Ecology, as a science, emerged in the late nineteenth century, although its roots may be found in many other places, times and cultures. The science of ecology looks at nonhuman nature, studying the numerous, complex interactions among its biotic and abiotic components. Human ecology adds the interactions between people and their environments, enormously increasing the complexities.
Environmental politics is about how humanity organizes itself to the nature that sustains it. Thus it encompasses matters of how people deal with the Earth and its life, and how they, relate to each other through the medium of the environment. Also it impinges on other areas of political concern such as those related to poverty, education, race, the economy and international relations…etc.
The ‘environment’ as a collective term for all these concerns arrived in the 1960s, which dates the beginning of environmental politics as such. Since then, the growth of environmental literature has matched the growth of environmental concern, which has spread to the Third World and the global system itself.
In the last four decades, the politics of the environment has featured a large and growing range of issues. The initial concerns were with pollution, deforestation, population growth, and depletion of natural resources. These concerns have been supplemented by worries about energy supply, animal rights, species extinction, global climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, toxic wastes, the protection of whole ecosystems and environmental justice. All these issues are interlaced with a whole range of moral and ethical questions about human livelihood, human attitudes and our proper relations to other entities on the planet.
Environmental politics today covers discussions of the various political, social and economic causes of ecological problems; the ethics of our relationship with the natural systems that sustain us; our environmental relationships with our fellow-humans; environmental movements and designs for alternative; political organizations.
Environmental struggles, rage all over the world, although it would seem that they are becoming more ubiquitous year after year in so many corners of our shared planet. It is as if the only way to face the declaration of war on nature and humanity by neo-liberal globalization is by conflict and struggle. The dominant models of development and the economy are making inroads into urban and rural landscapes, the body, and even the molecular fabric of life. They introduce environmentally destructive practices that leave landscapes of ecological destruction, sometimes veritable devastation, along the way. Today the number of environmental conflicts and mobilization that receive, or at least merit, worldwide attention has skyrocketed. Tropical forests, biodiversity, water, seeds, energy technologies, food, rivers, and seas, contamination caused by extractive industries such as oil and mining, trans-boundary pollution, fishing rights, urban redevelopment, the melting of glaciers, and polar ice caps possibly caused by global warming, and many more are all the object of struggles in many parts of the world.
Environmental crisis surfaced in the last 1960s, along with dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. Since then, the global populations have increased by over 50percent. There has been mighty nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, industrial accident at Bhopal and Prince William Sound in Alaska. Green parties have emerged as a significant electoral force in many countries. Mainstream environmental groups have acquired massive memberships. Populist backlashes against environmentalism have flared. Global environmental issues relating to climate change and ozone layer depletion have come to the fore. We have had Earth Summits; Earth Days, environmental legislation and regulation.
Beginning in the 1960s, the various philosophical strands of environmentalism were given political expression through the establishment of “green” political movements in the form of activist nongovernmental organizations and environmentalist political parties. Despite the diversity of the environmental movement, four basic principles provided a unifying theme to the broad goals of political ecology; (a) protection of environment, (b) grassroots democracy, (c) social justice (d) nonviolence. The political goals of contemporary green movement in the industrialized West focused on changing government policy and promoting environmental social values. In the less-industrialized or developing world, environmentalism has more closely involved in “emancipatory” politics and grassroots activism on issues such as poverty, democratization, and political and human rights, including the rights of women and indigenous peoples.
Environmental movements, originated in the 1960s with the emergence of the German idea of “conservation biology” and the American concept of “doctrine of resources conservation”, adopted a very different tradition of “reverence for wilderness” in the 1980s. With the new trends in global politics, like the gap between rich and the poor, the North and South, the increasing illiteracy rate and etc has led to the conclusion that the kind of development that we follow today is not in harmony with nature.
Environmental organizations established from the late 19th to the mid 20th century were primarily middle-class lobbying groups concerned with nature conservation, wildlife protection, and the pollution that arose from industrial development and urbanization. There were also scientific organizations concerned with natural history and with biological aspects of conservation efforts.
The early strategies of the contemporary environmental movement were self consciously activist and unconventional, involving direct protest actions designed to obstruct and to draw attention to environmentally harmful policies and projects. Other strategies included public education and media campaigns, community directed activities, and conventional lobbying of policy makers and political representatives. The movement also attempted to set public examples in order to increase awareness of environmental issues. Such projects included recycling, green consumerism, and the establishment of alternative communities, including self-sufficient farms, workers’ cooperatives, and cooperative housing projects.
Sustainable Development has now been promoted as the ideal model for recovery and escaping from the environmental crisis that we are facing today. It intends at the improving well being of the present and future generation by protecting the nature and by guaranteeing eradication of poverty and satisfaction of basic needs. However, the recent development linked with the current Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime is encouraging commercialization of seed development, monoculture, and protection of new plant verities, micro organisms and genetically modified organisms. As a consequent, our rich biogenetic diversity is being coded irreversibly. Indigenous and traditional knowledge and its application as well as life styles and cultures are affected by these developments with a lot of environmental and ethical implications. All these lead to greater concern of the equation of IPR, biodiversity and Sustainable Development. It necessitates the need to make an alternative approach that will bring a balance in between formal intellectual property system and sustainable aspects of biodiversity. Of late, many environmental movements are greater concern on these issues.
The origin of modern environmentalism and environmental movements in India can be ascribed to the Chipko movement in the central Himalayan region in the early 1970s. Chipko movement, launched to protect the Himalayan forests destruction, has its roots in the pre independence days. Many struggles were organized to protest against the colonial forest policy during the early decades of 20th century. Peoples’ main in these protests was that the benefits of the forests, especially the right to fodder, should go to local people. These struggles have continued in the post independent era as the forest policies of independent India are no different from that of colonial once.
During the past thirty years people in various regions of India have formed nonviolent action movements to protect their environment, their livelihood, and their ways of life. These environmental movements have emerged from the Himalayan regions of Uttar Pradesh to the tropical forests of Kerala and from Gujarat to Tripura in response to projects that threaten to dislocate people and to affect their basic human rights to land, water , and ecological stability of life-support systems. They share certain features, such as democratic values and decentralized decision making, with social movements operating in India. The environmental movements are slowly progressing towards defining a model of development to replace the current resource-intensive one that has created severe ecological instability. Similar grassroots environmental movements are emerging in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Throughout Asia and the pacific citizenry organizations are working innovative ways to reclaim their environment.
Environmental politics is about how humanity organizes itself to the nature that sustains it. Thus it encompasses matters of how people deal with the Earth and its life, and how they, relate to each other through the medium of the environment. Also it impinges on other areas of political concern such as those related to poverty, education, race, the economy and international relations…etc.
The ‘environment’ as a collective term for all these concerns arrived in the 1960s, which dates the beginning of environmental politics as such. Since then, the growth of environmental literature has matched the growth of environmental concern, which has spread to the Third World and the global system itself.
In the last four decades, the politics of the environment has featured a large and growing range of issues. The initial concerns were with pollution, deforestation, population growth, and depletion of natural resources. These concerns have been supplemented by worries about energy supply, animal rights, species extinction, global climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, toxic wastes, the protection of whole ecosystems and environmental justice. All these issues are interlaced with a whole range of moral and ethical questions about human livelihood, human attitudes and our proper relations to other entities on the planet.
Environmental politics today covers discussions of the various political, social and economic causes of ecological problems; the ethics of our relationship with the natural systems that sustain us; our environmental relationships with our fellow-humans; environmental movements and designs for alternative; political organizations.
Environmental struggles, rage all over the world, although it would seem that they are becoming more ubiquitous year after year in so many corners of our shared planet. It is as if the only way to face the declaration of war on nature and humanity by neo-liberal globalization is by conflict and struggle. The dominant models of development and the economy are making inroads into urban and rural landscapes, the body, and even the molecular fabric of life. They introduce environmentally destructive practices that leave landscapes of ecological destruction, sometimes veritable devastation, along the way. Today the number of environmental conflicts and mobilization that receive, or at least merit, worldwide attention has skyrocketed. Tropical forests, biodiversity, water, seeds, energy technologies, food, rivers, and seas, contamination caused by extractive industries such as oil and mining, trans-boundary pollution, fishing rights, urban redevelopment, the melting of glaciers, and polar ice caps possibly caused by global warming, and many more are all the object of struggles in many parts of the world.
Environmental crisis surfaced in the last 1960s, along with dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. Since then, the global populations have increased by over 50percent. There has been mighty nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, industrial accident at Bhopal and Prince William Sound in Alaska. Green parties have emerged as a significant electoral force in many countries. Mainstream environmental groups have acquired massive memberships. Populist backlashes against environmentalism have flared. Global environmental issues relating to climate change and ozone layer depletion have come to the fore. We have had Earth Summits; Earth Days, environmental legislation and regulation.
Beginning in the 1960s, the various philosophical strands of environmentalism were given political expression through the establishment of “green” political movements in the form of activist nongovernmental organizations and environmentalist political parties. Despite the diversity of the environmental movement, four basic principles provided a unifying theme to the broad goals of political ecology; (a) protection of environment, (b) grassroots democracy, (c) social justice (d) nonviolence. The political goals of contemporary green movement in the industrialized West focused on changing government policy and promoting environmental social values. In the less-industrialized or developing world, environmentalism has more closely involved in “emancipatory” politics and grassroots activism on issues such as poverty, democratization, and political and human rights, including the rights of women and indigenous peoples.
Environmental movements, originated in the 1960s with the emergence of the German idea of “conservation biology” and the American concept of “doctrine of resources conservation”, adopted a very different tradition of “reverence for wilderness” in the 1980s. With the new trends in global politics, like the gap between rich and the poor, the North and South, the increasing illiteracy rate and etc has led to the conclusion that the kind of development that we follow today is not in harmony with nature.
Environmental organizations established from the late 19th to the mid 20th century were primarily middle-class lobbying groups concerned with nature conservation, wildlife protection, and the pollution that arose from industrial development and urbanization. There were also scientific organizations concerned with natural history and with biological aspects of conservation efforts.
The early strategies of the contemporary environmental movement were self consciously activist and unconventional, involving direct protest actions designed to obstruct and to draw attention to environmentally harmful policies and projects. Other strategies included public education and media campaigns, community directed activities, and conventional lobbying of policy makers and political representatives. The movement also attempted to set public examples in order to increase awareness of environmental issues. Such projects included recycling, green consumerism, and the establishment of alternative communities, including self-sufficient farms, workers’ cooperatives, and cooperative housing projects.
Sustainable Development has now been promoted as the ideal model for recovery and escaping from the environmental crisis that we are facing today. It intends at the improving well being of the present and future generation by protecting the nature and by guaranteeing eradication of poverty and satisfaction of basic needs. However, the recent development linked with the current Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime is encouraging commercialization of seed development, monoculture, and protection of new plant verities, micro organisms and genetically modified organisms. As a consequent, our rich biogenetic diversity is being coded irreversibly. Indigenous and traditional knowledge and its application as well as life styles and cultures are affected by these developments with a lot of environmental and ethical implications. All these lead to greater concern of the equation of IPR, biodiversity and Sustainable Development. It necessitates the need to make an alternative approach that will bring a balance in between formal intellectual property system and sustainable aspects of biodiversity. Of late, many environmental movements are greater concern on these issues.
The origin of modern environmentalism and environmental movements in India can be ascribed to the Chipko movement in the central Himalayan region in the early 1970s. Chipko movement, launched to protect the Himalayan forests destruction, has its roots in the pre independence days. Many struggles were organized to protest against the colonial forest policy during the early decades of 20th century. Peoples’ main in these protests was that the benefits of the forests, especially the right to fodder, should go to local people. These struggles have continued in the post independent era as the forest policies of independent India are no different from that of colonial once.
During the past thirty years people in various regions of India have formed nonviolent action movements to protect their environment, their livelihood, and their ways of life. These environmental movements have emerged from the Himalayan regions of Uttar Pradesh to the tropical forests of Kerala and from Gujarat to Tripura in response to projects that threaten to dislocate people and to affect their basic human rights to land, water , and ecological stability of life-support systems. They share certain features, such as democratic values and decentralized decision making, with social movements operating in India. The environmental movements are slowly progressing towards defining a model of development to replace the current resource-intensive one that has created severe ecological instability. Similar grassroots environmental movements are emerging in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Throughout Asia and the pacific citizenry organizations are working innovative ways to reclaim their environment.
