Explaining Environmentalism by Philip W. Sutton

Author:Philip W. Sutton [Sutton, Philip W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351765237
Google: 28aWDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 2506901
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5 Twentieth Century Environmentalism

The Organisation of Twentieth Century Concern for Nature

Since the 1970s almost all industrialised societies have experienced the emergence of a range of new environmentalist organisations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and more recently the loose networks of Earth First!, and for the first time political parties based on a Green ideology and programme have been formed. The latter have achieved widely varying levels of success (Parkin 1989 & 1991; Müller-Rommel 1990).1 The forms, activities, action repertoires, aims and ideologies of these new organisations have been cited by many commentators as evidence of a radical shift in the type of social movements which characterise (post)modern societies. The new environmentalism has been influential in supporting the new social movements (NSM) perspective in West European sociology, because it is seen as significantly different from previous social movements, particularly labour movements and a descriptive contrast between old and new has thus been generated.

In this chapter I contest the characterisation of the new environmental organisations which is used as evidence for the existence of new social movements by demonstrating significant continuities with previous environmental movement organisations. Whilst recognising some genuinely novel features, I attempt to explain these by locating the organisations within the context of the developing environmental movement as a whole. I contend that the failure to take a longer term perspective of the development of environmental organisations and activities has led to a distorted image of the new environmentalism as well as raising unrealistic expectations of it.

One of the problems which occurs when we fail to take seriously the prior existence of similar problematics such as the problem of society/nature relations is that this often leads to a quest for novelty at the expense of noticing significant continuities. As Pizzorno (1978: 291) has noted there is a danger that, ‘…at the start of a wave of conflict we shall be induced to think that we are at the verge of a revolution; and when the downswing appears, we shall predict the end of class conflict’. The misinterpretation of waves of collective action which is apparent in relation to contemporary environmentalism is only one aspect of what Elias (1987) has called the ‘retreat of sociologists into the present’, and as I have argued, has lead to a reliance on theories which portray static pictures of ‘industrial’ and ‘post-industrial’ societies, rather than focusing on the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation and the con-sequences and changing forms of resistance to these dominant processes.

For many commentators, the earlier phase of concern for nature, explored in the previous chapter, has little if any relevance for the understanding of contemporary radical ecology. There are several reasons for this. Firstly it is argued that early conservationist and preservationist sentiment was unrepresentative of the wider population, being confined to an upper-class elite with no intention to challenge the dominant mode of modernisation. In short, it was not popular. Secondly, despite these early stirrings of concern, environmental organisations have failed to make any impact on the way

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