Abstract
The first Earth Day — 20 April 1970 — was a more seminal political event than was realized at the time. Since that time, environmental issues have gradually, though sometimes haltingly, become first-order political concerns. By the mid-1980s environmental protection was viewed by many as being as important to our collective well-being as national security, economic prosperity, social justice and — for some — even democracy itself. Some, at that time, would even have argued that if and when trade-offs between first-order values must be made, protecting the environment should be ‘first among equals’, a transcendent priority. The real challenge is to know what values must and should be traded off, when and to what extent.
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Notes
See the work of Thomas R. Malthus, W. Stanley Jeavons and others discussed in R.C. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), Ch. 3. See also D.H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972); W.R. Catton, jr, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1980).
See, in particular, W. Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco, Calif.: W.H. Freeman, 1977); R.L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974); T.R. Gurr, ‘On the political consequences of scarcity and economic decline,’ International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 29, 1985, pp. 51–75.
S.P. Hayes, ‘From conservation to environment: environmental politics in the United States since world war two,’ Environmental Review, Vol. 6, Fall, 1982, p. 20.
G. Sessions, ‘The deep ecology movement: a review,’ Environmental Review, Vol. 11, Summer, 1987, p. 107.
R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
R. Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).
See N. Myers, ‘Biodepletion,’ in R. Paehlke (ed) Encyclopedia of Conservation and Environmentalism (New York: Garland, 1995); J.A. Livingston, Rogue Primate (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1994); C. Tudge, Last Animals at the Zoo (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992).
F. Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975); L. Pim, The Invisible Additive: Environmental Contaminants in Our Food (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982); J. Robbins, Diet for a New America (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1987).
M. Lowe, The Bicycle: Vehicle for a Small Planet (Washington, DC: World-watch, 1989).
A. Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988).
M. Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 195–6.
See, for example, P. Ekins (ed.) The Living Economy: A New Economics in the Making (London: Routledge, 1986); D. Pearce, Economic Values and the Natural World (London: Earthscan, 1993); as well as the journal Ecological Economics.
Milbrath, L.W. (1984) Environmentalists: Vanguard for a New Society, Albany: State University of New York Press.
R. Kazis and R.L. Grossman, Fear at Work (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982).
Several relevant studies are cited in F.H. Buttel, C.C. Geisler and I.W. Wiswall (eds) Labor and the Environment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984); see, in particular, their annotations 016, 017, 040, 050, 064, 105 and 159.
Regarding recycling and refillable containers and employment, see W.U. Chandler, Materials Recycling: The Virtue of Necessity (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 1984); C.M. Gudger and J.C. Bailes, The Economic Impact of Oregon’s Bottle Bill (Corvallis, Oreg.: Oregon State University Press, 1974). Regarding energy conservation and employment see, for example, sources annotated in Buttel, Geisler and Wiswall (eds) Labor and the Environment.
B. Hannon and F. Puleo, Transferring from Urban Cars to Buses: The Energy and Employment Impacts, (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, Center for Advanced Computation, 1974).
See, for example, R.D. Bullard, Dumpling in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991); C. Lee, Toxic Waste and Race in the United States (New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987); L. Blumberg and R. Gottlieb, ‘The new environmentalists: saying no to mass burn,’ Environmental Action, Vol. 20, January/February, 1989, pp. 28–30.
See R.D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books, 1994).
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
See K. Boulding, ‘The encounters of the coming spaceship earth,’ in H.E. Daly (ed.) Economics, Ecology, Ethics (San Francisco, Calif.: W.H. Freeman, 1980), pp. 253–63.
World Commission, Our Common Future, pp. 6–7. See also International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), World Conservation Strategy (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 1980); Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (Olaf Palme, Chairman), Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); W. Brandt, World Armament and World Hunger (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986).
A.B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Energy/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 153.
J. Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974), p. 183.
For a broad consideration of environmentalism and administration, including the issue of openness, see R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson (eds) Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1990).
See, for example, G. McConnell, ‘The conservation movement — past and present,’ Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 7, 1954, pp. 470–1.
The broad issue of participation and the right to know is discussed in S.G. Hadden, A Citizen’s Right to Know: Risk Communication and Public Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989).
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© 1995 Robert Paehlke
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Paehlke, R. (1995). Environmental values for a sustainable society: the democratic challenge. In: Fischer, F., Black, M. (eds) Greening Environmental Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08357-9_8
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