According to Cahn and Cahn (1990), Earth Day 1990 "united more people concerned about a single cause than any other global event in history" (Cahn & Cahn, 1990: 17). Regardless of the possible hyperbole (and the difficulty of verification), the claim reflects the eminent position of the environmental movement in the late twentieth century from the perspective of some US commentators. Dunlap and Mertig (1992) place the heart of the US environmental movement in the period 1970 to 1990.
Dunlap (1992) presents the most comprehensive overview of U.S. environmental attitudes for the Post-War period. He suggests that the late 1960s and the 1980s were the particular periods when Americans were most involved with environmental ideas. But there is reason to doubt that one should base an accurate timeline of the environmental movement on the vagaries of environmental consciousness. Actions within government and actions among non-governmental institutions are also important in establishing when "environmentalism" occurred. For example, public interest may have subsided during the 1970s simply because the movement had apparently "succeeded" (by some estimations) by moving into the formal political arena.
Thus, in harmony with the fact that environmentalism was a nascent
force in the US from around 1900 and in harmony with the methodology
of the model of investigation employed here, the entire twentieth
century up to the 1980s will be examined as the context
from which US environmentalism emerged. The movement may have
picked up steam during the 1980s (and on into the 1990s) but this
study is concerned with the sources of the movement rather than
its path once it reached the fore of the American social landscape.
In terms of specific electoral outcomes, the United States in the twentieth century (Table 5.1) showed a bit more superficial juxtaposition of political administrations than it had during the preceding century. Once again, the basic tally of presidential victories was comparable (twelve Republican, ten Democratic). But only once did a single party appear to dominate the office (1933-1953)-and even then not to the extent that had occurred during the previous century. Once again, of the fifteen different persons elected to the office, five people were elected president more than once.
The Era of Reform at the close of the nineteenth century provided the first political context in which the nascent twentieth century environmental movement coalesced. "The organizational and ideological roots of contemporary environmentalism are commonly traced to the progressive conservation movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century" (Dunlap and Riley 1993: 1-2). This often involved the views of conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot who "emphasized the wise management of natural resources for continued human use" and of preservationists such as John Muir who "argued for the preservation of nature for its own sake" (Dunlap and Riley 1993: 2). Though such efforts were often focussed upon "natural" or "wilderness" areas (or, at the very least, "rural" areas), there were more urban social movements (such as those focussed on the problems of industrialization and urban squalor) that championed concerns what would eventually develop into the formalized environmental movement of the late twentieth century.
One example of this is the Hull House in Chicago. The Hull House was interested in community-based social reform in general. But such general interests manifest themselves on a number of "environmental" issues, such as Alice Hamiltons typhoid investigation that brought about sweeping changes in issues of sanitation (Gottlieb 1993). Such piecemeal efforts continued into the twentieth century and began to gather a focus in the 1960s. Frechet and Worndl (1993: 61)) describe this as an "ecologization" of new Deal environmentalism. "The environmental thematic became a matter of protest" (Frechet and Worndl, 1993: 61).
The 1960s are often portrayed as a decade of movements and contention. This decade formed the immediate context in which the environmental movement would germinate. There was the new Left, arguably typified by the Students for a Democratic Society. This group's 1962 statement (The Port Huron Statement) linked it plainly with two other significant movements of the era, the antinuclear/Cold War and the civil rights movements. Though the antinuclear movement lost momentum with the above ground Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), the civil rights movement evolved and became sometime compatriot of both the free speech and the end-the-war-on-Vietnam movements (Gottlieb 1993).
The broader "quality of life" issues addressed by these varied movements began to find a direct concern with environmental issues towards the mid- and late-1960s.
[A] series of dramatic episodes, including the 1965 power blackout and garbage strikes of new York City, the 1969 burning of the Ohio River along the industrial sections of Cleveland, and most visibly the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, highlighted for the new Left the darker side of a technologically centered, presumably post-scarcity system (Gottlieb 1993: 96).
At the same time, the environmental atrocities of the Vietnam War awakened peace activists to environmental concerns.
There was not all-out agreement between traditional new Left concerns with economic matters and the emerging environmental ethics.
Several new Left groups remained wary of the environmental label, associating it with issues such as population control [which was perceived as an elitist excuse for containment of the poor, especially in the Third World], wilderness protection identified as a kind of anti-urban elitism, and personal responsibility linked to a "blame the victim" approach (Gottlieb 1993: 97).
But what may have divorced the new Left most from the environmental movement was the rapid decline of the former in the early 1970s as the latter continued to build.
Though some commentators note a decline in public concern over environmental concerns during the 1970s (e.g., Dunlap 1992), there is ample reason to suggest the movement in general continued to progress. As noted above, the populace may have been "under the impression that the White House [under Carter] would effectively implement environmental objectives" (Hays 1987:62) and thus not as concerned as it had previously been. In addition, even before Carter arrived, Congress passed (and the President signed into law) more environmental legislation during the 1970s than perhaps at any other time:
The principal [acts were] the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1970), the Water Pollution Control Act (1972), the Marine Protection Act (1972), the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodentcide Act (1972), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), the Clean Water Act (1977), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act ("Superfund," 1980) [Dowie 1995: 33].
Even with all these transformations, the roots of the environmentalism that surfaced through the political turbulence of the 1960s had many aspects in common with the beginnings of the nascent movement around the turn of the 20th century. For example, the movement focussed in Puerto Rico had a strong emphasis on both workplace and community health and safety (Concepcion 1995). It is important to note that the concern for public health and safety was arguably only a structural context in which environmental insurgency festered. These aspects of "environmentalism" have now largely been subsumed within the greater movement and are intimately the purvey of "environmentalists" and not "public health advocates" (Gordon 1992). In this way, the public health movement played a role similar to (though perhaps less abstract than) that played the women's and the peace movements. Tarrow sees these latter movements along with environmentalism as the result of the environment created by the student movements of the 1960s (Tarrow 1989). The suggestion is that they all nurtured one-another.
This march towards mobilization was made possible, in part, by a number of formal political factors. When comparing the U.S. movement with some of its counterparts in Europe and Canada, Frechet and Worndl note that
the relative openness of the government apparatus encourages institutionalization tendencies in the environmental protest movement. State legislation processes are distinguished by their openness to interest groups. American supervisory authorities are more heavily obliged-in contrast to their European counterparts-to consider objections that may be raised. The public can participate in environmental supervisory processes (Frechet and Worndl 1993: 64).
| Party
Republican | Person
McKinley |
| Republican | Roosevelt | |
| Republican | Taft | |
| Democrat | Wilson | |
| Democrat | Wilson | |
| Republican | Harding | |
| Republican | Coolidge | |
| Republican | Hoover | |
| Democrat | FDR | |
| Democrat | FDR | |
| Democrat | FDR | |
| Democrat | FDR | |
| Democrat | Truman | |
| Republican | Eisenhower | |
| Republican | Eisenhower | |
| Democrat | JFK | |
| Democrat | Johnson | |
| Republican | Nixon | |
| Republican | Nixon | |
| Democrat | Carter | |
| Republican | Reagan | |
| Republican | Reagan |
US industrialization (as implied by GNP) increased overall throughout the first seven decades of the twentieth century, albeit with a few "hiccups". The first aberration occurred during the world-wide "Great Depression" of the 1930s. The second slackening of the increase in industrialization occurred after the Second World War. Conversely, wars tended to affect the growth of industrialization in the opposite direction. Both "world" wars, US involvement in Korea and the 1960s (and 1970s) campaign against various countries of southeast Asia occurred contemporaneously with notable (and often extreme) jumps in US industrial output.
This general "prosperity" was reflected in the lives of many individuals. The per capita gross national product in the US during the twentieth century (until 1970) tended to increase (from roughly 250 1975 dollars in 1900 to roughly 4800 1975 dollars in 1970). As reflected in Figure 5.1, however, this growth was somewhat erratic. During the years of the First World War, the first notable increase in the growth rate occurred. Then, from 1920 until the Second World War, the general level of affluence in the United States (as roughly reflected through the per capita gross national product) steadily decreased, almost to pre-W.W.I levels. The Second World War, however, coincided with a steep increase in per capita GNP that decreased a slight bit in the decade-and-a-half following the war. During the 1960s, this indicator of prosperity grew at a steeper rate once again (eventually even more steeply than during the two world wars). This is significant, since the implication is that general levels of income increased. Much research suggests that increasing income fosters concern for the environment (e.g., Dunlap and Van Liere 1978, Scott and Willits 1994, and so on).
At the same time, however, the rapid industrialization of North America during the late 1800s and the 1900s created many problems that became apparent by the turn of the century. "During the first decade of the new century there had been few investigations of occupational health and even fewer reforms of industrial practices in the United States, though occupational hazards were present in a wide range of industries" (Gottlieb 1993: 48). Industrial poisoning ("carbon monoxide in the steel mills, pneumonia and rheumatism in the stockyards, 'phossy jaw' from white phosphorus used in match factories" and the like were common plights [Gottlieb 1993: 48]).
Typically, though some of these problems (such as phossy jaw) were remedied, such successes "proved to be an exception rather than the rule in investigating and addressing occupational hazards " (Gottlieb 1993: 48-49). Such contradictions surrounding the "benefits" of industrialization have created a kind of cultural climate in which movement towards environmental activism gained momentum throughout the twentieth century. Salleh (1995), though writing particularly of women's relationship to industrialization (and the social circumstances that appear to have predominantly fostered it, such as patriarchy, capitalism and accumulation) suggests that such contradictions have produced an environmental politics of sustainability. More generally, even a figure such as Pinchot who is often seen as the more accommodating of the environmentalists produced during this "first wave" of environmentalism (during the Era of Reform) "observed that America's natural resources were being used at an alarming rate by businessmen with little or no concern for the future of the land" (Dowie 1995:17).
More generally, Frechet and Worndl (1993) state the relationship between industrialization and environmental mobilization quite succinctly: "The background for the ecological protest [activities] was the post-war industrialization push, in the course of which the problems of unlimited growth became a subject of awareness" (Frechet and Worndl, 1993: 56). Or, as Dunlap and Riley put it, twentieth-century concerns regarding the environment were a "reaction to [the] reckless exploitation of our nation's natural resources" (Dunlap and Riley 1992:2).
Environmentalism would grow, sometimes slowly, throughout the rest of the century. Directly after the First World War, "the United States was confronted by massive environmental calamities" and then a "second wave of environmental awareness arose during the Franklin Roosevelt administration and emphasized the mitigation of resource problems" (Dunlap and Riley 1992: 2). This concern with the environment resurfaced after the second world war and resulted in the "wilderness movement" towards the 1960s (McCloskey 1972).* In part, this third wave surged as a result "with the rapid growth of outdoor recreation in the 1950s" (Hays 1987: 3).
This awareness, according to Frechet and Worndl, became acute during the 1960s. "Rapid industrialization had, by that time, exhibited its destructive consequences, visible in such spectacular catastrophes as the oil-polluted beaches of Santa Barbara. People became aware that the immense natural riches of the USA were not inexhaustible" (Frechet and Worndl, 1993: 61). Dunlap and Riley concur: "old and new issues began to coalesce in the 1960s and gradually evolved into environmental concerns" (Dunlap and Riley 1992: 2).
It was during the 1960s perhaps more than at any other time that the (at least superficially) divergent concerns of the public health and other environmental concerns would be forged into a cohesive set of concerns (and attendant actions) that were facilitated by the general state of the economy (Hays, 1987). "Evolving environmental values were closely associated with rising standards of living... Personal real income grew" (Hays 1987: 3). Later, he writes the "environmental objectives and values arose out of deep-seated changes in preferences and values associated with the massive social and economic transformation in the decades after 1945" (Hays 1987: 13).
These transformations, as discussed were two-fold. They provided
the space in which concern could coalesce. But that concern was
preceded by the problems incurred from these transformations.
A short list of some of the post-war issues around which environmentalism
gathered demonstrates that some of the cause celebres were
also the results of "progress". Hays
(1987) cites the following environmental goals as symptomatic
of this duality: water conservation, sustained yield forestry,
soil conservation, and fish and game management.
Though not as dramatic as the preceding century's urbanization, the percentage of people living in urban dwellings increased from slightly less that forty percent in 1900 to roughly seventy percent in the 1970s (Figure 5.3). This rapid urbanization "represent[ed] a chronicle of new and pervasive forms of environmental degradation" (Gottlieb 1993: 51). This was a result of encroachment on wilderness areas, increasing use of fossil fuels, increased concentration of industrial pollutants and "dirty" transportation (railroads, autos and trucks). The hazards of the workplace and the hazards of the city exacerbated one another (Gottlieb 1993).
This is particularly apparent when one looks at one of the first problem areas, water quality. Municipalities felt that all aspects of urban dwelling were secondary to the needs of industry. Local water sources therefor became increasingly unpotable as they were spoiled by industry (Mumford 1961). As a result of this situation, epidemics of infectious diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, and typhoid were common through at least the turn of the century. Release of wastes into the air and disposal on land were similarly indiscriminate and problematical (Gottlieb 1993).
Most cities undergoing explosive growth were nightmares of primitive sanitation and waste disposal systems. Privies for sewage and private wells for water were still widely used in metropolitan areas until the end of the [nineteenth] century-and the former increasingly contaminated the latter. Cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, and other diseases carried by water and filth were rampant. In 1881, the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga River "an open sewer through the center of the city." It remained so until passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 (Shabecoff 1993: 39).
Cities have also emphasized the results of inequitable use of resources and the varying impact that this depletion of resources (or environmental degradation) has had on differing populations (Laituri & Kirby 1994). In this way, then urban growth has contributed to concern with environmental issues. In particular, citing of waste disposal facilities in minority communities (particularly in urban areas) has created a cadre of environmentalists-by-immediate-necessity largely attributable to both the problems and opportunities created by urban growth (Ernst 1994).
In sum, urban settings seem to foster movements of people that are "environmentally aware" and "active" at least insomuch as their environmental concerns relate to their own surroundings. This coincides roughly with Calavita and Cave's (1990) exploration of the growth of San Diego and its possible paths for the future.
It is important to note that this increasing awareness among urban dwellers of environmental issues does not necessarily correlate with an overall "environmental attitude". The increasing awareness and the often connected insurgency is not necessarily generically related to all issues environmental. In fact, studies that distinguish between urban and rural activism suggest that the two kinds of insurgency are differently rooted (e.g. Freudenburg 1991). This does not rule out the significance of urban growth for the overall sum of environmental activism. But this fact does remind one to remain cautious about the sweeping impact urbanization has had on some parts of the movement.
Still, even when the concerns of urban and rural dwellers diverge, it appears that the movement of urban residents to rural areas (where they are as likely as long-time rural residents to hold "pro-environmental" views) adds strength to the rural aspects of the movement. Fortmann and Kusel (1990) document this phenomena among rural populations of the western United States. Also, it is important to note that while the various kinds of grassroots mobilizations discussed here are sometime considered ineffectual, these aspects of environmental insurgency have played a key role in the overall movement (Krauss 1988). This has occurred, of course, at the cost of increasing local conflict over such matters as the newly ruralized urbanites' values clashed with the long-standing values of the long-time rural folks (Brown 1995). But when focussed on the occurrence of movement (as is the case in this thesis) rather than on the success of movement, this conflict does not negate the fact that contention is occurring.
Ultimately, urbanization appears to have had two positive correlations with increasing environmental activism. Chronologically, the first stems from the immediate impact of urban squalor that resulted from the rapid, disorganized growth of cities. The second manner in which increasing large proportions of the populace dwelling in cities impacted environmentalism is less direct but undeniable. The move to protect the wilderness environment has often been spearheaded by urban dwellers. Nash (1967) may overstate the situation, but
It is undeniable that the articulation of the joys of nature and the first calls for its protection did not come from the settlers struggling to wrest a livelihood from the wild frontier but from the scholars, poets, philosophers, scientists, writers, painters, clerics, and even the politicians of the settled, increasingly urbanized East (Shabecoff 1993: 46).
The United States during the twentieth century has experienced ever-increasing literacy. As reflected in Figure 5.4, the literacy rate has climbed from slightly more than eighty-nine percent in 1900 to greater than ninety-nine percent in 1980. Of particular note are the decreases in the rates of growth in the period 1940 to 1960 and from 1970 forward.
This generally increasing literacy-and the widespread schooling that has fostered it-has had a dual interaction with mobilization around environmental issues. More education has increased awareness of (and insurgency about) environmental causes. But it has also engendered a submission to "authority" that has sometimes created a situation in which contention is stifled before it can coalesce.
This stifling aspect of education has been noted by in various contexts by U.S. observers stretching back at least through the nineteenth century. As Spring (1973) notes, "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental" (Spring 1973, quoted in Zinn 1980: 257). Or, as one journalist observing teaching in the 1890s noted, "The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly" (Zinn 1980: 257).
In the twentieth century, the critiques have become more nuanced but have continued to note the problems with education "as it is practiced" from a variety of perspectives. Two disparate examples are Postman and Weingartner's (1969) and Freire's (1970) work. Among many others, these authors document both the manner in which education may liberate and enlighten (and, thus, possibly contribute to an environment that fosters contention). But they quite explicitly explore the manner in which "education" often acts as a process of disempowering those being "educated" (and, thus, may contribute to the unlikelihood of insurgency by stifling the creation of the situations in which contention could ferment). This "stifling" aspect of education has been directly linked to the lack of environmental consciousness among many twentieth century U.S. citizens (Brennan 1994).
Still, the overall movement of contemporary U.S. culture (including its reluctant educational systems) towards some kind of altered appreciation of the environment appears to have occurred. For example, Cooper (1993) finds a trend towards increasing appreciation of the natural world in core societies during the twentieth century. This appreciation could provide a context in which contention coalesces. And, specifically, increased educational levels positively correlate with non-dominating views towards the natural world (Woodrum and Hoban 1994).
This trend in education appears to parallel an overall trend in advanced capitalist societies in general. Eder (1993) notes the link between the "self-defeating process of modernization" and "the increasing environmental crisis" (Eder 1993: 119). Though his work deliberately eschews discussin the U.S. environmental movement, many of his insights into movements in general (and into contemporary environmental movements in advanced capitalist societies in particular) are useful.
Key among his insights is that ecological crisis has created a new generalized form of social ("class") conflict. This new conflict takes center stage in social relations and creates a newly radicalized constituency comprised largely of the traditional "middle class." This class, he suggests, grew out of "a distorted form of countercultural traditions" and if moving in a contentious direction again (Eder 1993: 134). This change opens new fields of contention. Eder sees "nature" as the likely primary new field of contention. Habermas draws a similar link between material conditions and their effect upon radical activity in his exploration of the effect of ecological degradation on the life-world (Habermas 1981, 1987). For example, he writes:
What sparks the protest...is the tangible destruction of the urban environment, the destruction of the countryside by bad residential planning, industrialization and pollution, health impairments due to side effects of civilization-destruction... These are developments that visibly attack the organic foundations of the life-world and make one drastically conscious of criterias of livability, of inflexible limits to the deprivation of sensual-aesthetic background needs... The objectives, attitudes, and behavior prevalent in youthful protest groups can at first be grasped as reactions to specific problem situations perceived with great sensitivity: "green" problems. The large industrial intervention in ecological balances, the scarcity of non-renewable natural resources, and the demographic development present industrially developed societies with serious problems. Yet these challenges are largely abstract and require technical and economic solutions that must, in turn, be planned globally and implemented by administrative means (Habermas 1981: 35 [emphases in original]).
The pattern of greater education creating a situation in which the potential for insurgency regarding environmental matters has not been unequivocally established (witness Buttel, et al.'s [1981] findings that there is little significant correlation between educational levels of farmers in new York and Michigan and their views regarding the environment) but the suggestion of a relationship between increasing general societal levels of education and increasing environmental activism appears guardedly justifiable. Generalized examinations of the relationship between educational levels and environmental views suggest that limiting one's study to farmers (i.e., Buttel et al.'s [1981] approach] may skew ones results. Scott and Willits (1994), in keeping with Van Liere and Dunalp (1980), among others, find that in the general population, increasing levels of education correlate strongly with increasing environmental consciousness.
The connection between increasing environmental awareness and increasing general levels of education can be substantively demonstrated. Throughout the period under consideration, environmental issues became more and more important to students and to the people who taught them. In 1967, for example,
a Cornell professor declared that "to write an essay on education for environmental management is to write an essay on the future of the university....Almost without exception, the separate parts of a modern American university's curriculum yield some angle of perspective on the environment".... by 1972, at least fifteen colleges and universities were offering environmental education programs (Scheffer 1991: 123).
Such a situation was not unique to venues of 'higher education'. The first Earth Day (in 1970) is often cited as a prime example of the generalized readiness of educational activities (which has gradually pervaded most aspects of American society by the latter twentieth century) to foster environmental insurgency. As Hays (1987) notes, there is a definite demographic relationship between increasing levels of education and the movement.
Nearly 20 million Americans took part in that broad communion: that exchange of thoughts and ideas about ways to reverse humankind's rush toward cultural extinction. Experts and concerned lay people spoke about rising problems of pollution, overpopulation, slums, wasted resources, planned obsolescence, and military overkill. Congress recessed for the day. Environmental Action described it as the largest, cleanest, most peaceful demonstration in America's history. Aging Rene Dubos regretted that he could not march with the students (Scheffer 1991: 125).
As Wallerstein (1974, 1984, 1990b, among other places) notes, there are some primary processes at work in (or aspects of the) international relations in the world-system (world-economy). There are three zones of this world-system (the core, semi-periphery and periphery). During the time period under consideration, the United States spent most of its time in the core of the world-system. Among other things, this means that the US accumulated capital through the direction of the extraction of natural resources from non-core countries.
As the treatments in, for instance, Amin (1990) make plain, one of the key aspects of the workings of the world-system is the creation of social (or, anti-systemic) movements. These can take on a myriad of forms. As Frank and Fuentes (1990) note, one of these forms is that of the "ecological movement". Their treatment of movements in an international context (following, in part, loosely the insights of Wallerstein (1974, 1984, 1990b and other works) and more closely the investigations of Brand (1990), among others) suggests that there are world-systemic factors that produce movements. Though they are reluctant to ferret out particular relationships between the world-system and movement formation (many causes have been offered but few have proved clearly sufficient upon close examination), they imply-as does Brand (1990) perhaps even more explicitly-that there are common, international causes to anti-systemic activities that occur in diverse locales during contemporaneous periods.
In the particular case of the US during the twentieth century, the acquisition of raw materials, and the attendant transformation of these raw materials into profitable consumer goods (often through the utilization of cheap foreign labor through the international division of labor [Frobel, et al. 1977]), contributed to an ever-increasing standard of living, especially during the Post-War period. This ever-increasing standard of living was based not only on the profits created through the privileged position of the United States but also through the increasing consumption that it enabled/engendered. As the discussion of the interrelationship between industrialization (and economic growth) and the emerging environmental movement suggests, then, the position of the United States within the world-economy during the twentieth century would appear to have been an important factor stimulating environmental activism. A likely direct link between the international environment and the US environmental movement appears to have been the manner in which the place of the US in the world-system contributed to economic prosperity (and its historically attendant ecological degradation, among other factors discussed above) that inadvertently fostered the nascent contention around ecological issues in the United States.
A second, complimentary factor worked in tandem with the manner in which US involvement in the world-economy contributed to US affluence and thus may have facilitated environmentalist insurgency. Transnational accumulation of capital has tended to inhibit accountability for ecological degradation while exacerbating environmental problems. The effect of this accumulation, even when tempered through international agreements,
has been to expand the transnational quest for markets, growing access to natural resources in a broader array of nations and regions within them, and the recruitment of labor forces in the world, all aimed as generating still-higher profits per unit production... But such expansion is likely to generate substantial new environmental degradation (Gould, et al., 1995:63-64).
This is not merely a fact of the world-system of the present but has been an ever-present factor for at least the last two centuries (e.g., Chew 1992), probably for the past five centuries (e.g., Wallerstein 1974), and possibly for the past fifty centuries or more (e.g., Frank & Gills 1992). During the twentieth century, with the US primarily at the helm of the world-economy,
the primary basis of economic expansion remained industrial production and land development for both increased resource extraction and rationalized agribusiness. Industrial production and land development required the withdrawal of ecosystem elements for raw material inputs, and the addition of wastes to ecosystems as the by-products of outputs. Accelerated production therefore necessarily usually implied at least sustained ecosystem withdrawals and additions, disrupting natural systems... [E]conomic growth logically entails...ecological disruption and environmental degradation, whether consciously or otherwise (Gould, et al., 1995:68-69).
The world-system influenced American environmentalism in other
ways, as well. For example, U.S. involvement in Vietnam fits well
with Wallerstein's
(1974, 1984, 1990b, among other places) understanding of the economic
underpinnings of actions instigated by the core and/or hegemon
in the world-economy. As Zinn
(1980) notes, the reasons for U.S. involvement in southeast Asia
revolved around economic motives (the US's official rhetoric notwithstanding).
The anti-war movement was one of the major domestic U.S. responses
to the actions of its own government playing out its role in the
world-system. And this movement that grew out the workings of
the world-economy was an important ancillary movement in the genesis
of environmentalism (as discussed above in this chapter).
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