The US is usually regarded as an environmental laggard, with US President George W. Bush perceived as being little better than the head of a gang of willful polluters who do everything they can to obstruct global action to protect the environment. Of course, there is some truth in this characterization of the US (and quite a lot in that of Bush), but the picture is not uniformly bleak.
Indeed, the environmental movement -- like most modern social movements -- began in the US. The roots of the US "environmental movement" lie in the 19th century, when the damage wrought by the industrial revolution and the fragmentation of the natural landscape by individual property rights and tenures first became apparent.
But it was the publication in 1962 of the book Silent Spring -- a polemic against the use of pesticides in agriculture -- by the biologist Rachel Carson that jumpstarted the modern ecological movement. Carson drew on scientific findings, but also voiced fundamental misgivings about consumer capitalism and a "postmaterialistic" belief in the primacy of the quality of life over economic growth.
In Carson's wake, the Woodstock generation of the 1960s, with its Earth Days, soon began to organize a broad campaign, which saw, in April 1970, around 20 million Americans take to the streets to defend the environment.
In this new movement, the libertarian tendencies of the New Left and the protectionist tendencies of the traditional right became intertwined. Paul Ehrlich's bestseller The Population Bomb exerted an influence that lasts to this day. The US environmental movement was soon exported to Europe and elsewhere: on one hand, the pragmatic Friends of the Earth and the media-oriented organization Greenpeace, and, on the other hand, eco-fundamentalist groups like Earth First! and the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) or lobbying groups like the World Wildlife Fund.
This movement managed to force the first environmental laws out of the conservative Nixon administration: the National Environmental Act of 1969, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Then as now, the focus in the US was on "green" topics (clean water, fresh air and biological diversity) rather than with the "brown" topics of ecological disasters such as the Chernobyl (or Harrisburg) disaster, which have played a dominant role in mobilizing Europeans.
The US' influential Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also was established under Nixon. Environmentalists hired scientists, lawyers and lobbyists who made sure that laws weren't just passed in Congress, but also implemented in practice.
But the current Bush administration has been hacking away at these 1970s laws from all directions. He approved oil exploration in closed nature reserves and also systematically fought to suppress scientific evidence on climate change. Now, however, owing to the surge in crude oil prices, even Bush has had to begin to consider alternative energy sources, and it won't be possible to limit these to nuclear power or ethanol, which is so popular among farmers, a key Bush constituency.
Indeed, even Bush's own political base, the Christian fundamentalists, are becoming "green," pressuring the administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol because they believe that the environment must be protected just like unborn life. "Eco-theology" and evangelical pro-life propaganda have become one of the liveliest branches of the US environmental movement. "Green" eco-activists, while feeling awkward about support from this quarter, nonetheless find them useful allies.
Indeed, the greening of the US is becoming a general proposition. Many Americans can only shake their heads at the energy lobbyists who surround Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and for a long time now a majority has been in favor of signing multilateral agreements, particularly in the area of climate protection. Catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina have reinforced this stance.
All this has caused Bush to seek to accommodate -- verbally, at least -- the will of an overwhelming majority of Americans to conserve energy. Moreover, although Bush has given mainly national security reasons for his seeming change of heart, the US federal system helps the country get around even a roadblock as powerful as the president, as "localism" promotes eco-political initiatives at the state level and even within municipalities.
It is not just California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who has recognized the signs of the times and proclaimed bold Kyoto targets for his state that may become a pacemaker of All-American modernization again. Political climate change has also been brought about by people like Jerome Ringo, the president of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), whose 4.5 million members make it one of the largest environmental organizations. Ringo also heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of trade unions, environmentalist groups, managers and local politicians that demands clean energy and good jobs.
How green the US will actually become remains to be seen, but as an ecological avant-garde, the US might even regain its lost influence in the world. Those who disdain environmental concerns have been ousted at the polls in large numbers, companies invest huge amounts in environmental technologies, states are suing car producers for their climate-adverse policies, and the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol have long been surpassed by some states -- a lesson for German and European cities and municipalities.
As in the past, the effectiveness of these initiatives ultimately will depend on whether these impulses reach Europe and Japan, as well as emerging nations like China and Brazil. It is time for Greens everywhere to start attending to ecological matters again -- and, strange as it may sound, to look again to the US for inspiration.
Claus Leggewie is director of the Center for Media and Interactivity at Giessen University, Germany, where he teaches political science.
Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences
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