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Lobbyists in Washington raising campaign funds from large companies for United States congressmen in a deal to save the spotted owl from extinction in the Pacific Northwest of the country;Direct Action activists in the forests of Idaho pouring sand into the gas tank of a bulldozer to prevent it from knocking any more old-growth forest down;
A priest preaching from the pulpit in Tampakan in the Philippines, pleading with his congregation to oppose the transnational mining company which has come into their midst;
“Green warriors,” having taken an oath (dyandi) to fight “to the last drop of blood,” moving silently through the forests of Mindanao before engaging in guerrilla conflict with the government military which is “clearing the way” for the company;
Australian aboriginal people in association with green activists from mainstream green NGOs (non-governmental organizations) attempting to get the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory listed as a World Heritage Area by lobbying international politicians and diplomats in Paris;
One hundred thousand people marching through the streets of Melbourne as part of a mass nationwide protest against uranium mining;
A band of young activists burying themselves beneath the ground in Hampshire, England, to impede the progress of road-building machinery which threatens to build a road through the mythical land of Camelot;
Catholics and Protestants meeting in a “safe house” provided by Friends of the Earth in Belfast, Northern Ireland, planning a campaign against the building of a motorway through shared communal space;
Small landholders and indigenous peoples linking hands, vowing to die by meeting the waters of the mighty Narmada River in India as it rises due to its damming, engulfing the villages and homes of a million people;
An international environmental non-governmental organization working with local Indian environmentalists in a desperate bid to save the last Bengali tigers which roam the earth;
“Hippies” entering the German Parliament dressed without suits and ties, attempting to change the ways in which Western parliaments operate and administrate;
Massive numbers of German anti-nuclear protestors dismantling railway tracks in their efforts to halt the transport of high-level nuclear waste from France to an “interim” waste repository at Gorleben.
Question: What on earth do these people have in common?
Answer: They call themselves environmentalists. They are part of environmental movements.
Environmental movements are amongst the most vibrant, diverse, and powerful social movements occurring today, across all corners of the globe. Their global distribution allows the researcher of these movements to range widely, to experience the multitude of ways in which different cultures engage in their political lives. This book is based on the premise that there is no one global environmental movement, but that there are many, and that the differences between these movements far outweigh their similarities despite the fact that most share the symbolic nomenclature of “environmental movement.”
It was within environmental movements that a modern environmental sensibility was born in most countries. In the nations of the minority North, this generally began in the late 1960s and early 1970s; whilst in the majority South, the environmental agenda emerged forcefully in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Without environmental movements there would be no “green” businesses or bureaucracies, no high-level United Nations conferences on global warming and population control, no governments which have created “greener” legislative frameworks relating to quotas on industrial pollution or limits on genetically modified foodstuffs.
To research and write a book on environmental movements is a bit like producing a work on “life, the universe, and everything.” First of all, there are so many issues which fall under the symbolic rubric of “the environment”: air, water, earth, fire, and all the others in between. All of nature is often perceived and portrayed as part of the environment and, depending on where you come from, humans can also be understood to be part of nature. If this book began with a list of environmental issues, the book would finish before the list making was complete.
Secondly, environmental movements are types of social movements. There is a wealth of conflicting and fascinating theories on the emergence and reality of social movements. I have discussed some of these theories elsewhere (Doyle and McEachern 2001; also see Doherty 2002a) and do not have the space or the inclination to repeat this task here. For the purposes of this work, I have chosen to view environmental movements through the theoretical frame of new social movements (NSMs). It is tempting, on some occasions, to argue that NSM theory is more appropriate to describing the post-materialist movements of the minority world; whilst more homogenous, often class-based theories outlining earlier, more traditional social movements may be more suited for analyzing the green movements of the less-affluent majority world. There is some merit in this argument; but to adopt such polarized theoretical tools for analysis at the outset of this book would be too simplistic, and not particularly rewarding in a comparative studies sense. Instead, I have decided to persist with the NSM model, for, despite its imperfections, its general applicability to the phenomena I have experienced, both in the minority and majority worlds, is excellent.
Box 1.1 lists the key characteristics of NSMs. The new social movements, which champion environmental issues, are extremely diverse and multitudinous in the ways in which they pursue their politics. Social movements, by their very definition, are amorphous political forms, often undergoing rapid changes in their polity. They are living political collective identities, unable to be captured exclusively within the terms and conditions of formal and institutionalized political histories. Social movements usually include many noninstitutionalized networks, groups, and communities and the more formal non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as dabbling in the worlds of party politics. Of course, social movement activities can also take place within institutionalized and corporate realms, such as churches, governments, and corporations. Although some people are doing their part by “greening” bureaucracies and corporations, it is not the purpose of this work to investigate these forms of politics. They have been addressed adequately elsewhere (Doyle and McEachern 1998; Connelly and Smith 1999). Also, apart from the German case, there has been a strong inclination to avoid the formal politics of political parties from within the movements themselves.
What is fascinating about researching and participating in the noninstitutional politics of social movements is that it allows one to see politics in the raw; to see the power relations, the decision-making, and the ideas of people often at the beginning of issue cycles, before these human relationships are obfuscated by the formalization of constitutions and the overarching control of law.
Studying the noninstitutional politics of networks, informal groups, and fluid, living movements demands quite separate methodological techniques than those for studying constitutionalized institutions and corporate bodies. There is no standard “repository of record” where one visits to analyze the documents. Of course, there are secondary sources and some archival, primary material, such as organizational correspondence; but much of the political field exists outside of the realm of the more vitrified, formal histories.
One way to overcome this sparseness of official material is to engage more fully with the research subject. On many occasions, to visit and understand, even if only partially, the politics of dynamic networks, both at the macro and micro levels, demands a willingness to research “at ground level.” Accordingly, much of the research which is presented in this book is rooted in the author’s fieldwork. As well as ethnographic and interview-based material, this book also relies on both official and informal correspondence which provides extra and more verifiable primary information. By cross-referencing this material, this study provides a clear and rich picture of the actual mechanics and organics of the policy-making processes of environmental movements.
Obviously, there is also much of this book which utilizes secondary evidence, but in all cases the empirical detail is supplemented by face-to-face, primary encounters with movement academics/participants predominantly throughout six countries: England, Germany, the United States, India, the Philippines, and Australia. So, this perspective of such vast and quickly changing phenomena is based, ultimately, on the author’s own subjective, but informed experience. Despite the attempts to be representative of movements across the globe, there are gaps in the overall coverage of the case studies. Where these gaps occur, such as in Africa, China, and South America, there has been some attempt to incorporate these movement experiences in boxes which are spread throughout the text.
With so much based on the author’s experiential knowledge, the only way to truly ground this vast topic is to admit to the place of the author in the research; to understand the author as a subject as well as an object. This placing of the author provides a fixed point from which to view the cascade of movements, shooting in all directions, in different dimensions, at alternate times across the political firmament. Without constructing this viewpoint, analysis of amorphous phenomena becomes quite meaningless. As one outcome of this epistemological/methodological approach to this book, each major chapter begins with a first-person piece, which places the author within the context of the country in question.
First of all, the author is an Australian, a culture which shares much of its recent white ancestry with European and North American cultures, whilst its traditional indigenous culture more readily explains its geographical location in the South. Also, the author is an environmental advocate as well as an academic. He has been an environmental and human rights activist for over two decades, in his own country as well as others. The author’s interest in environmental movements is always premised on the need to find better ways in which to engage in environmental politics, to understand and ascertain better pathways in which to hopefully resolve, even partly, environmental issues/problems. In this vein, this work takes on the cloak of positive criticism. 16 16