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Modern environmentalism, with its awareness of ecological damage and a desire to counteract it, dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.28 One strand in this “first-wave environmentalism” lay in a direct response to early industrialization. Romantic poets such as William Blake and William Wordsworth denounced the industrial era’s “dark satanic mills,” which threatened the “green and pleasant land” of an earlier England. In opposing the extension of railroads, the British writer John Ruskin in 1876 declared, “The frenzy of avarice is daily drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of ashes.”29 Mahatma Gandhi came into contact with this strand of thinking during his time in England during the late 1880s. “God forbid,” he later wrote, “that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West.” Another element in early environmentalism, especially prominent in the United States and Germany, derived from a concern with deforestation, drought, and desertification as pioneering settlers, lumbermen, miners, and the owners of colonial plantations inflicted terrible damage on the woodlands and pasturelands of the world. Articulated primarily by men of science, often those working in the colonial world, this approach sought to mobilize scientific expertise and state control to manage, contain, and tame modern assaults on the environment.

Protecting remaining wilderness areas was yet another aspect of early environmentalism. The first international environmental conference, held in London in 1900, aimed at preserving African wildlife from voracious European hunters. In the United States, it was the opening of the west to European settlers that threatened the natural order. “With no eye to the future,” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1897, “these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars …, spreading ruthless devastation ever wider and further.” Muir understood the economic rationale for preserving the wilderness, but for him it also held spiritual significance. “Wilderness is a necessity … not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”30 This kind of sensibility found expression in the American national parks, the first of which, Yellowstone, was established in 1872.

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These early examples of environmental awareness were distinctly limited, largely a product of literary figures, scientists, and some government officials. None of them attracted a mass following or provoked a global response. But “second-wave environmentalism,” beginning in the 1960s, did both of these things, even as it found expression in many quite different ways.

This new phase of environmentalism is most often associated with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, exposing the chemical contamination of the environment with a particular emphasis on the use of pesticides. The book struck a chord with millions, triggering environmental movements on both sides of the Atlantic. (See Zooming In: Rachel Carson.) Ten years later, the Club of Rome, a global think tank, issued a report called Limits to Growth, which warned of resource exhaustion and the collapse of industrial society in the face of unrelenting economic and population growth. Soon a mounting wave of environmental books, articles, treatises, and conferences emerged in Europe and North America, pushing back in various ways against the postwar emphasis on “development” and unending economic growth. That sensibility was aptly captured in the title of a best-selling book by British economist E. F. Schumacher in 1973: Small Is Beautiful.

But what most clearly distinguished second-wave environmentalism was widespread grassroots involvement and activism. By the late 1990s, millions of people in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand had joined one of the rapidly proliferating environmental organizations, many of them local. The issues addressed in these burgeoning movements were many and various: pollution, resource depletion, toxic waste, protecting wildlife habitats, nuclear power and nuclear testing, limiting development, and, increasingly at the top of the agenda in the twenty-first century, climate change. Beyond particular issues, proponents of “deep ecology” put forward an understanding of the world in which human beings were no longer at the center but occupied a place of equivalence with other species. Those supporting an “environmental justice” outlook were more concerned with the unequal impact of environmental problems on the poor, minorities, and developing countries.

The tactics of these movements were as varied as the issues they addressed. Much attention was given to public education and lobbying governments and corporations, often through highly organized and professionally run organizations. In Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, environmentalists created Green parties, which contested elections and on occasion shared power. Teach-ins, demonstrations, street protests, and various local actions also played a role in the strategies of environmental activists.

In the communist world, environmentalism was constrained by highly authoritarian states, which were committed to large-scale development. In the late 1980s, the Chinese government, for example, sharply repressed groups critical of the enormous Three Gorges Dam project across the Yangzi River. By the early twenty-first century, however, a grassroots environmental movement had taken root in China, expressed in hundreds of private groups and state-sponsored organizations. Many of these sought to ground their activism in Buddhist or Daoist traditions that stressed the harmony of humankind and the natural order. The Chinese state itself has enacted a large body of environmental laws and regulations.31 In the Soviet Union during the 1970s and later, environmentalists were able to voice their concerns about the shrinking of the Aral Sea, pollution threats to Lake Baikal in Siberia, and poor air quality in many cities. After the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost allowed greater freedom of expression as environmentalist concerns became part of a broader challenge to communism and Russian domination (see Chapter 21, pages 961–62).

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Quite quickly, during the 1970s and 1980s, environmentalism also took root in the Global South, where it frequently assumed a distinctive character compared to the more industrialized countries. It was more locally based and had fewer large national organizations than in the West; it involved more poor people in direct actions; it was less engaged in political lobbying and corporate strategies; it was more concerned with issues of food security, health, and basic survival than with the rights of nature or wilderness protection; and it was more closely connected to movements for social justice.32 Thus, whereas Western environmentalists defended forests where few people lived, the Chikpo, or “tree-hugging,” movement in India sought to protect the livelihood of farmers, artisans, and herders living in areas subject to extensive deforestation. A massive movement to prevent or limit the damming of India’s Narmada River derived from the displacement of local people; similar anti-dam protests in the American Northwest were more concerned with protecting salmon runs.

In the Global South, this “environmentalism of the poor” took shape in various ways, often in opposition to the gigantic development projects of national governments. Residents of the Brazilian Amazon basin, facing the loss of their livelihood to lumbering interests, ranchers, and government road-building projects, joined hands and directly confronted workers sent to cut down trees with their chainsaws. When the Thai government sought to create huge eucalyptus plantations, largely to supply Japanese-owned paper mills, Buddhist teachers, known as “ecology monks,” mobilized peasants to put their case to public officials. In the Philippines, coalitions of numerous local groups — representing various religious, women’s, human rights, indigenous peoples’, peasant, and political organizations — mobilized large-scale grassroots movements against foreign-owned mining companies. And in Kenya, the Green Belt Movement organized groups of village women to plant millions of trees intended to forestall the growth of deserts and protect the soil.

By the early twenty-first century, environmentalism had become a matter of global concern and had prompted change at many levels. National governments acted to curtail pollution and to foster the use of renewable energy sources. By 2014, Germany was edging up on getting 30 percent of its energy from such sources, most of it from solar and wind, while Brazil and Canada received 82 percent and 62 percent respectively from renewables, primarily hydropower. Furthermore, some 6,000 national parks in over 100 countries served to protect wildlife and natural beauty. In addition to governments, many businesses found it useful to become more clearly “green.” Reforestation programs were accordingly under way in China, Honduras, Kenya, and elsewhere. In recent years, international agreements have come close to eliminating the introduction of ozone-depleting substances into the atmosphere. And millions of individuals have altered their way of life, agreeing to recycle, to install solar panels, to buy fuel-efficient cars, to shop in local markets, and to forgo the use of plastic bags.

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But will these piecemeal efforts be enough to avoid the catastrophes that scientists predict will occur if global warming continues unchecked? Effective action on climate change, surely the most critical issue of the twenty-first century, has been difficult, partly because it would require some adjustment for citizens and corporations in the Global North and for elites everywhere. Furthermore, large-scale international agreement on global warming has come up against sharp conflicts between the Global North and South. Both activists and governments in the developing countries have often felt that Northern initiatives to address atmospheric pollution and global warming would curtail their industrial development, leaving the North/South gap intact. “The threat to the atmospheric commons has been building over centuries,” argued Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, “mainly because of industrial activity in the North. Yet … the North refuses to assume extra responsibility for cleaning up the atmosphere. No wonder the Third World cries foul when it is asked to share the costs.” A Malaysian official put the dispute succinctly: “The developed countries don’t want to give up their extravagant lifestyles, but plan to curtail our development.”34 Western governments argued that newly industrializing countries such as China and India must also agree to specific limits on their growing emissions if further global warming is to be prevented. Such deep disagreements between industrialized and developing countries have contributed to the failure of global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But negotiations continue regarding a climate change treaty that would be legally binding on all parties or at least voluntarily accepted by them. Beyond such efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, more exotic solutions have also surfaced such as capturing and burying carbon emissions or injecting light-reflecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere.

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More than any other widespread movement, global environmentalism came to symbolize “one world” thinking, a focus on the common plight of humankind across the artificial boundaries of nation-states. It also marked a challenge to modernity itself, particularly its consuming commitment to endless growth. The ideas of sustainability and restraint, certainly not prominent in any list of modern values, entered global discourse and marked the beginnings of a new environmental ethic. This change in thinking, although limited, was perhaps the most significant achievement of global environmentalism.