Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The rise of the environmental social movement
The next change that occurred during the 1980s was a massive grass-roots expansion in the
environmental movement, particularly in the USA, Canada, and the UK, partly as a back-
lash against the right-wing governments of the 1980s and the expansion of the consumer
economy, and partly because of the increasing number of environment-related stories in the
media. This heralded a new era of global environmental awareness and transnational non-
governmental organizations (NGOs). The roots of this growing environmental awareness
can be traced back to a number of key markers: these include the publication of Rachel
Carson's
Silent Spring
in 1962; the image of Earth seen from the Moon in 1969; the Club
of Rome's 1972 report on
Limits to Growth
; the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident
in 1979; the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986; and the Exxon Valdez oil spillage in
1989. But these environmental problems were all regional in effect, limited geographically
to the specific areas in which they occurred.
It was the discovery in 1985 by the British Antarctic Survey of depletion of ozone over
Antarctica, which demonstrated the global connectivity of our environment. The ozone
'hole' also had a tangible international cause, the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs),
which led to a whole new area of politics: the international management of the environ-
ment. There followed a set of key agreements: the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protec-
tion of the Ozone Layer; the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone
Layer; and the 1990 London and 1992 Copenhagen Adjustments and Amendments to the
Protocol. These have been held up as examples of successful environmental diplomacy.
Climate change has had a slower development in international politics and far less has been
achieved in terms of regulation and implementation, primarily because it is so much more
complicated and the fact that fossil fuels are currently central to all industrial development.
