Environmental problems and management.

The origins of environmental policy

Recognition of the need to both transform and adjust to nature is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. While we may think of ‘the environment’ as a modern political issue that gained popular appeal in the 1960s, the roots of environmentalist thinking stretch back far into the past (O’Riordan, 1976).The natural environment provides humanity with the material resources for economic growth and consumer satisfaction. But throughout history there have always been social critics and philosophers who have felt that humans also need nature for spiritual nourishment and aesthetic satisfaction. John Muir, the redoubtable founder of the Sierra Club in the USA, felt that without wild places to go to humanity was list:

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are fountains not only of timber and irrigating rivers, but also as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of over-industry and the deadly those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease … some are washing off sins and cobwebs of the devil’s spinning in all-day storms on mountains (quoted in Pepper, 1984, p. 33).

Environmental protection is remarkably similar terms today. What is dramatically different is the extent of popular concern. The critical question which needs to be asked is why did modern environmentalism blossom as a broad social movement spanning different continents in the late 1960s and not before? There is strong evidence that environmental problems like acidification and pesticide pollution materially worsened and became more widespread in the public mind in the 1960s and 1970s. The American sociologist Ronald Inglehart (1977), however, believes that we also have to look to society for an explanation. On the basis of careful and intensive public opinion analysis, he argues that modern environmentalism is the visible expression of a set of ‘new political’ values held by a generation of ‘post-materialists’ raised in the wealthy welfare states of the West.This liberated class no longer had to toil to supply their material needs and set out to satisfy what the psychologist Maslow (1970) terms its ‘higher order requirements like peace, tranquility, intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction. This was surely a ‘post-materialist’sensibility, but at first it was confined to a vociferous minority that tried to push their values onto the majority who steadfastly regarded themselves more as consumers than as citizens.

Other commentators, however, highlight the tendency for environmental concernto exhibit a cyclical pattern over time, with particularly pronounced peaks in the late 1960s and late 1980s. Closer scrutiny reveals that these short-term ‘pulses’ coincided with periods of economic growth and social instability, which at first blush seems consistent with Inglehart’s thesis. Other sociologists have also observed that materially richer and better educated sections of society tend to give much higher priority to environmental protection than poorer ones, with the highest rates among those working in the ‘non-productive’ sectors of the economy, such as education, health and social care (Cotgrove & Duff, 1980). Conversely, concern tends to tail off during periods of economic recession (Downs, 1972), and is not normally as pronounced in poorer sections of Western society or in developing countries. The birth of the modern environmental movement in the late 1960s certainly coincided with a period of economic prosperity and societal introspection. Whether this led to or was caused by the accumulating evidence of environmental decay is open to interpretation.

Source: Jordan, A., & O’Riordan, T. (1999). Environmental problems and management.In P. Cloke, P. Crang & M. Goodwin (Eds), Introducing human geographies (pp. 133-140). London: Arnold. Reproduced by kind permission of Hodder Education.

3.2 Decide if the references in the text are paraphrases/summaries or direct quotationsand complete columns 1 and 2 in the table below.

Рау attention to the kind of language used.

3.3 Match the list of ideas frоm the text with their appropriate references in the table in Ex.3.2. Complete column 3 of the table.