Environmental movement:

Preservationists 1830’s:

• george perkins marsh: Men and Nature (captured mood around

preservation movement)

• Created national parks (ex. Banf national park, result of

preservationists pushing for preserving environment)

• Preservationist movement movement by wealthy people,

basically ensuring people had somewhere to go to enjoy
wilderness, select few with enough money able to go there and
encounter

Conservationists 1860’s

• About utilitariainism, physical environment in order to meet

needs of people, protecting forest but maintaing for timber
extraction, maintaining managing game so then hunters could
enjoy ex preserve deer population then hunt when abundant.

• Aldo Leopold: game management. A sand county almanac

• Manage wildlife and resources for human use

Modern environmentalism 1960’s and 1970’s

• Rachel carsons: silent springs, paul ehrlich: opulations bomb too

many people in world not enough resources to support our
populations talks about environmental degredation etc…

• Pollution control, public awarness (raised issues bout pollution

and environmental health) looked into reducing air and water
polution making our world a better place to live in

• During this time environmental laws passed to protect

environment ex. New road built, not only think of how it affects
the population and how it improves traffic flow but how it will
affect the environment

Many veins: 1970’s onward

• Environmental justice (interested in the effect of polutants and

polluted environments on public health, argue that
environmental problems and pollutant problems due to
inequalities of different societies or different populations
between communitites richer communities or countries vs poorer
ones) typically environmental degredation pollution occurs in
 poorer areas losing acces to crucial resources even though richer
populations degrading environment and polutting more. (ex its
cheap for developed countries to make things elsewhere and it
doesn’t effect our environment and poorer countries bare
environmental burden)

• Deep ecology (other life animals insects abcteria have intrinsic

value they don’t just exist for human use need to move away
from view that these things exist for our use but to move to a
symbiosis environment we can live together)

• Ecofeminism – takes a lot of ideas from feminist movement from

1950’s to environment, a lot of problems in environment is
because we see ourselves as dominant entity and more
important in environment, to resolve issues in enviroment we
need to have more complimentary relationship with
environment and we are more equl with environment, equal
relation ship with natural world and other species.

• Issues are increasingly global in focus –

Pollyannas versus Cassandras:

• Cassandras: Doom and gloom (Cassandra could tell future, god

appolo in love with her she doesn’t return feelings so he
punishes her by her making predictions but no one would believe
her ex she said invasion happened but no one listened, cursed
with knowing what the future holds but no one believes her) this
is like modern environmntalist… society doesn’t listen to
environmentalists and doesn’t make changes to avoud future
problems

• Pollyanna: the future is bright, basically and optimist only good

things will happen in the future, see good things in everything
( ex resources will never be scarce well always have enough
water etc… or if theres a scarcity in a resource well find a way
around it no big deal human ingenuity will come up with a
solution and we can continue living the way we do and the future
will only get better, pollyannas argue cassandras make the
future out to be worse than it actually is and exaggerate and
everything will be good

• Resources never really scarce environmentalists either over

simplify or are not accurate.

Themes for term: