. War efforts in the two world wars were all-consuming. Security anxiety
between the wars, especially during the long Cold War (1945–1991), was high given
the perceived costs of unpreparedness. In this situation, states and societies had
strong incentives to maximize their military strength, to industrialize (and militarize)
their economies, and after 1945 to develop nuclear weapons. The international system,
in Darwinian language, selected rigorously against ecological prudence in favor of
policies dictated by short-term security considerations.
Security anxiety had countless environmental ramifications. In France after the defeat
of 1870, the army won the power to preserve public and private forests in northeastern
France, using them in a reorganized frontier defense system designed to channel
German invaders along narrow, well-fortified corridors. (The next German invasion, in
1914, came via Belgium). Many tense borders became de facto nature preserves
because ordinary human activities were prohibited (for example, Bulgaria–Greece, the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, and Iran–USSR). But other border
regions became targets for intensive settlement intended, among other goals, to
secure sovereignty, and consequently witnessed wide deforestation, as in Brazilian and
Ecuadorian Amazonia. Many states built road and rail systems with geopolitical
priorities in mind, such as Imperial Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad, Hitler’s
autobahns, the U.S. interstate system, and the Karakoram Highway between Pakistan
and China. Such major transport systems inevitably affected land-use patterns. Land
use occasionally was deliberately changed to promote military transport: In India, the
British before 1921 used irrigation to create “horse runs,” lush pastures for horse
breeding that were intended to keep the India Army supplied with mounts.32
By far the largest environmental effect of security anxiety came via the construction of
military-industrial complexes. After World War I it became clear that, aside from plenty
of young men, the main ingredient of military power was heavy industry. Horses and
heroism were obsolete. All the great powers of the twentieth century adopted policies
to encourage the production of munitions, ships, trucks, aircraft—and nuclear
weapons.
No component of military-industrial complexes enjoyed greater subsidy, protection
from public scrutiny, and latitude in its environmental impact than the nuclear
weapons business. At least nine countries built nuclear weapons, although only seven
admitted doing so (USA, U.K., France, USSR, China, India, and Pakistan). Israel and
South Africa developed nuclear weapons while pretending they hadn’t.
The American weapons complex involved some 3,000 sites in all. The United States
built tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and tested more than a thousand of them.
The jewel in this crown was the Hanford Engineering Works, a sprawling bomb factory
on the Columbia River in the bone-dry expanse of south-central Washington state. It
opened during World War II and built the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Over the next
50 years, Hanford released billions of gallons of radioactive wastes into the Columbia
and accidentally leaked some more into groundwater. In 1949, shortly after the Soviets
had exploded their first atomic bomb, the Americans conducted a secret experiment at
Hanford. The fallout detected from the Soviet test had prompted questions about how
quickly the Soviets were able to process plutonium. In response, American officials
decided to use “green” uranium, less than 20 days out of the reactor, to test their
hypotheses about Soviet activities. The Green Run, as it was known to those in on the
secret, released nearly 8,000 curies of iodine-131, dousing the downwind region with
radiation at levels varying between 80 and 1,000 times the limit then thought tolerable.
The local populace learned of these events in 1986, when Hanford became the first of
the U.S. nuclear weapons complexes to release documents concerning the
environmental effects of weapons production. The Green Run shows the
environmental liberties the Americans took under the influence of Cold War security
anxiety.33
But that was just the tip of the iceberg. More environmentally serious were the wastes,
which in the heat of the Cold War were left for the future to worry about. A half century
of weapons production around the United States left a big mess, including tens of
millions of cubic meters of long-lived nuclear waste. Partial cleanup is projected to
take 75 years and cost $100 billion to $1 trillion, the largest environmental remediation
project in history. Full cleanup is impossible. More than half a ton of plutonium is
buried around Hanford alone.34
The Soviets were more cavalier. Their nuclear program began with Stalin, who wanted
atomic weapons as fast as possible, whatever the human and environmental cost. As
it happened, the Soviet command economy was rather good at such things: a large
nuclear weapons complex arose from nothing in only a few years. The Soviets built
about 45,000 warheads and exploded about 715 between 1949 and 1991, mostly at
Semipalatinsk (in what is now Kazakhstan) and on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.
They used nuclear explosions to create reservoirs and canals and to open mine shafts.
In 1972 and 1984 they detonated three nuclear bombs to try to loosen ores from which
phosphate (for fertilizer) was derived. They dumped much of their nuclear wastes at
sea, mostly in the Arctic Ocean, some of it in shallow water. They scuttled defunct
nuclear submarines at sea. Most of the world’s known reactor accidents befell the
USSR’s Northern Fleet, based at Archangel.
The Soviets had only one center for reprocessing used nuclear fuel, at the Mayak
complex in the upper Ob River basin in western Siberia, now the most radioactive place
on earth. It accumulated 26 metric tons of plutonium, 50 times Hanford’s total. From
1948 to 1956 the Mayak complex dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, an
Ob tributary and the sole source of drinking water for 10,000 to 20,000 people. After
1952, storage tanks held some of Mayak’s most dangerous wastes, but in 1957 one
exploded, raining 20 million curies down onto the neighborhood—about 40 percent of
the level of radiation released at Chernobyl. After 1958, liquid wastes were stored in
Lake Karachay. In 1967 a drought exposed the lakebed’s radioactive sediments to the
steppe winds, sprinkling dangerous dust with 3,000 times the radioactivity released at
Hiroshima over an area the size of Belgium and onto a half million unsuspecting
people. By the 1980s, anyone standing at the lakeshore for an hour received a lethal
dose of radiation (600 roentgens/hr). A former chairman of the USSR’s Supreme
Soviet’s Subcommittee on Nuclear Safety, Alexander Penyagin, likened the situation at
Mayak to 100 Chernobyls. No one knew the extent of contamination in the former
USSR because the nuclear complex was so large and so secret. Much of the complex
was shut down in the last years of the USSR, but the mess remained and Russia
cannot afford much in the way of cleanup.35
The lethal residues of the British, French, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, South
African (and perhaps a few other) nuclear weapons programs were, mercifully, not on
the superpower scale.36 Taken as a whole, these programs not only burdened
posterity with a long-term waste-management obligation, but they also gobbled up
nearly a tenth of the commercial energy deployed worldwide after 1940.37 Future
historians will need to be at their best to convey to future generations the Cold War
anxiety that led responsible officials to sanction the slipshod production of nuclear
weapons and disposal of wastes.
WAR AND THE ENVIRONMENT. Much less was done in war than in the name of war.
The twentieth century did not lack for prolonged combat, but most of the
environmental changes wrought in combat proved fleeting. Bombers flattened most of
Berlin and Tokyo in 1944–1945, but both cities sprang up again within a decade or
two. American bombers put some 20 million craters in Vietnam (1965–1973), but
vegetation covered most of these wounds, while some eventually served as
fishponds.38 In the war between Japan and China (1937–1945), Chinese Nationalists,
hoping to forestall a Japanese advance, destroyed the dikes holding the Huanghe
(Yellow River) in 1938. Probably the single most environmentally damaging act of war,
it drowned several hundred thousand Chinese (and many thousand Japanese),
destroyed millions of hectares of cropland in three provinces, and flooded out 11 cities
and 4,000 villages. But the labor of surviving Chinese made good the devastation in a
few years. The intense combat on the Western front and at Gallipoli during World War I
and the scorched-earth policies of the German-Soviet struggle during World War II
brought correspondingly intense environmental devastation. But patient labor and the
processes of nature have hidden these scars and assimilated into the surrounding
countryside the sites of even the most ferocious battles—except where there has been
conscious effort to preserve the battlefields as memorials. In the Gulf War of 1991,
Iraqi forces ignited huge oil fires that darkened the skies, and spilled further oil into the
shallow and biologically rich Persian Gulf. The atmospheric pall dissipated in a few
months when the burning wells were capped, but marine life took (and will take) years
to recover. The Gulf War may prove an exception to the rule about the fleeting nature of
environmental damage from combat.39
While environments governed by irrigation works such as China’s were the most
vulnerable to war’s destruction, deforestation took (and will take) longer to heal.
Dryland agriculture recovered quickly from war, on average in about three years.
Pasture and grassland often took a little longer, perhaps 10 years. But forests would
take a century or three. For centuries warfare had featured forest destruction as policy.
Caesar burned Gallic woods. In the twentieth century the prominence of guerrilla
tactics meant that war played an unusually large role in deforestation. Many wars of
colonial resistance in Africa and Southeast Asia involved guerrilla campaigns. During
the Cold War, many of the proxy wars fought in Africa, Asia, and Central America did
too. Guerrillas had to hide, and forests provided ideal cover; hence antiguerrilla forces
destroyed forest. At times guerrillas did too, often as acts of arson aimed at occupying
powers or forces of constituted order.
Twentieth-century technology made forest destruction much easier than in Caesar’s
(or William Tecumseh Sherman’s) day. The French pioneered incendiary bombing of
forests in the Rif War (1921–1926), an uprising of Moroccan Berbers against Spanish
and French colonial power. Napalm debuted in World War II in flamethrowers and
proved its effectiveness against forest cover in the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) before
becoming a major weapon in the American arsenal in Vietnam. The British inaugurated
the use of chemical defoliants in the Malaya insurgency in the 1950s. The Americans
used them on a large scale (for example, Agent Orange) in Vietnam. The Soviet-Afghan
War begun in 1979 witnessed the use of a variety of high-tech defoliants. These and a
hundred cases like them constitute some of the more durable ecological effects of
combat.40
Outside of combat, war efforts had other ecological impacts. In the karstic limestone of
the Veneto Alps, World War I munitions dumps leached copper into groundwater.
Eighty years later some springs seemed “to be small mines” of copper. European
wheat demand in World War I led to the plowing up of about 6 million hectares (an area
the size of West Virginia or Sri Lanka) of grasslands on the American High Plains, and
some more in Canada’s prairie provinces. This helped prepare the way for the Dust
Bowl of the 1930s. The British war effort in World War II consumed about half of
Britain’s forests. To build Liberty ships in 11 days, as Americans did in Portland,
Oregon, during that war, took a lot of electricity, justifying additional hydroelectric
dams on the Columbia River, where two big ones had been built in the late 1930s.
Frantic drives to raise production of food, fuel, minerals, and other resources surely led
to sharp ecological disruptions in every combatant nation, as did crash road-and
railroad-building efforts. More recently, belligerents in the civil wars that raged in
Cambodia and eastern Myanmar (Burma) financed their campaigns by contracting
with Thai logging companies to strip forest areas under their control.41
By suppressing normal economic activity, war temporarily reduced some ordinary
environmental pressures. Despite depth charges and oil spills in the U-boat
campaigns, World War II brought back halcyon days for North Atlantic fish populations,
because fishing fleets sat out the war. Industrial emissions slackened because of coal
shortages and factory destruction, at least in Europe and Japan. Iraqi land mines in the
Kuwaiti desert kept people out and allowed a resurgence of animal and plant life in the
1990s.42 Combat had its impacts on the environment, occasionally acute but usually
fleeting. More serious changes arose from the desperate business of preparing and
mobilizing for industrial warfare.
IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION, AND DEMOCRATIZATION. International politics was
conducted by means other than war. Here I will touch briefly on only two major
themes: first, imperialism and decolonization, and then democratization. As the
twentieth century began, Russia, Japan, the United States, and especially the western
European powers had embarked on imperial expansions. This often involved the
displacement of existing populations, as in South Africa and Algeria. Colonial powers
reoriented local economies toward mining and logging, and toward export
monocultures of cotton, tea, peanuts, or sisal. Normally these changes were imposed
with no thought to environmental consequences: the only goals were to make money
for the state and for entrepreneurs, and to assure the mother country ready access to
strategic materials. By the 1940s the French and British at least claimed to have local
interests at heart when converting as much as possible of Mali to cotton or of
Tanganyika to peanut production. But through ecological ignorance they nonetheless
brought salinization in the Niger bend region of Mali and turned marginal land into
useless hardpan in central Tanganyika.43
Decolonization surprisingly changed little of this. New independent regimes often
continued the economic policies of their predecessors. Big prestige projects carried on
the tradition of colonial environmental manipulation in places such as Ghana, Sudan,
and India. Financially weak regimes (such as Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Ivory
Coast) often sold off timber and minerals as fast as possible, regardless of
environmental impacts. Many rulers arrived in office via coup d’état and saw fit to cash
in before the next colonel or sergeant followed suit. The decolonization of Soviet
Central Asia brought no changes in the water regime that was strangling the Aral Sea.
In environmental matters, as in so many respects, independence often proved no more
than a change in flags.
Democratization was another matter. A global wind of democratization blew across
Greece and Iberia in the 1970s, much of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s, and
parts of eastern Europe and Africa in the 1990s. In some cases, environmental protests
helped in modest ways to undermine the legitimacy of authoritarian (for example,
Chile) and communist (Poland) regimes. Such regimes had encouraged pollutionintensive economies and ecologically heedless resource extraction in their quests to
build state power and maximize economic growth. They normally had kept ecological
information under tight control. Democratization broke the hold these regimes enjoyed
over information, and brought to light all manner of environmental problems. Those
caused by foreigners, the military, or specific factories were often addressed and
sometimes resolved. Those caused by the consumption patterns of ordinary citizens
often got worse under democracy, as, for instance, when eastern Europe and Russia
dropped subsidized public transport in favor of private cars. Moreover the media
spotlight shone only on certain kinds of environmental problems, usually those
inspiring maximum dread such as industrial accidents and nuclear issues. Slowmoving crises such as soil erosion or biodiversity loss remained hidden in the
shadows, uncompelling to the media and the public and entirely irrelevant to
politicians attuned to the next election. Thus democracy tended to generate its own
characteristic environment.44
All these great currents of international politics in the twentieth century—security
anxiety, imperialism, decolonization, democratization, and if to a lesser degree war—
profoundly shaped the century’s environmental history. Almost all of the
environmental changes generated by these currents were inadvertent effects of
politics and policies designed for other ends. Yet at the same time nations negotiated
hundreds of environmental accords, sowing the seeds of what might become a loose
regime of environmental governance. That would require a relaxation of the security
anxiety that shaped the twentieth century.
Environmental Politics and Policies
In contrast, the politics and policies in which environmental considerations formed a
conscious element had modest effects. Environmental politics and policies, as such,
began only in the 1960s. Prior to that, local, national, and (on a very limited scale)
international laws and treaties regulated some aspects of pollution, land use, fishing,
and other issues. Smoke nuisance ordinances go back at least 700 years. Britain
established a regulatory agency for a specific source of pollution, the Alkali
Inspectorate, in 1865. But all of this was uncoordinated—specific policies and laws for
very specific instances.45 On the international scale, neighboring countries had, from
time to time, agreed to restrain fishing or water use. A multilateral agreement in 1911
checked the exploitation, in the Bering Sea’s Pribilof Islands, of fur seals that Russian,
Japanese, Canadian, and American sealers had hunted nearly to extinction between
1865 and 1900. The United States and Canada arrived at a number of wildlife
conservation accords before 1916.46 In the aftermath of World War II, international
institutions sprang up left and right, including some concerned with the environment
such as the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature). Others
regulated the environment without making it their explicit focus, such as the WHO, FAO
(the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization), and UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization), all of which were born in the years 1945 to 1948. But no
coordinated policies or political currents dealt with the environment as such. This
changed in the 1960s, a direct result of the tumult in the world of ideas.
Two general phases are discernible in the environmental politics and policies of the
late twentieth century. The first began in the mid-1960s and lasted until the late 1970s.
In this phase environmental movements and, in some cases, political parties, sprang
up in the rich countries. New Zealand’s Values Party, born in the late 1960s, was the
first explicitly green party but far from the most successful: it splintered after some 15
years on the edges of New Zealand politics. Environmental movements focused mainly
on pollution issues but also on fears of resource exhaustion, spurred by OPEC’s
actions of 1973. Governments responded by creating new agencies charged with
protecting the environment as a whole. Sweden (1967) and the United States (1970)
led the way. International regimes of cooperation remained very weak, despite the
efforts made after the first international conference on the environment in Stockholm
(1972). That led to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), headquartered
in Nairobi.
In the second phase, beginning around 1980, poorer countries established their own
environmental protection agencies, often given the status of ministry. In many cases,
such as Nigeria or Russia, environmental laws and policy existed only on paper. In
some cases, for example, Angola or Afghanistan, ongoing wars meant there was no
environmental politics or policy even on paper. But in India, Brazil, Kenya, and
elsewhere, grassroots environmental movements germinated and, whether through
civil disobedience or official channels, began to affect national politics. India boasted
hundreds of environmental organizations by the 1980s, ranging from scientific
research institutes that served as watchdogs—such as New Delhi’s Centre for Science
and Environment—to coalitions composed mainly of peasant women, such as the
Chipko Andalan that sought to check logging in the Himalaya. Such movements were
often led by women whose lives were most affected by fuelwood shortage (because
fuelwood gathering almost everywhere was women’s and children’s work), soil erosion
(where women worked the land, as in much of Africa and the Indian Himalaya), and
water pollution (because women fetched water and were responsible for children’s
health). Kenya’s Green Belt movement, dedicated to tree planting, was organized by the
National Council of Women of Kenya in 1977. From 1981 to 1987 the movement was
led by a woman, a former professor of veterinary anatomy, Wangari Maathai (born
1940). Ordinarily these grassroots environmental movements were embedded in
peasant protest or some other social struggle. When strong enough, they won some
concessions from governments; when not, they solidified antienvironmental attitudes
in the corridors of power, inadvertently inviting elites to equate environmentalism with
subversion and treason. The Green Belt movement proved strong enough to make an
impact on the land and provoke a backlash: it had planted some 20 million trees in
Kenya by 1993, but government spokesmen vilified Maathai and government thugs
roughed her up more than once for her efforts.47
In the rich countries in this second phase, new concerns added new dimensions to
environmental politics: tropical forests, climate change, ozone depletion. In the United
States an ideological crusade to roll back environmental regulation (c. 1981–1984)
boomeranged, as provocative statements by President Reagan’s officials served as
recruiting devices for environmental pressure groups.48 Leadership in terms of
innovative institutions and planning passed to northern European countries, notably
the Netherlands, and to Japan. Green parties entered politics, and in some cases (such
as Germany in 1983) to parliaments as well. In 1998 the German Green Party took part
in a coalition government, and its members held some important ministries. The
Europeans pioneered a consensual politics of environmental moderation, based on
corporatist traditions in which government, business, and organized labor hammered
out agreements after prolonged bargaining. The Dutch in particular, beginning in 1989,
arrived at an integrated national environmental plan, designed to harness the power of
the influential ministries and special interests resistant to ecological prudence, such as
agribusiness.49
The second phase featured unprecedented efforts at international cooperation.
Regional and global problems, such as acid rain or ozone depletion, required new
institutions, agreements, and regimes of restraint. The Reagan Administration initially
scuppered what it could, but found fewer and fewer allies abroad or in Congress. In
1987 (see above), the U.S. Congress helped browbeat the World Bank into
environmental awareness. In 1987 the Brundtland Report, the fruit of four years of
U.N.-sponsored inquiry into the relationship between environment and economic
development, offered intellectual underpinnings for environ-mental planning, for
regimes of restraint, and for the ambition of ecologically sustainable development. The
Montreal Protocol (1987) and subsequent accords showed what good science and
diplomacy could do. Thousands of international environmental agreements were
reached from the mid-1960s onward and many had real effects. Optimistic observers
saw in this a nascent “global governance regime” that could address the world’s
cross-border environmental problems.50
The impact of all this, from 1967 on, was considerable in the rich countries. The
technically and politically easiest environmental problems were in fact significantly
reduced. Industrial wastewater was cleaned up, with benefits to the Rhine, the North
American Great Lakes, and elsewhere. Sulfur dioxide emissions waned. Leaded
gasoline vanished into history. Municipal sewage treatment improved. In general,
problems that arose from a single institution or point source were addressed with
some success. Initially at least, local solutions such as taller smokestacks merely
shunted ill effects elsewhere. Sometimes more systemic solutions succeeded in their
specific task but at the same time deepened other problems. Scrubbers used to control
particulate emissions from smokestacks worsened acid rain. Most truculent of all were
those problems that derived from citizen behavior or from diffuse sources. Nitrous
oxides from vehicle exhausts and toxic farm runoff, for instance, continued to mount in
North America and Europe.
Moreover, in most of the rich countries some powerful industries resisted
environmental regulation successfully by launching endless lawsuits or controlling the
decisive ministries. This helped prevent serious reform in transport, energy, and
agribusiness, the myriad environmental impacts of which scarcely abated. The U.S.
auto industry fought successfully to hamstring fuel efficiency standards. The coal
industry in Germany retained its giant subsidies. California agribusiness kept getting
water at dirt-cheap prices. More often than not, major decisions affecting the
environment remained the province of the powerful ministries—trade, finance, industry,
agriculture—rather than of environmental agencies.
Environmental politics ran up against the limits of the possible at the international level
too. Although the United States became more amenable to international agreements
after the late 1980s, it tried hard to see that in these accords its ox wasn’t gored. At the
U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the
Americans made it clear that U.S. “lifestyles” were not up for negotiation. Other
countries matched this stance. Japan proved recalcitrant on whaling prohibitions (as
did Norway) and the trade in elephant ivory. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers
fought against agreements on carbon emissions. Brazil insisted on its right to develop
Amazonia as it wished, regardless of the implications of burning the world’s largest
rainforest. India and China declined to join the Montreal Protocol and subsequent
accords on ozone-destroying CFCs, and in general adamantly refused to compromise
their industrial ambitions in the interest of their, or the global, environment. Mexico and
many other countries resisted pressures to bring environmental laws into harmony
with those of richer nations: countries with more relaxed laws (or enforcement) found
multinational firms more eager to invest in new steel mills and chemical plants. While
there were many fault lines and alliances in this late-century world of international
environmental politics, the main one divided rich from poor. Called, with dubious
geography, a north-south confrontation, it crystallized at Rio in 1992 and particularly
bedeviled climate-change negotiations, which had achieved only toothless accords up
to 1999.