Environmental Activism Essay Example For Students

Environmental Activism Essay Environmental Activism Essay 1. The large mainstream environmentalism groups started to compromise too much with regulatory agencies and bureaus, starting with the Glen Canyon Dam project. This began an estrangement with the mainstreams that culminated in the rise of more militant groups like Earth First! Glen Canyon represented what was fundamentally wrong with the countrys conservation policies: arrogant government officials motivated by a quasireligious zeal to industrialize the natural world, and a diffident bureaucratic leadership in the mainstream environmental organizations that more or less willingly collaborated in this process. The mainstream environmental groups and government held the premise that mankind should control and manage the natural world. The radicals held that our technological culture with its intrusions on natural world had to be curtailed, perhaps even undone, to keep the ecology of this planet and our role in it viable. It marked a shift from a rearguard strategy (mainstream) to protect wilderness to an affirmative attempt to roll back the artifacts of civilization, to restore the world to the point where natural processes such as the flow of rivers could continue. The mainstream environmental movement is now perceived by many as out of touch with peoples deep concern about environmental degradation, has become systematized. The activists use approaches such as industrial vandalism or ecotage to foster dramatic results. Some other methods employed are tree spiking, tree sitting, road blockading, demonstrations, tree pinning, ship sinking, dam breaking and outright terrorist-type sabotage (bombing power stations, bridges, power line, etc.) There may be some complimentary results of the efforts of both mainstream and radical groups. The large environmental organizations, while denouncing the radicals confrontational activities, have then been able to use their ample finances to take the campaign to Congress or the courts with the impetus of public support the radicals generated. 2. With Soules quote, including Vertebrate evolution may be at an end it means that the civilization complex has lost its reference point by overwhelming the natural processes it has always used to define itself. The otherness of nature is disappearing into the artificial world of technology. As the environmental crisis worsens, we can expect increased attention directed at the ecological sciences, resource management, pollution control, and technological supervision of the reproduction of valued species, including man. Toynbee writes that the ecological scarcity of the future will be so severe that the within each of the beleaguered developed countries there will be a bitter struggle for control of their diminished resources. This conflict will inevitably lead to the imposition of authoritarian regimes. There is already evidence of ecological elites where power and status are increasingly measured not merely by economic control, but by control over the ecology. Access to clean water, fresh air, open wild spaces, and natural products is competing with ownership of German autos and Swiss watches. It is becoming the main preoccupation of political debate. As an example, even when a corporation decides to create a item through genetic or non-genetic engineering, it is often indirectly determining what species will be exterminated to increase profits, which habitats will be sacrificed for economic growth, and whose children will be allocated the toxic water, poisoned food, and radioactive living space. If the environmental crisis is causing us to reexamine and reject the accepted values of the civilization complex in its entirety, a unique event is taking place: the passing of civilization into history. 2. Societal breakdown in the face of a continually deteriorating physical world may face many problems. As stated above by historian Toynbee, a conflict may lead to the imposition of authoritarian regimes. Atomic bomb EssayEarth First! represents the rage and reaction that radical environmentalists feel toward the destruction of the natural world. They are not only acting out their rage, on the contrary, the theory and practice of ecotage are as well thought out as the politics of reform. Formans notion of monkeywrenching, based on the belief that if profit brings the resource industry into the wilderness, loss of profit due to continuing equipment damage, production delays, and increased security will drive it out. The cost of repairs, production delays, and increased security will drive it out. It may be too much for the bureaucrats and exploiters to accept if there is a widely-dispersed, unorganized, strategic movement of resistance across the land. Such a movement has developed, though not on the scale radical environmentalists would wish. Ecotage probably costs the resource industry and government agencies between $20 and $25 million annually. One can only speculate as to the ef ! fect that has had on decisions made in corporate boardrooms. Most Earth First!ers do not believe ecotage is a substitute for major social changes; rather, it is a stopgap measure damage control to protect as much of the natural world as possible until such change is brought about, one way or another. 7. It tells us that society values property and the higher standard of living through technology over the natural world and any rights the natural world may be entitled to even though the majority of society on a personal level is sympathetic to the cause of radical environmentalists in theory. The American people are not accustomed to thinking of such nonhuman entities as mountain lions, forests, and rivers as exploited groups whose 9th amendments rights can be violated. From the perspective of the radical environmentalists movement, this state of affairs is exactly the problem. In the ante-bellum South, people were not accustomed the thinking of slaves as human beings who had any claim to the protection of the law. We now find this position both repugnant and ridiculous. In the future, so goes the biocentric argument, we will feel the same toward contemporary societys refusal to extend legal and ethical standing to the deer people and the tree people. Radical environmentalism is best understood as an attempt to enlarge the circle of legal and ethical standing (9th amendment rights) to include other species and even entire ecosystems. Using this theory as a 9th amendment weapon to extend the rights to the natural world can only, in my opinion, happen when society as whole, i.e. in large numbers, gets behind the biocentric movement to the magnitude it got behind the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s.8. Much of the breakdown of civilization is that we seem to rely on a totalization of values, values represented as universal, applicable to everyone, at all times. Through totalized values, organized societies have at their command a medium through which to dictate the kind of human behavior that enhances the power of those in control. Whether those values result in people plowing a field, working in a factory, or dropping an atomic bomb on helpless civilians, the discourse of civilization can find a justification i n Gods commandments, progress, national security, or humanism. Social power shapes the most intimate and quotidian acts of civilizations citizens. Industrial man and the industrial society may be the most deleterious and unsustainable economic system the world has ever seen, since it constantly eats into the ecological systems on which it depends. We are beginning to realize just how costly a system it is as the health and cleanup bills from years of environmental abuse come due. Not surprisingly, those who benefited most from the extravagant rise of the industrial economy have done their best to pass the burden on to others: the poor, the unwary, or the next generation. Industrialism is perhaps the greatest pyramid scheme in history. The role that industrial man must take for the ultimate survival of the natural world is that he must take the action to slow and reverse human population growth . There are ecological limits to how many people can live in dignity on this planet; to quibble over whether that line has yet been crossed is to invite a game of ecological brinkmanship that there is no need to play. And if human population has not exceeded carrying capacity, the arguments of the humanist critics leave out the whole question of the effect present population levels have on the nonhuman world.