Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
personal values, sense of self, political efficacy and cultural identity. Social movements
such as feminism or environmentalism facilitate critical self-reflection and the
formation of alternative meaning schemes and perspectives. They enable people to
identify with causes larger than themselves, motivating them to learn and engage.
People who have experienced such personal and/or wider perspective transformations
frequently bring considerable energy, power and commitment to social movements.
This was so for Lois Gibbs in her campaign with the residents of Love Canal in the
state of New York to fight for justice and compensation after the toxic pollution
caused by the Hooker Electrical Company had led to many community health
problems, including cancer, epilepsy, asthma, birth defects, miscarriages and premature
death (Livesey, 2003). Indeed, much policy development and political action focusing
on the broader issues of sustainable development have emerged from environmental
campaigning, conservation action, pollution control and environmental management
practices operating at a variety of spatial levels (Doyle and McEachern, 1998; Connelly
and Smith, 1999). New digital technologies, including social networking sites,
seem to be further enhancing processes of political engagement and awareness.
Computer-mediated communications (CMC) has facilitated globalization through its
coordination of dispersed economic and political networks, but these same CMC
networks have also enabled relatively inexpensive and instantaneous communication,
nurturing the growth of online activist virtual communities and the formation of
new counter-public spheres. New media have attracted increasing numbers of people
intent on using the Internet to enhance the work of many global justice movements.
The first new kind of (inter)network-based movement emerged with the anti-corporate
struggles of the indigenous Mayan people, the Zapatistas, in Mexico in the early
1990s, and then, most effectively, in the Seattle, Montreal, Genoa, Miami and Cancun
anti-globalization, anti-WTO protests. For the first time public street protests were
supplemented and to an extent organized through the use of mobile digital technologies
and the Internet. For Langman (2005), these new forms of activist organizations
constitute fluid social movements united by a passionate commitment to social and
environmental justice, freedom and democratic community in a networked world.
Jeffrey Juris argues that transnational counter-publics have emerged as a result of
grass-roots anti-corporate globalization movements developing advanced forms of
computer-mediated communication and networking. Activists have integrated the
Internet into their everyday routines through email lists and websites, 'building a
new digital media culture through the practice of informational utopics' (Juris, 2005:
205), producing alternative values, discourses and identities effectively serving as
new social, cultural and political laboratories from which new forms of empowered
political agency may arise.
Towards ecological democratization
Recognizing ecological limits and planetary boundaries has led some green political
theorists to argue not only for an end to economic growth but for a seemingly
authoritarian politics that can curtail the relentless individual and corporate pursuit
of economic self-interest and formulate appropriate political policies. These will be
devised by an elite group of people who truly understand the long-term issues and
can in effect articulate the general will. Thus, William Ophuls has argued for nearly
forty years that this may involve measures of coercion as well as regulation and
