The New Environmentalism

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The Congress recognizes that each person should enjoy a healthful environment and that each person has a responsibility to contribute to the preservation and enhancement of the environment.-The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

Young person, today have known no other society than the one into which they were born, and may take for granted what came before. They may not care much about tradition. Even the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, which so drastically changed our society, may seem distant when one watches documentaries of the period.

Our environmental heritage, like our social heritage, was established over many decades, by all citizens, but especially by conservationists. One of the driving forces of the human rights movements of the 1960s was a fierce determination to establish permanent protection of many newly recognized environmental and consumer rights. The public interest law movement, epitomized by Ralph Nader, tied these two forces together; coalitions were formed combining environmental and consumer rights forces with other groups, such as those promoting civil rights.



Many young Americans were in revolt against misuse of government authority and particularly in turmoil over the devastation that was being inflicted on the American environment. The impact of the war in south-east Asia, and especially the effects of television coverage during this period, cannot be underestimated: people watched actual occurrences in Vietnam and were repelled by what they saw.

Catalysts For Environmental Change

Silent Spring, a book by Rachel Carson published in 1962, dramatized the price society pays for the indiscriminate use of technological advances. Carson's thesis was that "we have allowed these chemicals [pesticides] to be used with little or no investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life." Silent Spring galvanized public opinion for the environmental changes to come.

Young persons, in particular, became aroused over pollution, blight, deterioration, waste, and destruction of our natural resources, and over the terrible hurt to everybody's health. Late in the 1960s, the media began to catalyze public opinion behind a change in social and political policies. Then, on January 28, 1969, a gigantic oil spill occurred offshore at Santa Barbara, California. The television pictures of seabirds, their feathers coated with oily gunk, suffering and dying while people who cared tried to rescue them, symbolized all forms of technology's overuse in conflict with the environment. Capturing the national attention, that single event provoked the public into action.

The public health movement was two and one-half centuries old, and the conservation movement one century old, at the time. Environmental stewardship was entrenched in our American value system. But most observers credit that catastrophe on the California coast with marking the start of the new environmental era. Modest organization work to pro-mote the cause of the environment continued for the next year. Then, the following April of 1970, an estimated twenty million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, a more-or-less spontaneous, unexpectedly successful celebration.

Concurrently, a great deal of political groundwork was being laid. Through a rare combination of imagination, political leadership, and chance, the Congress produced a gem of a law in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). It was full enough of rhetoric to satisfy the most ardent Earth Day demonstrator. Every law has its rhetoric, but NEPA had more: a strong action-forcing device. Its Section 102(2)(c) requsires an environmental impact statement in advance of any federal action that might significantly affect the quality of the environment. This requirement has revolutionized U.S., even international, decision making. It rhetorically asks governmental agencies: "Wait! Do we know all we should know about what you propose to do? Do we understand its consequences? Can we make it safer for people and more benign for the environment? Do the benefits outweigh the costs?"

If such questions had been asked-and if the will and the technology had existed to answer them-Los Angeles might have been built so as to minimize its smog and traffic congestion. The automobile might have been developed so as to avoid harmful emissions. Certainly hazardous and toxic chemicals would not have been dumped in thousands of locations, from which they definitely cause illness, and probably cause much of the rising incidence of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, mental retardation, and other serious threats to health and life.

We may not be able to do much about some of the environmentally related threats to our health, but we can unburden future generations by not making similar mistakes in our own uses of technology. The major social movement, which offers the potential for stepping back, taking a second look, and making more rational social, political, and technological decisions, is what we call the new environmentalism.

The New Environmentalism

The new environmentalism has three facets: education, science, and management. It employs them in new ways. It is ends-oriented, not means-oriented. Contrast the old with the new as follows:

Education. It might seem that defining environmental education would be as simple and as straightforward as defining medical education or engineering education, but such is not the case. A major problem in defining environmental education, compared to other types of education, is that it is all encompassing. The difficulty begins with the environment's not being a discipline. Medical education is education in medicine. Engineering education is education in engineering, and so forth throughout scores of disciplines. But environmental education is education about the environment.

Science. The new environmentalism also embraces environmental science. Traditionally, scientists and engineers worked on narrow disciplinary problems such as those having to do with climate, air turbulence, estuaries, forests, epidemics, earthquakes, and groundwater, to name a few. After 1970, the perspective broadened in response to governmental support for interdisciplinary research and development.

There were other reasons for this broadening, too. New technology such as high-speed computers relieved scientists of much of the drudgery which long had characterized their work. Machines could process vast amounts of data with the speed of light, making it possible to handle this information explosion. Scientists could devote their time to things that were more "fun," one of which was interacting with fellow scientists in a teamwork approach to more broad-based environmental problems. For the first time, they could think in terms of "managing" or manipulating environmental phenomena, as easily as they could conduct scientific experiments in the laboratory.

Management. Environmental management is an action term; it refers to all activities, public and private, undertaken to achieve the goals of environmental quality. In such activities lie many jobs and careers. This is the author's definition:

Environmental management is an interdisciplinary, integrated effort, involved with the very fabric of people's lives, focused on interrelated environmental problems and employing the findings of science, the techniques of engineering, and the understanding of the social sciences to preserve the human environment, to utilize natural resources, and to better society.

Interdisciplinary. Whereas once it was thought sufficient for disciplines to stand-alone, the sciences-especially the natural sciences and their forms of application as in engineering and technology-now are recognized as complex and closely interconnected. Biology, chemistry, ecology, physics, and other scientific disciplines, linked as in a chain, must be employed together in the solution of complex environmental problems. That is why we speak of many fields, including environmental management, as interdisciplinary.

Integrated Environmental management is integrated-parts incorporated into a larger whole. To the sciences must be added such other disciplines as engineering, business management and public administration, communications, economics, education, history, the humanities, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, sales and marketing, and the social sciences. Environmental management is an integrated form of interdisciplinary endeavor.

Involved. Environmental management endeavors, while interdisciplinary and integrated, must be undertaken with the full appreciation that they are focused on the human environment, therefore people are affected. For this reason, environmental managers must be involved in the broader society; they must be good environmental citizens, whether or not their profession has a code of ethics, requires a license, or confers a title such as Doctor. Some of the ways in which this citizen involvement occurs are to be found throughout the chapters to follow.
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