Introduction - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 6

Africa and Asia. More convenient travel in Western Europe hastened the
spread of the New Left after 1968, environmental movement in the 1970s,
and the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s.
Political scientists often classify participation as conventional or non-
conventional. Voting is the prime instance of conventional means; others
are writing to a legislator, writing to a newspaper, attending a public
meeting, speaking at a hearing, or signing a petition. Nonconventional
means are taking part in a demonstration, boycotting a product, join-
ing a strike, or illegal activities like occupying a building, sabotaging a
sawmill, or planting a bomb. Voting turnout varies among the democra-
cies. Australians are highest with a 95% rate, the Europeans range from
86% percent and up, and Americans are notoriously low with 54%.
Nonconventional participation like demonstrations has long been a fea-
ture of the environmental movement. In Eastern Europe during the last
decade of Communism, citizens found the government would tolerate
public marches and demonstrations for environmental protection (but not
against the government in general), so the movement gained adherents
who really wanted an outlet to protest in general. On the individual level,
environmentalists have held sit-ins, such as a woman in California who
sat in a tree for 738 days. Tree sitting originated in New Zealand in 1978
and remains popular there and in Australia. The radical group Earth
First! engaged in sabotage, or as its members called it, ecotage. They ham-
mered spikes into trees cut for delivery to a sawmill. At the mill, the saw
would hit the spike, breaking the blade and perhaps injuring a worker.
The group planted explosives on electric transmission towers in remote
forests, toppling them to the ground. In 1979 the crew of the Canadian ship
Sea Shepherd scuttled an illegal whaling trawler in a harbor in Portugal.
Interest groups have been another hallmark of the environmental move-
ment. Alternatively called non-state actors, they have grown tremen-
dously. In the United States the Sierra Club went from 70,000 members
to a million members in two decades. Since its founding in 1969, Friends
of the Earth has spread to affiliates in 70 countries with two million
members. Since 1971, when a few opponents of nuclear bomb testing
sailed a small boat from British Columbia to Amchitka Island in Alaska,
Greenpeace has grown to have affiliates in 40 countries, with a total of
nearly three million members.
Typically, groups favoring the environment originate from protest move-
ments. First comes the disturbance, which causes citizens to band together
to air their grievances and seek redress. Assuming the group is successful,