Environmentalism is the support of or involvement with the environmental movement by environmentalists.

It is a social movement which seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, education, activism and setting an example in order to protect natural resources and ecosystems. Some of the issues of concern for the environmental movement are pollution, species extinction, waste reduction, recycling, the threat of global warming and ozone depletion, and genetically engineered crops.

Environmentalism in fiction

• Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang.
• T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth.
• Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, a story of a society founded on eco-awareness, alternative tech, social responsibility, and personal self-actualization.
• Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.
• Michael Crichton's State of Fear
• Ben Elton's Stark
• Mandy Hagar's Run for the Trees, a children's book on native forest logging in New Zealand.
• Derek Hansen's Blockade, a story about the logging of Australian rainforest.
• Frank Herbert's Dune
• Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy and Skinny Dip.
• Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, a scientist attempts to release a deadly virus in order to reduce
  
  
  
  the world's population.
• Neal Stephenson's Zodiac.
• Dr. Seuss's The Lorax.
• David Brin's Earth.
• Jane Fonda's cartoon, Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
• Many anime movies by Hayao Miyazaki carry a hidden environmentalist message. The most well known is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but also well known is Princess Mononoke, which is, in fact, based on a conflict between technology and nature.

Environmentalism in nonfiction

• Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run by David Brower
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• The War Against the Greens by David Helvarg (1994)
• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
• Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, Michael Braungart
• The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas
• Confessions of an Eco-Warrior by Dave Foreman
• Going Green: How to Communicate Your Company's Environmental Commitment by E. Bruce Harrison
• The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg
• Ecodefense: A Guide to Monkeywrenching edited by Dave Foreman
• Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action by George Perkins Marsh (1865)
• Return of the Primitive (The philosophy of Privation) by Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz
• From the Ground Up by Luke W. Cole & Sheila R. Foster
• "The Legacy of Luna"* by Julia Hill is about a tree sit done by the author that lasted for two years.

Environmentalism in music

Environmentalism has occasionally

Environmental organisations

See also List of environmental organizations and Category:Environmental organizations

Greenpeace is the most prominent international organisation which lobbies on a wide range of environmental issues. Other international organisations such as World Wildlife Fund have specific areas of concern. Many countries have organisations that address general and specific environmenental issues at a local or national level.

Critiques of environmentalism

Some see environmentalism as having many of the same characteristics as a Religion including a paradise, a fall from grace, a salvation, and a judgment day, among others. Some environmental groups have been accused of using sensationalist tactics and misinforming the public instead of deferring to scientific evidence. Environmentalists are also sometimes accused of advocating anti-globalization and anti-corporatization which is idealism some say is detrimental to achieving environmental objectives.

Post-Environmentalism

Many environmentalists in 2004 started questioning whether “environmentalism” -- as it was conceived 40 years ago -- is still a useful moral, intellectual and political framework.

According to a controversial 2004 essay called “The Death of Environmentalism,” written by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two environmental strategists, American environmentalism has been remarkably successful in protecting the air, water and large stretches of wilderness in North America and Europe, but has stagnated as a vital force for cultural and political change.

These post-environmental thinkers argue that the ecological crises the human species faces in the 21st Century are qualitatively different from the problems the environmental movement was created to address in the 1960s and ‘70s. Climate change and habitat destruction, they argue, are global, more complex, and demand far deeper transformations of the economy, the culture and political life.

The consequence of environmentalism’s outdated and arbitrary definition, they argue, is political irrelevancy: American environmentalism today finds itself not only losing ground on the great ecological crises of the day, it is increasingly unable to defend even the basic protections it won 30 and 40 years ago, which are under assault by a potent alliance of religious and economic fundamentalists backed in every way possible by the president of the United States.

See also

• Environmentalists
  • Category:Environmentalists
• Environmental movement
• Environmental planning
  • Free-market environmentalism
  • Radical environmentalism
• Carbon footprint
• Conservationist
  • Conservation movement
  • Conservation ethic
• List of environment topics
• Green politics
• Greenwash
• Natural environment
• Sustainability
• Timeline of environmental events

References

• Helvarg, David, The War Against the Greens, (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1994) ISBN 0871564599
• Shellenberger, M. and T. Nordhaus. 2004. The Death of Environmentalism.

Ambientalismo ecologisme