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Major Environmental Movements in India

Last updated on April 22, 2024 by ClearIAS Team

Contemporary India experiences almost unrestricted exploitation of resources because of the lure of new consumerist lifestyles.

The balance of nature is disrupted. This has led to many conflicts in society.

In this article, we discuss the major environmental movements in India.

Table of Contents

What is an Environmental Movement?

An environmental movement can be defined as a social or political movement, for the conservation of the environment or for the improvement of the state of the environment . The terms ‘green movement’ or ‘conservation movement’ are alternatively used to denote the same.
The environmental movements favour the sustainable management of natural resources. The movements often stress the protection of the environment via changes in public policy . Many movements are centred on ecology, health and human rights .
Environmental movements range from highly organized and formally institutionalized ones to radically informal activities.
The spatial scope of various environmental movements ranges from being local to almost global.

Some of the major environmental movements in India during the period 1700 to 2000 are the following.

Bishnoi Movement

Year: 1700s
Place: Khejarli, Marwar region, Rajasthan state.
Leaders: Amrita Devi along with Bishnoi villagers in Khejarli and surrounding villages.
Aim: Save sacred trees from being cut down by the king’s soldiers for a new palace.

What was it all about : Amrita Devi, a female villager could not bear to witness the destruction of both her faith and the village’s sacred trees. She hugged the trees and encouraged others to do the same. 363 Bishnoi villagers were killed in this movement.

The Bishnoi tree martyrs were influenced by the teachings of Guru Maharaj Jambaji, who founded the Bishnoi faith in 1485 and set forth principles forbidding harm to trees and animals. The king who came to know about these events rushed to the village and apologized, ordering the soldiers to cease logging operations. Soon afterwards, the maharajah designated the Bishnoi state as a protected area, forbidding harm to trees and animals. This legislation still exists today in the region.

Chipko Movement

Place: In Chamoli district and later in Tehri-Garhwal district of Uttarakhand.
Leaders: Sundarlal Bahuguna, Gaura Devi, Sudesha Devi, Bachni Devi, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Govind Singh Rawat, Dhoom Singh Negi, Shamsher Singh Bisht and Ghanasyam Raturi.
Aim: The main objective was to protect the trees on the Himalayan slopes from the axes of contractors of the forest.

What was it all about : Mr. Bahuguna enlightened the villagers by conveying the importance of trees in the environment which check the erosion of soil, cause rains and provide pure air. The women of Advani village of Tehri-Garhwal tied the sacred thread around the trunks of trees and they hugged the trees, hence it was called the ‘Chipko Movement’ or ‘hug the tree movement’.

The main demand of the people in these protests was that the benefits of the forests (especially the right to fodder) should go to local people. The Chipko movement gathered momentum in 1978 when the women faced police firings and other tortures.

The then state Chief Minister, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna set up a committee to look into the matter, which eventually ruled in favour of the villagers. This became a turning point in the history of eco-development struggles in the region and around the world.

Save Silent Valley Movement

Place: Silent Valley, an evergreen tropical forest in the Palakkad district of Kerala, India.
Leaders: The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) an NGO, and the poet-activist Sughathakumari played an important role in the Silent Valley protests.
Aim: To protect the Silent Valley, the moist evergreen forest from being destroyed by a hydroelectric project.

What was it all about: The Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) proposed a hydroelectric dam across the Kunthipuzha River that runs through Silent Valley. In February 1973, the Planning Commission approved the project at a cost of about Rs 25 crores. Many feared that the project would submerge 8.3 sq km of untouched moist evergreen forest. Several NGOs strongly opposed the project and urged the government to abandon it.

In January 1981, bowing to unrelenting public pressure, Indira Gandhi declared that Silent Valley will be protected. In June 1983 the Center re-examined the issue through a commission chaired by Prof. M.G.K. Menon. In November 1983 the Silent Valley Hydroelectric Project was called off. In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi formally inaugurated the Silent Valley National Park.

Jungle Bachao Andholan

Place: Singhbhum district of Bihar
Leaders: The tribals of Singhbhum.
Aim: Against the government’s decision to replace the natural sal forest with Teak .

What was it all about: The tribals of the Singhbhum district of Bihar started the protest when the government decided to replace the natural sal forests with the highly-priced teak. This move was called by many “Greed Game Political Populism”. Later this movement spread to Jharkhand and Orissa.

Appiko Movement

Place: Uttara Kannada and Shimoga districts of Karnataka State
Leaders: Appiko’s greatest strengths lie in it being neither driven by a personality nor having been formally institutionalised. However, it does have a facilitator in Pandurang Hegde. He helped launch the movement in 1983.
Aim: Against the felling and commercialization of natural forest and the ruin of ancient livelihood.

What was it all about: It can be said that the Appiko movement is the southern version of the Chipko movement. The Appiko Movement was locally known as “Appiko Chaluvali”. The locals embraced the trees which were to be cut by contractors of the forest department. The Appiko movement used various techniques to raise awareness such as foot marches in the interior forest, slide shows, folk dances, street plays etc.

The second area of the movement’s work was to promote afforestation on denuded lands. The movement later focused on the rational use of the ecosphere by introducing alternative energy resource to reduce pressure on the forest. The movement became a success. The current status of the project is – stopped.

Narmada Bachao Andholan (NBA)

Place: Narmada River, which flows through the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Leaders: Medha Patker, Baba Amte, Adivasis, farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists.
Aim: A social movement against several large dams being built across the Narmada River.

What was it all about: The movement first started as a protest for not providing proper rehabilitation and resettlement for the people who have been displaced by the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Later on, the movement turned its focus on the preservation of the environment and the eco-systems of the valley. Activists also demanded the height of the dam to be reduced to 88 m from the proposed height of 130m. World Bank withdrew from the project.

The environmental issue was taken into court. In October 2000, the Supreme Court gave a judgment approving the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam with a condition that the height of the dam could be raised to 90 m. This height is much higher than the 88 m which anti-dam activists demanded, but it is definitely lower than the proposed height of 130 m. The project is now largely financed by the state governments and market borrowings. The project is expected to be fully completed by 2025.

Although not successful, as the dam could not be prevented, the NBA has created an anti-big dam opinion in India and outside. It questioned the paradigm of development. As a democratic movement, it followed the Gandhian way 100 per cent.

Tehri Dam Conflict

Year: 1990’s
Place: Bhagirathi River near Tehri in Uttarakhand.
Leaders: Sundarlal Bahuguna
Aim: The protest was against the displacement of town inhabitants and the environmental consequence of the weak ecosystem.

Tehri Dam attracted national attention in the 1980s and the 1990s. The major objections include seismic sensitivity of the region, the submergence of forest areas along with Tehri town etc. Despite the support from other prominent leaders like Sunderlal Bahuguna, the movement has failed to gather enough popular support at the national as well as international levels.

Appiko – The Hindu
NBA – The Hindu

Article by: Priyanka Sunil

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Hi, You are providing valuable information for competitive exam’s. Here in this article you have written about “Chipko Movement” is started from Tehri Garhwal. “Chipko Movement” was started from “Reni Village” of Chamoli ditrtict, which is near “Joshimath”.

So, plz correct that.

November 26, 2016 at 4:18 pm

Thanks Udit for pointing it out. We have updated the article.

The struggle Chipko’s first battle took place in early 1973 in Chamoli district, when the villagers of Mandal, led by Bhatt and the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM), prevented the Allahabad-based sports goods company, Symonds, from felling 14 ash trees. In Tehri Garhwal, Chipko activists led by Sunderlal Bahuguna began organising villagers from May 1977 to oppose tree-felling in the Henwal valley.

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Singhbhum district is not in Bihar it is Jharkhand. If you’re mentioning before the partition of the state then you shouldn’t mention the line ” then it was spread in Jharkhand and Orissa”. Please keep your information correct.

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Environmental Movements In India

Environmental Movements in India

An environmental movement is a type of social movement that involves an array of individuals, groups and coalitions that perceive a common interest in environmental protection and act to bring about changes in environmental policies and practices.

Environmental and ecological movements are among the important examples of the collective actions of several social groups.

This article will provide information about Environmental Movements in India in the context of the IAS Exam .

This is useful for the Environment section of the UPSC Syllabus .

The candidates can read more relevant articles from the links provided below:

Cause of Environmental Movements

The increasing confrontation with nature in the form of industrial growth, degradation of natural resources, and occurrence of natural calamities, has resulted in imbalances in the bio-spheric system.
Control over natural resources
False developmental policies of the government
Right of access to forest resources
Non-commercial use of natural resources
Social justice/human rights
Socioeconomic reasons
Environmental degradation/destruction and
Spread of environmental awareness and media

Major Environmental Movements in India

Many environmental movements have emerged in India, especially after the 1970s. These movements have grown out of a series of independent responses to local issues in different places at different times.

Some of the best known environmental movements in India have been briefly described below:

The Silent Valley Movement

The silent valley is located in the Palghat district of Kerala.
It is surrounded by different hills of the State.
The idea of a dam on the river Kunthipuzha in this hill system was conceived by the British in 1929.
The technical feasibility survey was carried out in 1958 and the project was sanctioned by the Planning Commission of the Government of India in 1973.
In 1978, the movement against the project from all corners was raised from all sections of the population.
The movement was first initiated by the local people and was subsequently taken over by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP).
Many environmental groups like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and Silent Valley Action Forum participated in the campaign.

To read more about the Silent valley movement , check the linked article.

Chipko Movement

Chipko Movement started on April 24, 1973, at Mandal of Chamoli district of Gharwal division of Uttarakhand.
The Chipko is one of the world-known environmental movements in India.
The movement was raised out of ecological destabilisation in the hills.
The fall in the productivity of the forest produces forced the hill dwellers to depend on the market, which became a central concern for the inhabitants.
Forest resource exploitation was considered the reason behind natural calamities like floods, and landslides.
On March 27 the decision was taken to ‘Chipko” that is ‘to hug’ the trees that were threatened by the axe and thus the chipko Andolan (movement) was born.
This form of protest was instrumental in driving away the private companies from felling the ash trees.

To read more about the Chipko movement in detail, check the linked article.

Bishnoi Movement

This movement was led by Amrita Devi, in which around 363 people sacrificed their lives for the protection of their forests.
This movement was the first of its kind to have developed the strategy of hugging or embracing the trees for their protection spontaneously.

To read more about Bishnoi Movement in detail, check the linked article.

Appiko Movement

It is a movement inspired by the Chipko movement by the villagers of Western Ghats,
In the Uttar Kannada region of Karnataka, the villagers of Western Ghats started the Appiko Chalewali movement during the month of September – November 1983.
Here, the destruction of forest was caused due to commercial felling of trees for timber extraction.
Natural forests of the region were felled by the contractors, which resulted in soil erosion and drying up of perennial water resources.
In the Saklani village in Sirsi, the forest dwellers were prevented from collecting usufructs like twigs and dried branches and non-timber forest products for the purposes of fuelwood, fodder, honey etc. They were denied their customary rights to these products.
In September 1983, women and youth of the region decided to launch a movement similar to Chipko, in South India.
The agitation continued for 38 days, and this forced the state government to finally concede to their demands and withdraw the order for the felling of trees.

To read more about Appiko Movement in detail, check the linked article.

Narmada Bachao Andolan

Narmada is one of the major rivers of the Indian Peninsula.
The scope of the Sardar Sarovar project, a terminal reservoir on Narmada in Gujurat in fact is the main issue in the Narmada Water dispute.

To read more about Narmada Bachao Andolan in detail, check the linked article.

Jungle Bachao Andolan

Jungle Bachao Andolan began in the 1980s in the Singhbhum district of Bihar (presently in Jharkhand).
It was a movement against the government’s decision to grow commercial teak by replacing the natural Sal forests.
The tribal community is the most affected by this decision as it disturbs the rights and livelihood of Adivasis of that region.
This movement was widely spread in states like Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha in various other forms.

To read more about Jungle Bachao Andolan in detail, check the linked article.

Environmental Movements in India [UPSC Notes]:- Download PDF Here

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History of the Environmental Movement

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László Erdös 2

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For a long time during our evolution, the effect humans had on their environment was not qualitatively different from the effect of several other mammal species. The agricultural revolution changed the nature-human relationship fundamentally. From this time on, the non-human world was regarded as mere raw material: nature (and indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature) had to be destroyed, subdued, dominated, or exploited. This world view was dominant until the era of Romanticism, when poets, writers, painters, and philosophers recognized the beauty of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among these pioneers. National parks have been set up everywhere on the globe, non-governmental conservation organizations have been launched, and international agreements have come into force. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring and the 1970 Earth Day boosted the green movement. The 1986 ban on commercial whaling, the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out the chemicals destroying ozone, and the 1991 treaty to protect Antarctica are among the few global successes of the green movement, while efforts to combat climate change have not yet been crowned with success. Today, the importance of green issues is increasingly recognized. John Muir said, “The battle for conservation […] is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.” Whether we can win this war may well depend on our ability to change our relationship with nature and to abandon the tragically obsolete myth of human superiority.

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Erdös, L. (2022). History of the Environmental Movement. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_144-1

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Published : 31 May 2022

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Essay on Green Movement

Students are often asked to write an essay on Green Movement in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Green Movement

Introduction to green movement.

The Green Movement is a broad global campaign aimed at promoting environmental sustainability. It encourages people to adopt eco-friendly practices like recycling and conservation.

Origins of the Green Movement

The Green Movement began in the 1960s in response to growing concerns about pollution and environmental damage. It has since grown into a worldwide effort.

Impact of the Green Movement

The Green Movement has led to significant changes in laws and practices. It has raised awareness about the importance of protecting our planet for future generations.

In conclusion, the Green Movement plays a crucial role in ensuring a healthy and sustainable environment. It is up to us to continue this important work.

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Speech on Green Movement

250 Words Essay on Green Movement

Introduction to the green movement.

The Green Movement, also known as the environmental movement, is a broad-based, global initiative focused on advocating for policies that protect the environment and promote sustainability. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to growing public concern about ecological degradation and pollution.

Driving Forces of the Green Movement

The Green Movement is driven by a variety of factors, including the recognition of the finite nature of natural resources, the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the environment, and the need for sustainable development. It is propelled by individuals, non-governmental organizations, and governments alike, all recognizing the urgent need for change.

Impacts and Achievements

The Green Movement has had significant impacts on public policy, corporate behavior, and public awareness. It has led to the establishment of environmental laws, the promotion of renewable energy, and the development of sustainable practices. It has also played a crucial role in raising awareness about climate change and other environmental issues.

Challenges and the Future

Despite its achievements, the Green Movement faces challenges. These include resistance from industries dependent on fossil fuels, economic factors, and political obstacles. However, with the increasing urgency of environmental issues, the movement’s relevance and influence are likely to grow. The future of the Green Movement lies in its capacity to adapt, innovate, and mobilize towards a sustainable future.

500 Words Essay on Green Movement

The Green Movement, also known as the environmental movement, is a socio-political and cultural phenomenon that began in the mid-20th century. It encompasses various environmental issues including conservation, preservation, and the sustainable management of resources. The movement has been instrumental in raising awareness about environmental degradation and the urgent need for sustainable practices.

Origins and Evolution

The Green Movement originated in the 1960s, a time marked by rapid industrialization and urbanization. The publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, which highlighted the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, is often credited as the catalyst. The subsequent decades saw the movement evolve from local and national campaigns into a global agenda. Milestones such as the United Nations’ Stockholm Conference in 1972 and the Earth Summit in 1992 underscored the international recognition of environmental concerns.

Key Principles and Goals

The Green Movement is guided by principles like sustainability, biodiversity, ecological integrity, social justice, and non-violence. Its primary goal is to ensure the earth’s resources are used responsibly, conserving them for future generations. The movement also advocates for policies to reduce pollution, halt deforestation, and mitigate climate change.

Impact and Achievements

The Green Movement has significantly influenced public policy, corporate behavior, and individual lifestyles. It has led to the establishment of environmental laws and regulations, the creation of national parks and protected areas, and the rise of renewable energy. The movement has also fostered the growth of ‘green’ industries, such as organic farming and green building, and has encouraged consumers to make more environmentally friendly choices.

Challenges and Future Directions

Despite its successes, the Green Movement faces several challenges. These include political resistance, corporate pushback, economic constraints, and public apathy. Additionally, the movement must contend with the complex, interconnected nature of environmental problems, which often require multidisciplinary solutions and international cooperation.

Looking ahead, the Green Movement must continue to innovate and adapt. It will need to engage more effectively with diverse stakeholders, harness new technologies, and develop strategies that integrate environmental, social, and economic considerations.

In conclusion, the Green Movement has played a crucial role in highlighting the importance of environmental stewardship. While significant strides have been made, much work remains to be done. As we face the escalating threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, the principles and goals of the Green Movement are more relevant than ever. Ultimately, the success of the movement will depend on our collective willingness to embrace sustainable practices and make the necessary changes to protect our planet.

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48 The Impacts of Environmental Movements

Christopher Rootes is Professor of Environmental Politics and Political Sociology; and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements at University of Kent

Eugene Nulman is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer in the School of Socil Policy, Sociology, and Social Research at University of Kent

Published: 09 July 2015
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The impacts of environmental movements (EMs) are indirect and mediated outcomes of efforts by actors ranging from environmental NGOs to grass-roots activists to influence environmental policies and practices of governments and corporations, usually by mobilizing public opinion. With fewer resources than industry groups, EMs’ impacts are dependent on mass media coverage, the fluctuating salience of environmental issues, and political opportunities. EMs influence policy by deploying scientific knowledge, more successfully where they have special expertise. In international negotiations, EMs have acted as brokers between North and South to influence global environmental policies. In authoritarian states, EMs have enlarged scope for civil society and democratic participation.

In the academic and—especially—in the activist literature, claims or assumptions about the impacts of environmental movements upon policy, practice, and outcomes are legion. Indeed, grand, often inflated claims have been made for the influence of environmental movements by their activists and opponents alike. Yet, because the impacts of social movements are notoriously difficult to assess, the impacts of environmental movements have been relatively under-investigated, and because such competing claims are so difficult to assess, the impact of environmental movements remains highly contested.

From the 1970s onwards, the history of environmental movements in North America, western Europe, and Australia has generally been told as one of a series of inspiring victories as one relatively unspoiled fragment of the natural environment after another has been spared from developers, and as some of the most egregious instances of pollution of air, land, and water have been mitigated. Yet, even since the 1960s, the great strides that have been made toward effective environmental protection have not been solely the products of environmental movements. The US Clean Air Acts, for example, resulted from initiatives of Congress even before anything recognizable as an environmental movement emerged. In many cases, despite the undoubted value of the efforts of environmental movements, there is a pervasive chicken and egg problem: did the movement discover the problem or did it, rather, amplify existing public or elite opinion and, by mobilizing some of the public, channel it into the policy arena?

Environmental Movements

Since the 1960s, we have become accustomed to speaking of “the environmental movement.” Although many of its constituents do not take action as demonstrative or conflictual, even confrontational, as that we commonly associate with other social movements, some do. Indeed, “environmental movement” is a problematic denotation of a phenomenon that is highly diverse in its forms of organization and action, from the radical, but sometimes covert, direct action of the “green” movement ( Doherty 2002 ), through demonstrative public protest, to the often publicly invisible actions of bureaucratized formal organizations that lobby governments or work in concert with governments and/or corporations to achieve desired environmental outcomes.

The latter end of the continuum presents particular difficulties, and some have suggested that it is better referred to as a “public interest lobby” or an “advocacy coalition” rather than a movement ( Bosso 2005 ). Some environmental NGOs, however, rarely lobby, let alone protest, but are preoccupied with practical action to remedy environmental degradation or to protect remnants of relatively pristine natural environments.

To define “environmental movements” restrictively would be at odds with the discourse of environmentalists themselves, which is generally inclusive and recognizes commonalities among environmental groups and organizations that are rooted in the shared concern to protect the natural environment that exists among the members and supporters of environmental organizations of various kinds. Thus, we define an environmental movement as a loose, non-institutionalized network of informal interactions that includes, as well as individuals and groups who have no organizational affiliation, organizations of varying degrees of formality, and is engaged in collective action motivated by shared identity or concern about environmental issues ( Rootes 2004 ).

Much grass-roots environmental activism is only loosely linked to mainstream environmental movement organizations (EMOs) or, indeed, to other instances of grass-roots action. Yet though the links and networks may be precarious, such local action is informed by the climate of opinion to which EMOs have contributed, and has often played a discovery role for national EMOs ( Carmin 1999 ) and served to train activists who have gone on to rejuvenate wider environmental movements.

The Bases of Impact

The impact of environmental movements, and the pressure they exert on governments, corporations, and other actors, is not simply proportional to the frequency or intensity of their mobilization of public protests or, indeed, of the numbers of participants therein. Indeed, recourse to street demonstrations may mark not the strength but the weakness of a movement, and its embrace of confrontational tactics may reflect the desperation of the politically excluded. For the most part, in highly economically developed Northern states, especially in Europe, the environment has generally been a valence issue that attracts a relatively high measure of endorsement across the political spectrum and does not sharply divide mainstream political parties. Under such conditions, environmentalists may enjoy relatively easy access to policy makers and decision makers.

Environmental NGOs, especially in the North, generally ground their influence and legitimacy upon their insistence that their claims are based on the best available scientific evidence. Sometimes they commission original research; more generally, they deploy published research. As a result of long engagement with particular issues, such NGOs earn respect for their expertise and are, as a result, sometimes drawn into advising or acting as contractors to governments and corporations that lack either scientific expertise or the capacity effectively to communicate to the public the environmental issues that they confront.

Nevertheless, if their reliance upon scientific evidence gives such environmental NGOs credibility with the powerful, it inhibits NGOs’ ability to campaign on issues where scientific evidence is weak. This is especially problematic where public concern about an issue, such as incinerator emissions, cannot be warranted by scientific evidence of harm. Even in the absence of such evidence, and without overt support from established NGOs, local environmental campaigns may nevertheless be successful in mobilizing against proposed developments, not only in Northern countries with nominally democratically accountable governments and officials, but even in authoritarian states such as China ( Lang and Xu 2013 ) where governments’ desire to avoid sustained civil unrest may outweigh concern to implement development policies. Although it is by no means inevitable, the frequency of local environmental campaigns may lead governments and corporations to avoid particular strategies and technologies altogether, and so local campaigners may achieve impacts where environmental NGOs cannot.

The impacts of environmental movements may be direct or indirect, negative or positive. Thus environmental movements may embrace action designed to head-off, derail or obstruct the formation or development of draft or mooted policies, or they may promote the formation or development of policies designed to achieve desired environmental ends. Equally, once policy is formulated and promulgated, environmental movements may oppose or obstruct its implementation, or contrive to make the implementation of environmentally desirable policy more effective.

Impacts on Policy Formation

Examples of the negative impacts of environmental movements on policy formation or development are legion. In the United States, anti-nuclear and anti-incineration campaigners have been credited with preventing the commissioning of any new nuclear power stations or waste incinerators for three decades from 1980. In the UK, the Blair/Brown Labour government (1997–2010) essayed a series of policies concerning genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and new housing on greenfield sites, and repeatedly backed down when faced by environmental movement protests. Similarly, that government’s coalition successor watered down proposed changes to land-use planning in the face of concerted opposition.

Of the many cases in which EMOs have positively influenced the shaping of environmental policy, perhaps none is more iconic than the role EMOs played in securing passage of the UK Climate Change Act 2008, then the most ambitious and potentially consequential environmental legislation in the world. Beginning in 2005, Friends of the Earth (FoE) and other EMOs began to mobilize public support for decisive action to combat climate change. FoE proposed a draft Climate Change Bill requiring annual 3 per cent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions leading to an 80 per cent reduction by 2050, and worked with representatives of each major political party to steer the issue into parliamentary debate. FoE encouraged its supporters to lobby their Members of Parliament to sign declarations of support for the Bill, which 412 of the 646 MPs eventually did. This led the government to adopt the Bill, whilst watering down its more ambitious provisions. However, as the Bill proceeded through the parliamentary process, FoE urged its members to continue to lobby MPs to strengthen the Bill. Public and private lobbying persuaded many MPs to press the government to accept the 80 per cent reduction target and to include annual indicative targets while maintaining five-year binding targets ( Nulman 2015 ).

Not the least interesting aspect of this case is the extent to which an EMO successfully engaged with the formal political and legislative process to secure passage of legislation that realized most of its objectives; even when it sought to mobilize its supporters it did so by conventional means: a petition, albeit online, and a campaign of writing letters and sending emails and postcards to MPs. In securing passage of unprecedentedly ambitious legislation, FoE undoubtedly made an impact, but it did so by means not generally central to the repertoires of social movements. Yet FoE’s methods were appropriate to the circumstances. Whilst it is unlikely that any such ambitious legislation would have made its way to the statute books without FoE’s initiative and persistence, it was widely perceived to be timely, as the ease with which so many MPs were persuaded to support it attests.

The experience of the US environmental movement with respect to climate change is in stark contrast. With federal government action on climate change blocked by hostile Republican majorities in Congress, the US climate movement has more often taken the form of protest, and its impacts have been greatest in states and cities where legislators have been sympathetic.

Although the influence of environmental movements is mediated by the variety of other actors and interests, and identifying specifically movement impacts is accordingly difficult, it appears that the influence of environmental movements upon policy is greatest in the early, agenda-setting stages of policy formation, when policy preferences are malleable rather than entrenched ( Olzak and Soule 2009 ). Thus, at this liminal stage, movement organizations may strategically frame policy issues so as to shape the preferences of elite actors. Some, however, may seek to raise awareness even of issues on which attitudes are culturally embedded or politically entrenched in order to problematize them and to mobilize public opinion to demand policy change.

Impacts on Policy Implementation

The impacts of environmental movements upon policy implementation may be positive as well as negative. Thus environmental campaigns and mobilizations may ensure local implementation of national policies and international treaties. In many countries, wildlife conservation organizations campaign principally to ensure the implementation of protective legislation.

Often, however, environmental campaigners have resisted, and sometimes successfully obstructed the implementation of government policy. In some cases the impact of the environmental movement appears clear, as, for example, in the case of the protests in Germany that disrupted the transport of nuclear waste. In both Germany and the United States, protests have prevented the construction of permanent nuclear waste repositories. Yet although it was sustained pressure from environmentalists that maintained the high profile of the nuclear issue in Germany from the 1970s onward, it was an external event—the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan—that triggered the decision to close Germany’s nuclear reactors.

The 1990s campaign against the UK road-building program stimulated a series of protracted and innovative protests that delayed and escalated the costs of road-building, but it is less clear that it was their impact, rather than a recession-induced state fiscal crisis, that brought the program to a premature end.

In general, the impact of environmental movements upon policy implementation is often indirect and difficult to distinguish from the impacts of other actors, processes, and events.

Impacts on Public Opinion

Social movements are usually conceived of as phenomena of civil society. However large the initial mobilization, most movements, in the attempt to build a constituency for social and/or political change, appeal to wider sections of the public, either directly to change social practice or in order to enlist public opinion in the struggle to persuade governments or corporations to change policy and/or practice. Indeed, Burstein (1999) concludes that movements influence policy outcomes only when their actions are mediated by public opinion.

Many of the achievements of environmental movements have resulted from lobbying and persuasion that is not usually publicly visible. Precisely because it is not visible, the extent of its impact is disputable and cannot easily be assessed ( Giugni 2004 ). But even where the actions of environmental movements are highly visible, determining the extent and significance of their impact is more art than science. Studies that purport to demonstrate the impact of movements on public opinion are generally correlational, observing the correlation between a movement’s articulation of a discourse and the appearance of its traces in public opinion, ideally after a plausible elapse of time. In a notably sophisticated study of the impact of protest upon public policy, Agnone (2007) found that, controlling for media attention, legislative context, and election cycles, more federal environmental protection legislation was passed in the United States when environmental movement protest amplified, or raised the salience of, pro-environmental public opinion. Such impacts may be amplified by the relatively high levels of public approval of the environmental movement and trust in environmental NGOs ( Dunlap and Scarce 1991 ; Inglehart 1995 ).

In general, in democratic states, the impact of environmental movements upon public policy is greatest where it runs with the grain of public opinion, and especially where the movement’s diagnostic and prognostic frames resonate with (significant parts of) the public. In an apparently infinite iterative process, environmental activists seek to shape public opinion and thereby influence the formation of environmental policy. In this the mass media have been an indispensable tool, for it is through the mass media that most people gain information about the environment as about other issues. Of environmental NGOs, Greenpeace has been the most consistently adroit and assiduous in its exploitation of the opportunities provided by mass media to reach the public and thence to bring pressure to bear upon governments and corporations. Whether campaigning against nuclear weapons testing, whaling or sealing, or latterly against transnational oil companies, Greenpeace has highlighted environmental degradation and parlayed public opinion into persuading governments and corporations to change policy and practice ( Zelko 2013 ).

By engaging the public, environmental movements have often been credited with setting the agenda for public policy on environmental matters, but in general their impact is perhaps better conceived not as agenda-setting so much as highlighting neglected issues, maintaining their salience, keeping public concern alive even at times when the attentions of policy makers are diverted elsewhere by other pressing issues such as those of economic crisis management, and pressing their advantage when windows of political opportunity are opened.

Thus Rucht (1999) concluded that, although environmental movement pressure was correlated with improvements in the quality of the environment, that pressure appeared to be mediated by public opinion, and it was by no means sufficient to guarantee favorable outcomes; likewise in some countries, the United States included, strong movement pressure was associated with only moderately favorable public opinion and environmental outcomes. Nor should government resistance be simply assumed; ministers in the 1997–2010 UK Labour government actively encouraged the environmental movement to mobilize in favor of policies that ministers desired but which they feared lacked sufficient public support.

Variations in the relationships between movement pressure, public opinion, and environmental outcomes may be explained by variations in political opportunity, both structural and conjunctural. But another element Rucht did not attempt to measure was the strength of corporate and political opposition to environmental protection measures that conflict with libertarian political ideology and/or corporate interests entrenched in and protected by informal networks of power and influence.

The widely celebrated successes of environmental movements often exert a constraining effect on corporations which are obliged, when devising policies and strategy, to consider the possible impacts of antagonizing Greenpeace or other campaigning NGOs, but they have also stimulated the development of vigorous countermovements both in the industrialized North and in the developing South. It may be a tribute to the effectiveness of environmental movements that coal-mining, oil, and other resource extracting corporations have funded pre-emptive campaigns to counter the claims of environmental NGOs, but the corporate fightback has made the struggle for environmental justice more hazardous, especially for activists in developing countries in the global South, where modernizing elites often see their interests as aligned with those of resource-extracting corporations.

It might be supposed that the dramatic increase in the numbers of environmental organizations and the numbers of their members and supporters is testimony to the impact of the mobilizing efforts of those organizations upon a wider public. But there is an equally plausible case to be made that EMOs were often largely passive beneficiaries of wider secular changes in societies. The case of FoE in England is instructive. FoE set out in 1971 to be a lobbying organization and did not seek or expect a mass membership, but its first public action—a “bottle drop” outside a drinks manufacturer in London—attracted so many calls from people asking “how can I join” that FoE responded by licensing the formation of more than 100 local FoE groups. FoE had not so much mobilized the public as it had taken an action that chimed with the public mood at the time and, by its existence, provided a vehicle for the organizational reflection of that mood.

It is clear that public opinion alone does not provide sufficient opportunities for the environmental movement to influence policy, but others conditions have been identified that bolster the impacts of EMOs.

How Movements Make an Impact

Political opportunities are important factors in the ability of environmental movements to influence policy. The opening of an environmental policy window during periods of electoral competition is particularly important as it gives EMOs greater access to policy makers. In these contexts, EMOs often work to generate solutions to policy problems or influence the designs of existing or government-proposed policies, working as expert stakeholders. EMOs are at a particular advantage here as they are regarded as a “scientific social movement” ( Yearley 1989 ).

Yet movements do not make an impact only through the direct efforts of NGOs that engage with policy makers. Radical activists also make an impact, often by creating a “radical flank” effect that enables more institutionalized NGOs to gain an audience. Thus environmental movement impacts are often better considered as the outcomes of a variety of strategies and tactics all directed to broadly shared ends, than simply to the efforts of a single NGO.

As well as attempting to address specific issues or policies, EMOs participate in electoral campaigning around the environment more generally. Green parties do this in many countries, but in the United States the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) works to promote environmentally friendly policy makers and shame others. In 1971, the LVC began compiling a record of Congressional environmental votes and giving each Congressman a score between 0 and 100. Analysis of these scores revealed some correspondence with the strength of the movement in the Congressman’s state. Thus, in 1971, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey received scores of 50, 68, and 70, respectively; of the three states, Pennsylvania had a weaker environmental movement ( Hays 1993 : 41).

This strategy was favored particularly in contexts where the environmental movement had little access to policy makers. Such was the case in the United States following George W. Bush’s first presidency, when the environmental movement’s distaste for Bush after his administration attempted to undermine the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and forest protection and pollutant regulations led the Sierra Club, LCV, and other environmental organizations to spend over $15 million during the 2004 campaign ( Bosso and Guber 2005 : 79). However, environmental organizations spent significantly less on campaign contributions than other advocacy groups, and the movement’s attempt to determine the outcome of the election failed. Bush’s rival in the 2004 race, John Kerry, was unable to generate media coverage through support for environmental initiatives despite high levels of public support for environmental legislation, probably due to its relatively low salience following the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the subsequent war in Iraq ( Bosso and Guber 2005 ).

Influence of Environmental Movements on International Agreements

The increasing number and scope of international agreements concerning the environment has presented a new pattern of opportunities to environmental NGOs. The limited capacities of new supranational institutions of environmental governance have sometimes led them to deliberately foster the development of networks of environmental groups, as, for example the European Commission did when, in seeking to expand its competence in the hitherto neglected environmental sphere, it funded the establishment of the European Environmental Bureau. Environmental NGOs were presented with a platform and opportunities to participate in the shaping of agreements at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and they have made influential contributions to international Conventions on a wide range of topics, including biosafety, desertification, endangered species, forestry and whaling (see, e.g., contributors to Betsill and Corell 2008 ).

Environmental activists have also demonstrated and made representations at several global climate summits, none more spectacularly than the 2000 Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-9) when concerted action by environmental NGOs persuaded the US delegation to drop its proposal to include nuclear energy in the Clean Development Mechanism associated with the Kyoto Protocol. That victory proved short-lived when, unable to secure EU agreement that the United States might offset its greenhouse gas emissions by treating its forests as “carbon sinks,” the United States withdrew from the Kyoto process. The 2009 (COP-15) meeting in Copenhagen, billed as the summit at which a successor climate agreement to Kyoto would be developed, was an even more devastating failure for environmental campaigners; present in unprecedented numbers and with different groups employing a variety of insider and outsider strategies, the meeting ended with all non-official delegates excluded from the conference center and with no new agreement ( Hadden 2015 ).

Access in itself is only as useful as is the level of seriousness of policy makers in advancing environmental protection in relation to other interests. EMOs were given significant levels of access both formally in the climate change negotiations process and as advisors to (or even members of) national delegations but, despite their formal inclusion in the governance process, EMOs failed to influence many important decisions as they were unable to affect the incentive structures of national delegations.

In other international negotiations, NGOs were able to affect debates on carbon sinks and emissions trading in addition to having some influence on positions taken by the US and EU delegations ( Betsill 2008 ; also see Burgiel 2008 on the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety; Corell 2008 on the Desertification Convention; Andersen and Skodvin 2008 on the International Whaling Commission; and Humphreys 2008 on Forest Conversation and the Trade in Forest Products).

In general, the impacts of EMOs in international negotiations, and upon the eventual agreements, have been limited both by movement actors’ relative outsider status compared to industry groups ( Lund 2013 ), and, most critically, by their frequent need to be perceived to act transparently, in public, when most of the real work of such negotiations takes place behind closed doors. It is noteworthy that environmental NGOs have had most influence when they have engaged practically in areas in which they had accumulated expertise and where they were able to act as brokers between North and South. On climate change, by contrast, where environmental NGOs have no special expertise commensurate with the magnitude and complexity of the problem, and where the issues have become polarized and politicized, they have, despite their intermittently highly public interventions, been much less influential.

The two major international EMOs—FoE and Greenpeace—present different patterns of response to the dilemmas of attempting to make an impact on global environment politics.

Greenpeace International has privileged efficiency and campaign effectiveness over internal democracy, and has retained the capacity to restructure and sometimes amalgamate national Greenpeace organizations, which are concentrated in the global North. The result is that it is sometimes viewed with suspicion not only by national governments but also by the citizens of states whose cultures and interests it offends, most notably in the case of Norway ( Strømsnes et al. 2009 ). Yet its organizational structure has given Greenpeace the flexibility and capacity to respond to issues as they arise, and has contributed to its becoming the most formidable environmental campaigning NGO in the world, particularly on marine issues.

FoE International, by contrast, has over seventy national affiliates, and is well represented in the global South. It has insisted upon preserving internal democracy even at the expense of operational efficiency and, very likely, the effectiveness of some of its short-term campaigns ( Doherty and Doyle 2013 ). In the longer term, however, its respect for the autonomy of its national affiliates, deliberate inclusiveness in the determination of policy priorities, and determination to keep together a disparate grouping may increase its impact and make it a more important player in global environmental politics.

Often in the global South, environmental movements have utilized a “boomerang effect” in order to bring international resources to bear upon local and national concerns. An early example occurred during a campaign to clean up the “valley of death” in Cubatao, Brazil in the 1980s when campaigners sought to reduce international funding for development that increased pollution and deforestation ( Hochstetler 2002 ). Environmental movements in the global South often called upon allies in the North for support, particularly regarding the halting of environmentally destructive practices associated with large projects funded or commissioned by actors from the North, but as transnational environmental networks developed, the boomerang effect was put into play more frequently even without the clear presence of Northern interests (as in the case of the campaign against the Narmada Dams in India, which persuaded the World Bank to withdraw funding).

It should not be imagined, however, that all the effective initiatives of environmental movements at international level originate in the global North. GAIA, the global alliance against waste incinerators, began in the Philippines and thence spread through the South and to the North. More generally, assisted by improving communications networks, South–South environmental movement networks are becoming increasingly common.

Wider Impacts of Environmental Movements

Environmental movements have been credited with enlarging the space for civil society and democratic participation in authoritarian states in central and eastern Europe and in the newly industrializing states of east Asia ( Lee and So 1999 ).

Because environmental movements address universal issues and the health and well-being of whole populations, issues that can be construed as questions of national patrimony rather than sectional or subversive interests, environmental movements have been more easily tolerated by authoritarian regimes than have groups and movements that directly challenge the character of the state itself.

In China, for example, whereas human rights activists suffer restrictions and worse, environmental activists, treading carefully to sidestep official restrictions on fund-raising, have succeeded in steadily enlarging their scope of activity. This they have done by exploiting the legal gray area in which environmental NGOs are positioned—neither officially recognized nor expressly proscribed. Rather than seeking to influence policy directly, Chinese environmental NGOs have pragmatically adapted their aims and approaches based on the needs of the public, focussing upon the health and livelihood impacts of environmental degradation. Moreover, seeking to demonstrate to the public that they are there to help rather than to make trouble, many Chinese environmental NGOs have sought to work on what the government has identified as areas for improvement, in order to accelerate and influence environmental improvements rather than campaigning for radical restructuring ( Zhang and Barr 2013 ).

Whilst the ultimate outcomes of environmental activism in China remain obscure, elsewhere in east Asia and in central and eastern Europe under state socialism, environmental movements permitted a certain space in which to organize, and attracted activists who might otherwise have campaigned more directly for regime change. But if environmental movements thus became schools for civil society organization and cover for activists with other aspirations, when regime change occurred, environmental movements were often marginalized and effectively demobilized as activists exploited the space to address other neglected issues. This was most evident in central and eastern Europe where the collapse of state socialist regimes entailed a precipitate decline in economic activity. As a result, not only were citizens distracted from environmental concerns by the need to augment their sharply reduced real incomes, but the evident need for environmental improvement was reduced by the dramatic contraction of polluting industries, which was less the product of environmental campaigning than of the collapse of protectionist economic policies and the introduction of market economics.

In a much more modest way, environmental movements appear to have contributed to the vitality of civil society and, tentatively, to the rejuvenation of the political processes of liberal democratic states. If conventional politics holds little attraction for young people in most such states, it is among the youngest age cohorts than support for environmental movements and, especially, Green parties is greatest. Similarly, women tend to be more prominent in local environmental campaigns than they are in mainstream politics, probably because the barriers to entry are lower in the former than in the latter. Thus the existence of environmental movements may provide a path into politics for people who would otherwise remain outside the political realm.

The striking thing about environmental movements is that despite their many successes, and justified celebration of their increasing influence in many policy arenas, the assault on the global environment proceeds at an unprecedented pace. Scarcely a week goes by without new evidence of continuing degradation of the global environment: the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are at unprecedentedly high levels and rising; tropical rainforests continue to be logged and burned so that the “lungs of the planet” are an ever smaller proportion of the surface area of the Earth; biodiversity continues to decline at an alarming rate; overfishing and acidification of the oceans increasingly endanger tropical reefs and marine ecology.

This increasing global environmental degradation is only partly offset by significant local gains, of which examples include the improving condition of Europe’s rivers, better air quality in many cities in the global North, and even the re-naturalization of some previously degraded landscapes and rivers. Even in the North, it is difficult to be sanguine about the prospects of environmental improvement because the business-as-usual operations of (government and) corporations and other economic actors, including, not least, consumers, continue to contribute to environmental degradation. It is this that justifies the focus of many environmental activists upon practical action at the local level because at least here the impacts of action may be demonstrable. Nevertheless, the dilemma of local action remains that its impacts are largely determined by institutional arrangements that it is beyond the power of local actors to change, or upon the actions or reactions of more powerful non-local actors ( Rootes 2013 ).

The general paradox of environmental improvements in the domestic environments of the de-industrializing/ecologically modernized countries of the global North is that much of it has been achieved at the expense of increasing impacts abroad, especially in the global South, not simply by direct exploitation of the natural environmental resources of less affluent/less industrialized countries, but also via the normal operation of the terms of trade by which the industrial production that fulfils the aspirations of the consumers of the North has been increasingly located in the South.

However, the spread of environmental awareness is now global, transnational EMOs now exist, and the campaigns of national environmental EMOs address not merely national but, increasingly, global issues. In their interventions in international negotiations, EMOs have begun to make an impact and, although various national and corporate interests are powerfully arrayed against them, it is likely that, through their continued advocacy and deployment of scientific evidence, environmental movements will make significant impacts upon global environmental policies and their implementation.

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How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement

By Eliza Griswold

Sept. 21, 2012

On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.

“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.

“Silent Spring” was published 50 years ago this month. Though she did not set out to do so, Carson influenced the environmental movement as no one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond. “Silent Spring” presents a view of nature compromised by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT. Once these pesticides entered the biosphere, Carson argued, they not only killed bugs but also made their way up the food chain to threaten bird and fish populations and could eventually sicken children. Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions. In doing so, Carson, the citizen-scientist, spawned a revolution.

“Silent Spring,” which has sold more than two million copies, made a powerful case for the idea that if humankind poisoned nature, nature would in turn poison humankind. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves,” she told the subcommittee. We still see the effects of unfettered human intervention through Carson’s eyes: she popularized modern ecology.

If anything, environmental issues have grown larger — and more urgent — since Carson’s day. Yet no single work has had the impact of “Silent Spring.” It is not that we lack eloquent and impassioned environmental advocates with the capacity to reach a broad audience on issues like climate change. Bill McKibben was the first to make a compelling case, in 1989, for the crisis of global warming in “The End of Nature.” Elizabeth Kolbert followed with “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.” Al Gore sounded the alarm with “An Inconvenient Truth,” and was awarded the Nobel Prize. They are widely considered responsible for shaping our view of global warming, but none was able to galvanize a nation into demanding concrete change in quite the way that Carson did.

What was it that allowed Carson to capture the public imagination and to forge America’s environmental consciousness?

Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature,” as she is called, is frequently invoked in the name of one environmental cause or another, but few know much about her life and work. “People think she came out of nowhere to deliver this Jeremiad of ‘Silent Spring,’ but she had three massive best sellers about the sea before that,” McKibben says. “She was Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.”

The sea held an immense appeal to a woman who grew up landlocked and poor as Carson did. She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away, down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons’ four-room log cabin. Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to their death. The smell of tankage, fertilizer made from horse parts, was so rank that, along with the mosquitoes that bred in the swampland near the riverbank called the Bottoms, it prevented Springdale’s 1,200 residents from sitting on their porches in the evening.

Her father, Robert Carson, was a ne’er-do-well whose ventures inevitably failed; Carson’s elder sister, Marian, did shift work in the town’s coal-fired power plant. Carson’s mother, Maria, the ambitious and embittered daughter of a Presbyterian minister, had great hopes that her youngest daughter, Rachel, could be educated and would escape Springdale. Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women, now known as Chatham University, in Pittsburgh. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore, where she attended graduate school for zoology at Johns Hopkins University and completed a master’s degree before dropping out to help support her family. The Carsons fared even worse during the Depression, and they fled Springdale, leaving heavy debts behind.

Carson became a science editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency founded under the New Deal. Eager to be a writer, she freelanced for The Atlantic and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. Driven by her love of the sea, she wrote on everything from where to go for summer vacation to what to do with the catch of the day to the life cycles of sea creatures. Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense of wonder” about nature. In her best-selling sea books — “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea-Wind” — she used simple and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.

Carson was initially ambivalent about taking on what she referred to as “the poison book.” She didn’t see herself as an investigative reporter. By this time, she’d received the National Book Award for “The Sea Around Us” and established herself as the naturalist of her day. This was a much folksier and less controversial role than the one “the poison book” would put her in. Taking on some of the largest and most powerful industrial forces in the world would have been a daunting proposition for anyone, let alone a single woman of her generation. She tried to enlist other writers to tackle the dangers of pesticides. E.B. White, who was at The New Yorker, which serialized Carson’s major books, gently suggested that she investigate pesticides for The New Yorker herself. So she did.

“Silent Spring” begins with a myth, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which Carson describes “a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Cognizant of connecting her ideal world to one that readers knew, Carson presents not a pristine wilderness but a town where people, roads and gutters coexist with nature — until a mysterious blight befalls this perfect place. “No witchcraft,” Carson writes, “no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Carson knew that her target audience of popular readers included scores of housewives. She relied upon this ready army of concerned citizens both as sources who discovered robins and squirrels poisoned by pesticides outside their back doors and as readers to whom she had to appeal. Consider this indelible image of a squirrel: “The head and neck were outstretched, and the mouth often contained dirt, suggesting that the dying animal had been biting at the ground.” Carson then asks her readers, “By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”

Her willingness to pose the moral question led “Silent Spring” to be compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” written nearly a century earlier. Both books reflected the mainstream Protestant thinking of their time, which demanded personal action to right the wrongs of society. Yet Carson, who was baptized in the Presbyterian Church, was not religious. One tenet of Christianity in particular struck her as false: the idea that nature existed to serve man. “She wanted us to understand that we were just a blip,” says Linda Lear, author of Carson’s definitive biography, “Witness for Nature.” “The control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human arrogance.”

“Silent Spring” was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress. In Carson’s view, technological innovation could easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity,” McKibben says. “She was the first to tap into an idea that other people were starting to feel.”

Carson’s was one of several moral calls to arms published at the start of the ’60s. Jane Jacobs’s “Death and Life of American Cities,” Michael Harrington’s “Other America,” Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” and Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” all captured a growing disillusionment with the status quo and exposed a system they believed disenfranchised people. But “Silent Spring,” more than the others, is stitched through with personal rage. In 1960, according to Carson’s assistant, after she found out that her breast cancer had metastasized, her tone sharpened toward the apocalyptic. “She was more hostile about what arrogant technology and blind science could do,” notes Lear, her biographer.

“No one,” says Carl Safina, an oceanographer and MacArthur fellow who has published several books on marine life, “had ever thought that humans could create something that could create harm all over the globe and come back and get in our bodies.” Safina took me out in his sea kayak around Lazy Point, an eastern spoke of Long Island, to see three kinds of terns, which zipped around us over the bay. We then crossed the point in his red Prius to visit thriving osprey, one species of bird that was beginning to die out when “Silent Spring” made public that DDT weakened their eggshells. As we peered through binoculars at a 40-foot-high nest woven from sticks, old mops and fishnets, a glossy black osprey returned to his mate and her chicks with a thrashing fish in his talons. Safina told me that he began to read “Silent Spring” when he was 14 years old, in the back seat of his parents’ sedan.

“I almost threw up,” he said. “I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren’t raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals.” That a corporation would create a product that didn’t operate as advertised —“this was shocking in a way we weren’t inured to,” Safina said.

Though Carson talked about other pesticides, it was DDT — sprayed aerially over large areas of the United States to control mosquitoes and fire ants — that stood in for this excess. DDT was first synthesized in 1874 and discovered to kill insects in 1939 by Paul Hermann Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for this work. During World War II, DDT applied to the skin in powder form proved an effective means to control lice in soldiers. But it wasn’t just DDT’s effectiveness that led to its promotion, Carson maintained; it was a surfeit of product and labor. In her speeches, Carson claimed that after the war, out-of-work pilots and a glut of the product led the United States government and industry to seek new markets for DDT among American consumers.

By the time Carson began to be interested in pesticides, in the mid-1940s, concerns related to DDT were mounting among wildlife biologists at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md., which was administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and elsewhere. Controversy over pesticides’ harmful effects on birds and plants led to high-profile lawsuits on the part of affected residents who wanted to stop the aerial spraying.

Carson used the era’s hysteria about radiation to snap her readers to attention, drawing a parallel between nuclear fallout and a new, invisible chemical threat of pesticides throughout “Silent Spring.” “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she wrote. “How then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”

Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, knew that such comparisons would be explosive. They tried to control the response to the book by seeking support before publication. They sent galleys to the National Audubon Society for public endorsement.

The galleys landed on the desk of Audubon’s biologist, Roland Clement, for review. Clement, who will turn 100 in November, currently lives in a studio on the 17th floor of a retirement community in New Haven, about a mile from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Carson’s papers are kept. “I knew of everything she wrote about,” he told me over lunch at his home this summer. “She had it right.”

The book, which was published on Sept. 27, 1962, flew off the shelves, owing largely to its three-part serialization in The New Yorker that summer. “Silent Spring” was also selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which delighted Carson. But nothing established Carson more effectively than her appearance on “CBS Reports,” an hourlong television news program hosted by a former war correspondent, Eric Sevareid. On camera, Carson’s careful way of speaking dispelled any notions that she was a shrew or some kind of zealot. Carson was so sick during filming at home in suburban Maryland that in the course of the interview, she propped her head on her hands. According to Lear as well as William Souder, author of a new biography of Carson, “On a Farther Shore,” Sevareid later said that he was afraid Carson wouldn’t survive to see the show broadcast.

The industry’s response to “Silent Spring” proved more aggressive than anyone anticipated. As Lear notes, Velsicol, a manufacturer of DDT, threatened to sue both Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker. And it also tried to stop Audubon from excerpting the book in its magazine. Audubon went ahead and even included an editorial about the chemical industry’s reaction to the book. But after “Silent Spring” came out, the society declined to give it an official endorsement.

The personal attacks against Carson were stunning. She was accused of being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an affinity for cats. In one threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin, Velsicol’s general counsel insinuated that there were “sinister influences” in Carson’s work: she was some kind of agricultural propagandist in the employ of the Soviet Union, he implied, and her intention was to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to achieve “east-curtain parity.”

But Carson also had powerful advocates, among them President John F. Kennedy, who established a presidential committee to investigate pesticides. Then, in June 1963, Carson made her appearance before the Senate subcommittee. In her testimony, Carson didn’t just highlight the problems that she identified in “Silent Spring”; she presented the policy recommendations she’d been working on for the past five years. When faced with a chance to do so, Carson didn’t call for a ban on pesticides. “I think chemicals do have a place,” she testified.

She argued vehemently against aerial spraying, which allowed the government to dump pesticides on people’s property without their permission. She cited dairy farmers in upstate New York, whose milk was banned from the market after their land was sprayed to eradicate gypsy moths. As Carson saw it, the federal government, when in industry’s thrall, was part of the problem. That’s one reason that she didn’t call for sweeping federal regulation. Instead, she argued that citizens had the right to know how pesticides were being used on their private property. She was reiterating a central tenet of “Silent Spring”: “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.” She advocated for the birth of a grass-roots movement led by concerned citizens who would form nongovernmental groups that she called “citizen’s brigades.”

The results of her efforts were mixed, and even her allies have different opinions of what Carson’s legacy actually means. Carson is widely credited with banning DDT, by both her supporters and her detractors. The truth is a little more complicated. When “Silent Spring” was published, DDT production was nearing its peak; in 1963, U.S. companies manufactured about 90,000 tons. But by the following year, DDT production in America was already on the wane. Despite the pesticide manufacturers’ aggression toward Carson and her book, there was mounting evidence that some insects were increasingly resistant to DDT, as Carson claimed. After Roland Clement testified before the Senate subcommittee, he says, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the Democrat from Connecticut who was chairman of the committee, pulled him aside. “He told me that the chemical companies were willing to stop domestic use of DDT,” Clement says, but only if they could strike a bargain: as long as Carson and Clement would accept the companies’ continued export of DDT to foreign countries, the companies would consider the end of domestic use. Their message was clear, Clement says: “Don’t mess with the boys and their business.”

Though Clement was a supporter of Carson’s, he believes that she got both too much credit and too much blame after “Silent Spring” came out. “It’s a fabrication to say that she’s the founder of the environmental movement,” Clement says. “She stirred the pot. That’s all.” It wasn’t until 1972, eight years after Carson’s death, that the United States banned the domestic sale of DDT, except where public health concerns warranted its use. American companies continued to export the pesticide until the mid-1980s. (China stopped manufacturing DDT in 2007. In 2009, India, the only country to produce the pesticide at the time, made 3,653 tons.)

The early activists of the new environmental movement had several successes attributed to Carson — from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the establishment of Earth Day to President Nixon’s founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970. But if “Silent Spring” can be credited with launching a movement, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

The well-financed counterreaction to Carson’s book was a prototype for the brand of attack now regularly made by super-PACs in everything from debates about carbon emissions to new energy sources. “As soon as ‘Silent Spring’ is serialized, the chemical companies circle the wagons and build up a war chest,” Souder says. “This is how the environment became such a bitter partisan battle.”

In a move worthy of Citizens United, the chemical industry undertook an expensive negative P.R. campaign, which included circulating “The Desolate Year,” a parody of “A Fable for Tomorrow” that mocked its woeful tone. The parody, which was sent out to newspapers around the country along with a five-page fact sheet, argued that without pesticides, America would be overrun by insects and Americans would not be able to grow enough food to survive.

One reason that today no single book on, say, climate change could have the influence that “Silent Spring” did, Souder argues, is the five decades of political fracturing that followed its publication. “The politicized and partisan reaction created by ‘Silent Spring’ has hardened over the past 50 years,” Souder says. Carson may have regarded “Silent Spring” and stewardship of the environment as a unifying issue for humankind, but a result has been an increasingly factionalized arena.

Carson was among the first environmentalists of the modern era to be charged with using “soft science” and with cherry-picking studies to suit her ideology. Fifty years later, the attacks on Carson continue. Her opponents hold her responsible for the death of millions of African children from malaria; in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear,” one character says that “banning DDT killed more people than Hitler,” a sentiment Crichton publicly agreed with. The Web site rachelwaswrong.org, which is run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group based in Washington, makes a similar charge: “Today, millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.”

But much of Carson’s science was accurate and forward-looking. Dr. Theo Colborn, an environmental health analyst and co-author of a 1996 book, “Our Stolen Future,” about endocrine disrupters — the chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormone system — points out that Carson was on the cutting edge of the science of her day. “If Rachel had lived,” she said, “we might have actually found out about endocrine disruption two generations ago.”

Today, from Rachel Carson’s old bedroom window in Springdale, you can see the smokestacks of the Cheswick coal-fired power plant less than a mile away: an older red-and-white, candy-striped stack and a newer one, called a scrubber, installed in 2010 to remove sulfur dioxide. It later needed repairs, but with the approval of the Allegheny County Health Department, it stayed open, and the plant operated for three months without full emission controls. The plants says it is in compliance with current E.P.A. emissions standards for coal-fired plants, though new ones will take full effect in 2016.

Springdale’s board of supervisors supports the plant’s business. As David Finley, president of Springdale Borough put it, the noise from the plant used to bother a handful of residents, but it “sounds like money” to many others. The plant buys fresh water from an underground river that runs through the borough and has paid for things like Little League uniforms and repairs to the municipal swimming pool. Springdale has been nicknamed “Power City” since the days Carson lived there. The high-school sports teams are called the Dynamos; their mascot is Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon character of the electricity lobby.

A few months ago, two citizens in Springdale volunteered to be representatives in a class-action suit, which charges that the coal-fired plant “installed limited technology” to control emissions that they claim are damaging 1,500 households. One of the plaintiffs, Kristie Bell, is a 33-year-old health care employee who lives in a two-story yellow-brick house with a broad front porch, a few blocks from Carson’s childhood home. Bell said it was “Silent Spring” that encouraged her to step forward. “Rachel Carson is a huge influence,” Bell said, sitting at her kitchen table after work on a sultry evening last summer. “She’s a motivator.” For Bell, Carson’s message is a call to mothers to stand up against industry to protect the health of their families.

Detractors have argued that the lawsuit is the creation of personal-injury attorneys. (Because of the difficulty of making a clear health case, the plaintiffs are claiming property damage caused by corrosive ash.) But Bell said that it’s not about money. “I never sit outside on my front porch because I don’t know what’s coming out of that smokestack,” she said. One hundred years ago, when Carson was a child, residents of Springdale had the same concern — one that informed Carson’s worldview. “When we start messing around with Mother Nature,” Bell said, “bad things happen.”

Eliza Griswold is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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Environmental Justice Movement Essay (Critical Writing)

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Since the 19th century, the phenomenon of ecological awareness and environmental preservation has not existed in isolation from the major socio-economic patterns. The primary catalyst of rapid environmental policy change across the US and the world, in general, was the socio-political discrepancies behind the existing pattern of managing environmentally hazardous waste. It was established at the end of the 20 th century that the location and settlement of ethnic minorities and low-income residents were highly associated with the sites of environmentally hazardous waste. Thus, in order to bridge the socio-economic gap within the state, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued Executive Order 12898, which addressed the immediate need for environmental justice for minority and low-income populations within the state (“Executive Order 12898,” 1994). Hence, the emphasis was made on the matter of eliminating socio-economic barriers in the battle with environmental hazards and human health.

For its part, the modern perception of the environmental movement is not only focused on the idea of promoting change through public regulations. For the sake of better outcomes, today’s environmental awareness has acquired a more anthropocentric and proactive approach, which means paying more attention to the value of human life and health through the promotion of an ecologically sustainable lifestyle and manufacturing. In such a way, the emphasis on education does not require a prescriptive approach to handling the patterns of hazardous waste management. Hence, it may be rightfully concluded that environmental justice has now become a full-scale constituent of the environmental movement agenda, as the attention paid to environmental equality among social groups is not sufficient to stop the current hazardous processes in terms of global and national ecology. The current goals for environmental justice outlined by the EPA (2020) encompass the health, well-being, and environmental quality of the overburdened populations. The modern environmental movement, for its parts, focuses on education and taking personal responsibility for the impact on the environment.

The history of environmental justice traces back to the 20th century when national minority and low-income populations across the US realized that as a consequence of rapid industrialization, the state bodies were willing to eliminate toxic waste in the areas less popular with well-to-do Caucasian residents. Thus, in 1982, the African American community of Warren County in North Carolina organized a peaceful protest against the landfill created in the area (EPA, 2021). Although it was not the first time, the ethnic minority voiced their concerns over the environmental injustice, that particular sit-in eventually drew the attention of the scholars willing to find the correlation between the allocation of landfills and minority and low-income communities.

As a result, in 1983, the first comprehensive study was published on the matter of environmental racism in Houston, Texas, as there was a distinct correlation established between the choice of land for toxic waste sites and the African American neighborhoods in the area (EPA, 2021). The EPA (2020), as well the provisions of the EO 12898, define environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (para. 1). The definition encompasses both the notions of fair treatment and meaningful involvement. The former stands for the impartiality of treatment and the elimination of any discrimination against people’s inherent laws of safety. The latter, for its part, means that no individual shall be deprived of the right to participate in the discussion of their environment, health, and community activities. Hence, it may be concluded that the notion of environmental justice has become an extremely relevant issue to the US community as a result of a series of explicitly discriminative policies and precedents.

Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994. (1994). Federal Register.

US Environmental Policy Agency. (2020). Learn about environmental justice.

US Environmental Policy Agency. (2021). Environmental justice timeline.

The Bamako Convention: Management of Hazardous Waste Materials Movement
Household Hazardous Waste in Different Countries
Illegal Hazardous Waste Management Cases
Environmental Network Media Projects
Environmental Philosophies and Actions
Florida Orange Harvest Crisis
Degradation of Mangrove Forests
Changing the World Through Fashion: Eva Kruse at TEDxCopenhagen
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, August 30). Environmental Justice Movement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-justice-movement/

"Environmental Justice Movement." IvyPanda , 30 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-justice-movement/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Environmental Justice Movement'. 30 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Environmental Justice Movement." August 30, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-justice-movement/.

1. IvyPanda . "Environmental Justice Movement." August 30, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-justice-movement/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Environmental Justice Movement." August 30, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-justice-movement/.

EssayEmpire

Environmental movement essay.

The environmental movement is a social movement dedicated to the management, protection, and restoration of the natural environment. Also referred to as the conservation movement, or more recently, the green movement, it is one of the more successful social movements of the 20th century, for it secured widespread public support and influenced governments to establish agencies and pass legislation consistent with the goals of the movement.

Although the movement is rooted in many ideas from the conservationist movement of the early 20th century, what can be called the modern environmental movement did not begin until the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this time the movement benefited from the increased political mobilization and cultural climate that accompanied the civil rights and anti-war movements. Also helping to launch the environmental movement was new scientific evidence increasingly indicating that human activity was harming the natural environment. Environmentalists pointed to river fires, gas station lines, and factory soot as examples of avoidable human behavior that was damaging to the environment.

Numerous highly publicized disasters occurred during the 1970s and 1980s that further increased public awareness. Two of these events—the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and the explosion at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986— involved mishaps with nuclear energy. Both events received considerable media and public attention, resulting in a decline in public support for nuclear energy. In 1989, an oil tanker, the Exxon Valdez, hit a reef off the coast of Alaska, resulting in leakage of an estimated 11 million gallons of oil into the sea, one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history. The images of sea animals covered in oil further outraged the public and produced increasing support for the environmental movement into the 1990s.

Government agencies were established and legislation was passed near the beginning of the environmental movement, and these agencies and laws remain in effect today. In 1969 came the National Environmental Policy Act and establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency as a federal agency devoted to protecting and preserving the environment. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act sought to save species who were threatened by environmental destruction.

Various organizations promoting environmental-ism have also had a profound impact. Two of the first organizations, the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, have been promoting environmental issues for more than a century. Sporadic grassroots protests, referred to as Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) movements, reflect local concerns of the environmental movement by discouraging the establishment of waste sites and trash incinerators in local communities. Earth Day—first held on April 22, 1970— continues to serve as a day encouraging Americans to be particularly cognizant of environmental issues.

Recently, the environmental movement began focusing on such macro-level concerns as global warming, ozone depletion, and rain forest loss. In 2005, an agreement among more than 160 countries, known as the Kyoto Protocol, went into effect. Countries ratifying this protocol agreed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases considered harmful to the environment. The United States has not ratified this protocol despite being the world’s most significant producer of greenhouse gases.

Demographically, the environmental movement is primarily a middle-class movement. Many attribute the affluent nature of this movement to the greater amount of time devoted to recreation by the middle class and the tendency for the middle class to focus on aesthetics. A recent trend in the movement, however, has been an emphasis on environmental justice, which emphasizes racial and class disparities in the level of harm caused by pollution and waste. Those participating in the movement tend to be younger in age than participants in most other social movements. Despite the rural nature of the early conservationist movement, those participating in the environmental movement are more likely to reside in urban areas.

Although the environmental movement receives a great deal of public support, some groups resist the movement. Businesses with economic incentives to engage in what many consider to be environmentally harmful practices oppose the movement, typically stating that claims made by environmentalists are exaggerated or mythical. Recently, however, businesses have begun to alter their practices and images to act and appear more environmentally friendly. As a result, the culprit has become the general public, and emphasis has shifted to individual responsibility for environmental concerns.

Bibliography:

Dryzek, John S. 2005. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dunlap, Riley E. and Angela G. Mertig. 1992. American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970-1990. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Hannigan, John A. 2006. Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

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World Environment Day 2024: Essay, Speech And Drawing Ideas for Students

World Environment Day 2024 Essay, Speech, and Drawing Ideas: Every year, people across the country celebrate World Environment Day. It's a perfect chance to raise awareness about environmental issues and their importance. The goal of this event is to inspire awareness and action for protecting the environment. World Environment Day is celebrated on June 5th each year and is organised by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

World Environment Day 2024: Theme

The theme for World Environment Day 2024 , according to the official website, focuses on land restoration, desertification, and drought resilience, under the slogan “Our land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration. ” The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will host the 2024 global celebrations.

World Environment Day 2024: Essay, Speech, and Drawing Ideas for Students

World Environment Day signifies a commitment to ending plastic use and preventing the depletion of natural resources. Celebrations take place worldwide, with schools and colleges organising events like debates and essay competitions. Here are some ideas for essays, speeches, and drawings for Environment Day 2024:

World Environment Day Speech for Student in English

Respected Sir,

Today, we come together to celebrate World Environment Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness and taking action to protect our precious planet. This year's theme, "Our land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration," highlights the urgent need for land restoration, desertification prevention, and drought resilience. As we gather here, let us remember that our actions today will shape the world for future generations.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, our host for this year, stands as a beacon of commitment to these vital environmental goals. Together, we can combat land degradation, restore ecosystems, and ensure a sustainable future for all. Let us pledge to adopt eco-friendly practices, support reforestation, and promote sustainable land management.

Each small step we take contributes to a healthier, greener planet. Let us be the generation that restores and cherishes our land, securing a bright and prosperous future for all.

10 Line speech for World Environment Day 2024

World Environment Day 2024 is celebrated on June 5th, focusing on the theme “Our land. Our future.
We are #GenerationRestoration.” This year’s campaign emphasises the importance of land restoration, combatting desertification, and enhancing drought resilience.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hosts the global celebrations, showcasing their commitment to environmental sustainability.
World Environment Day serves as a reminder of our collective responsibility to protect and restore our planet.
It encourages individuals, communities, and nations to take action towards a sustainable future.
Simple actions like planting trees, reducing waste, and conserving water can make a significant impact.
Together, we can restore degraded lands, support biodiversity, and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Let us unite as #GenerationRestoration to secure a healthier planet for future generations.
This World Environment Day, let's be the change we need.
Plant a seed, conserve each drop, choose green every time.
Together, we can heal the Earth, one action at a time.

Short World Environment Day Speech

Good morning, everyone .

Today, we celebrate World Environment Day, a crucial reminder of our responsibility to protect our planet. This year's theme, "Our land. Our future. We are #GenerationRestoration," highlights the urgent need for land restoration and combating desertification and drought. Our actions today will shape the world for future generations. Let’s commit to reducing our plastic use, conserving water, and supporting sustainable practices. By working together, we can heal our planet and ensure a healthier, greener future. Remember, every small step counts. Let’s be the change we wish to see in the world.

World Environment Day Essay (100 words)

World Environment Day (WED) is celebrated globally every year on the 5th of June. It aims to raise awareness about environmental issues and encourage positive actions for the planet. This day is organised by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), established by the UN General Assembly in 1972. It focuses on improving current environmental conditions and making the world a better place. Celebrated in over 100 countries, it inspires both public and political efforts to address environmental challenges. The goal is to motivate everyone to become active agents of sustainable and eco-friendly development worldwide.

World Environment Day Essay (150 words)

World Environment Day, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972, is celebrated every year on the 5th of June. This day was announced at the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment to address environmental issues. The United Nations designed it as a key tool for raising global awareness about pressing environmental problems. The main goal is to show people the true face of environmental issues and empower them to become active agents of eco-friendly development worldwide. It encourages people to change their attitudes towards the environment for a safer future. In Kerala, the State Council for Science, Technology and Environment organises state-level activities based on the annual theme. For example, in 2016, the theme was “Fight against the Illegal Trade in Wildlife”. This day promotes awareness and inspires actions to protect our environment.

World Environment Day Essay (200 words)

World Environment Day is celebrated globally on the 5th of June each year. Established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972, this day aims to raise awareness about environmental issues and motivate people to take positive actions for the planet. The campaign began during the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and is managed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). On World Environment Day 2015, India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, planted a sapling at his official residence, highlighting the importance of the day.

Media and celebrities promote the objectives of this campaign, encouraging public participation and awareness. Goodwill ambassadors from UNEP send messages worldwide, urging action for World Environment Day. This campaign calls on people to join the celebration in large numbers, understand the real environmental conditions, and become active agents in combating climate change. We should all participate in this celebration and pledge to protect our environment for a better future.

World Environment Day Essay (250 words)

World Environment Day is an annual campaign celebrated on the 5th of June to inspire people worldwide to address negative environmental changes. Established in 1972 by the United Nations General Assembly, its first celebration was on the 5th of June 1973. Each year, the celebration is based on a specific theme declared by the United Nations, and various activities are organised to highlight environmental issues.

The campaign aims to encourage positive changes in the environment and ensure a safe future for our planet. It brings together people from different countries to discuss environmental topics and engage in activities like essay writing, speech recitation, art competitions, and more. The campaign promotes public action and political attention towards environmental protection.

Activities during World Environment Day celebrations include parades, cleanup activities, concerts, tree planting, and recycling initiatives. Although it is not a public holiday, schools and offices remain open, and everyone is encouraged to participate. The goal is to work together for positive actions that maintain the planet's beauty. We should remember the campaign's objectives throughout the year and act accordingly to preserve our environment.

World Environment Day Essay (300 words)

World Environment Day is celebrated annually on the 5th of June in almost 100 countries. It was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 and first celebrated in 1973. Each year, a different theme is declared by the United Nations to inspire positive actions for the environment.

The campaign is hosted by different cities each year, where international exhibitions take place for a week. The United Nations raises awareness about environmental issues through this campaign, which effectively encourages public action and political attention.

Various activities are organised during the celebrations, including essay writing, speech recitations, drama plays, street rallies, art and painting competitions, parades, debates, and more. These activities attract a large gathering of academics, environmentalists, scientists, politicians, and the general public, fostering new ideas about the environment.

In addition to the host city's celebrations, countries celebrate World Environment Day in their states, cities, schools, and colleges. Activities include parades, cleanup initiatives, concerts, recycling efforts, and tree planting. Although it is not a public holiday, everyone is encouraged to participate and take positive actions for the environment.

World Environment Day promotes the idea that we have only one planet to live on, and it is our responsibility to maintain its natural beauty. By participating in the campaign and taking actions such as planting trees, conserving water, reducing electricity use, and supporting wildlife, we can contribute to a healthier and more sustainable planet.

World Environment Day Essay (400 words)

World Environment Day is an annual campaign celebrated on the 5th of June to address environmental issues and implement effective plans for a safer, healthier future. Declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 during the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, it is a significant day for spreading awareness and encouraging positive actions for the planet.

WED was established with various plans and objectives to address environmental problems and promote sustainable development. It is run by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and celebrated in over 100 countries. The campaign's goal is to change people's attitudes towards the environment and ensure a prosperous future for all nations.

The celebration is hosted by different cities each year, with a unique theme declared by the UNGA. Activities include tree planting, cultural events, drawing and painting competitions, quizzes, debates, lectures, essay writing, and more. Workshops on sustainable project management are also organised to encourage youths to address environmental and climate change issues.

In 2009, an environment fair was held in Chennai and Bangalore, featuring activities like painting competitions, e-waste management training, renewable energy devices, wildlife conservation, rainwater harvesting systems, debates on global warming, and awareness drives about the "go green" revolution. These activities promote eco-friendly infrastructure and energy efficiency to combat global warming and save natural resources.

World Environment Day brings people from all countries together to deal with climate change and improve forest management. It is an effective campaign that enhances political attention and public action. By participating in WED, we can contribute to a healthier planet and ensure a safer future for generations to come. Let us all pledge to take positive actions and work together to maintain the beauty of our planet.

World Environment Day 2024: Drawing Ideas for Students

World Environment Day 2024: FAQs

What is the theme of World Environment Day 2024?

The theme for World Environment Day 2024 is "Land Restoration, Desertification and Drought Resilience." The slogan is "Our Land, Our Future. We are #GenerationRestoration."

When is World Environment Day?

World Environment Day is always held on June 5th.

Who is hosting 2024 World Environment Day?

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be hosting the 2024 World Environment Day global celebrations.

What can I do to get involved in World Environment Day?

There are many ways you can get involved in World Environment Day! You can find a practical guide with ideas for individuals, businesses, and governments on the World Environment Day website [World Environment Day Get Involved]. Some ideas include:

Planting trees
Reducing your consumption of resources
Supporting sustainable businesses
Getting involved in local restoration projects
Raising awareness about environmental issues

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Environmental movement
The environmental movement (sometimes referred to as the ecology movement) is a social movement that aims to protect the natural world from harmful environmental practices in order to create sustainable living. Environmentalists advocate the just and sustainable management of resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy and individual behavior.
History of the environmental movement
History of the environmental movement. Concern for the impact on human life of problems such as air and water pollution dates to at least Roman times. Pollution was associated with the spread of epidemic disease in Europe between the late 14th century and the mid-16th century, and soil conservation was practiced in China, India, and Peru as early as 2,000 years ago.
Timeline of Environmental Movement and History
April 15, 2014. This timeline of key moments in environmental history and the environmental movement is adapted from Tom Turner's chronology for American Earth, an anthology edited by Bill ...
Environmental Movements in India
Environmental Movement. An environmental movement is a social and political movement. It seeks to address environmental issues and advocate for the protection and preservation of natural resources and ecosystems. Environmental movements typically focus on issues such as air and water pollution, deforestation, climate change, wildlife conservation.
Major Environmental Movements in India
The terms 'green movement' or 'conservation movement' are alternatively used to denote the same. The environmental movements favour the sustainable management of natural resources. The movements often stress the protection of the environment via changes in public policy. Many movements are centred on ecology, health and human rights ...
Essay on Environmental Movement
The environmental movement is a campaign aimed at protecting our natural world. It includes people and groups working together to keep the air, water, and land clean. They want to make sure plants, animals, and humans can live healthily. This movement started because people saw the damage being done to Earth and wanted to fix it.
A Brief History of Environmentalism
Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay warning that human overpopulation would lead to ecological destruction. ... Rachel Carson brought the environmental movement into focus with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, describing the impact of chemical pesticides on biodiversity. "For the first time in the history of the world," she wrote ...
Environmental Movements in India
To read more about the Silent valley movement, check the linked article. Chipko Movement. Chipko Movement started on April 24, 1973, at Mandal of Chamoli district of Gharwal division of Uttarakhand. The Chipko is one of the world-known environmental movements in India. The movement was raised out of ecological destabilisation in the hills.
History of the Environmental Movement
As the environmental movement gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, the existing economic system in general and the belief in limitless economic growth in particular were increasingly challenged. In 1966, Kenneth E. Boulding published an influential essay entitled The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (Boulding 1966). Later he famously ...
The Environmental Movement in the US Research Paper
This paper is concerned with analyzing the environmental movement in the US as a potential engine for social change. The movement's ideology, membership, and leadership are investigated, with the contrast between the past and present iterations. Several contradictions and issues within the movement that may hinder its goal fulfillment are ...
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The Modern Environmental Movement. From the Collection: The Environment. June 30, 1948: The Postwar Period. The first piece of legislation to lay down federal regulation of water quality, the ...
Environmental Movement and Individual Choices Essay
The modern environmental movement. The history of the environmental movement includes several important milestones. For example, one can mention the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring because it raised people's awareness about the effects of ecological problems. Secondly, one should speak about various legislative acts that were largely prompted by the work of environmental ...
Essay on Green Movement
Students are often asked to write an essay on Green Movement in their schools and colleges. And if you're also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic. ... The Green Movement, also known as the environmental movement, is a socio-political and cultural phenomenon that began in the mid-20th ...
Environmental movement in the United States
Scope of the movement. The early Conservation movement, which began in the late 19th century, included fisheries and wildlife management, water, soil conservation and sustainable forestry.Today it includes sustainable yield of natural resources, preservation of wilderness areas and biodiversity.; The modern Environmental movement, which began in the 1960s with concern about air and water ...
Environmental Movement Essay
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the Beginning of the Environmental Movement in the United States When Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published in 1962, it generated a storm of controversy over the use of chemical pesticides. Miss Carson's intent in writing Silent Spring was to warn the public of the dangers associated with pesticide use.
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Abstract. The impacts of environmental movements (EMs) are indirect and mediated outcomes of efforts by actors ranging from environmental NGOs to grass-roots activists to influence environmental policies and practices of governments and corporations, usually by mobilizing public opinion. With fewer resources than industry groups, EMs' impacts ...
How 'Silent Spring' Ignited the Environmental Movement
The early activists of the new environmental movement had several successes attributed to Carson — from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the establishment of Earth Day to President Nixon's ...
Environmental Justice Movement Essay (Critical Writing)
Environmental Justice Movement Essay (Critical Writing) Since the 19th century, the phenomenon of ecological awareness and environmental preservation has not existed in isolation from the major socio-economic patterns. The primary catalyst of rapid environmental policy change across the US and the world, in general, was the socio-political ...
PDF Thinking about Environmental History
Although environmental history is an offspring of the environmental movement, the dream of uniting history and nature has enticed historians for a very long time, going back all the way to Herodotus.1 The idea of history contained a connection between culture and nature at its very inception: writing history means grasping
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Aug 13, 2023. --. 1. Eco-literature, also known as environmental literature or ecocriticism, has emerged as a crucial genre in contemporary literature, reflecting society's growing concern for ...
Evolution of the Environmental Movement
It has been molded and shaped for over 200 hundred years now, possibly more. To fully understand this movement that is now taking claims as a revolution, we must see how it began, how and why it developed and changed over the years and what it has become, and accomplished. The Environmental movement has flourished more over just the past 3 ...
Environmental Movement Essay
Environmental Movement Essay. The environmental movement is a social movement dedicated to the management, protection, and restoration of the natural environment. Also referred to as the conservation movement, or more recently, the green movement, it is one of the more successful social movements of the 20th century, for it secured widespread ...
World Environment Day 2024: Essay, Speech And Drawing Ideas for Students
World Environment Day signifies a commitment to ending plastic use and preventing the depletion of natural resources. Celebrations take place worldwide, with schools and colleges organising events like debates and essay competitions. Here are some ideas for essays, speeches, and drawings for Environment Day 2024.
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The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out ...

Major Environmental Movements in India

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48 The Impacts of Environmental Movements

Environmental Movements

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