This book begins from an unusual point, as it does not start from the beginning but rather from the end of its object of investigation, notably from the (seeming) death of environmentalism. Despite odds, the choice is not unjustified. In fact, most of existing books on the topic, exploring the origin and development of environmental thinking, leave the reader with the uncomfortable feeling of its progressive disappearance from the public arena, or claim that it now firmly sits at the high table of twentieth-century political ideologies.
None of the two options, however, justify people’s engagement in the continuous and hard battles environmentalisms are still fighting. Even today, we can see many people who embark on endless struggles for transforming ecological and social practices they repute to be harmful for the life on the Earth. What is inspiring them?
Through a critical analysis of the theoretical path that led environmental thinking and environmentalists close to extinction (gripped in the gearwheels of progressive normalization and the prophecy of its ineffectiveness), this book comes to disclose the emerging worldviews, ideals, and means which are now rescuing environmentalism from its own end.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe competing approaches to environmentalism and post-environmentalist theory, while Chapters 4 and 5 advance an innovative understanding on the future of environmental thinking by moving from the analysis of path-breaking interpretations of the power of networking and mobilizing beings and things in the production of ordinary (and extraordinary) environmental struggles. These chapters include, for instance, everyday initiatives of resilient planning or urban gardening, innovative transport behaviors, and also major programs supporting smart energy grids or large ecosystem restoration projects. While not (necessary) entailing brand-new practices, they all adopt a new perspective on the formation and functioning of sociopolitical collectives involved in a disputed state of affair. From such a perspective, environmental issues are reconsidered under an alternative light as they show unexpected links and connections, alliances between humans and nonhumans, overlapping of technologies and procedures, integration of cultural facts, and matter of things in multilayered public arenas, where a controversial topic is debated through practical engagement further than discursive practices.
Building upon current transformation of the relationship between science, technology, society, and the environment, this book suggests adopting the postmodern material-semiotic approach (whose most popular form is the actor-network theory (ANT); Latour, 2005) in order to appreciate the main trends in the evolution of environmental thinking. The following pages thus combine a theory-informed presentation of worldwide cases and crucial events in the history of environmentalism with a journey into scholarly explorations in order to answer the crucial question: where is environmental thinking heading toward?
1.1 A World in Commotion
Environmental thinking emerged in the Western world in the 1960s as a structured form of collective elaboration on the possibility to preserve or restore natural equilibria, ecosystem functioning, and the relationship between humans and the environment. Some have described its rise as an extension of the Western Romantic tradition, combining in a complex and somewhat contradictory form, a faith in the possibilities offered by scientific knowledge and technical innovations alongside a belief in the intrinsic value of nature. The internal conflict between the more positivist and rationalist approaches, which produced both science-based blueprints for survival and anti-scientific or even spiritual approaches, based on ecocentric and biocentric ethical perspectives (Bartollomei 1995), characterizes the panorama of environmental thinking since its inception. This dual character of environmental thinking dates back to the diffusion of colonial sciences, which promoted the rapid diffusion of new scientific ideas and, at the same time, incorporated the pantheistic thought of the colonized population in a romantic interpretation of nature so that “[t]he ideological and scientific content of early colonial conservationism…amounted by the 1850s to a highly heterogeneous mixture of indigenous, Romantic, Orientalist and other elements” (Grove 1995, 2). The desire to know natural laws by intimately participating in nature’s spiritual richness expressed by transcendentalist (e.g., John Muir, Henry Toureau, and Adolf Just) and romantic thinkers (most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller) and the desire to exercise power over the environment are both constitutive parts of early environmental thinking.
Modern environmental thinking (also referred to as “scientific environmentalism”) emerged in the Western world during the 1970s as a structured form of commitment, aimed at safeguarding the fragile global ecological equilibrium by halting or limiting the impact of human production and consumption processes. Its worldwide diffusion was due to the exponential increase in the range, scale, and seriousness of environmental problems that gave rise to a massive international mobilization pointing out the environmental side effects of the long global economic boom following World War II (including rising population, increasing energy and resource consumption, new sources and level of pollution, waste production, biodiversity erosion, etc.). The tragedy of the nuclear bomb explosions; the discovery of the damaging effects of dioxins, pesticides, fertilizers, and detergents; the chemical war in Vietnam; and similar events alerted global populations. From the end of the 1970s in Western Europe and North America, a corpus of heterogeneous scientific and social narratives helped to forge the core of our belief that the Earth’s ecological balance is seriously endangered (and that we, as human beings, are mainly responsible for this), and this, in turn, gave rise to the environmentalist movement. Although both environmental thinking and the environmentalist movement included a plethora of distinct understandings of the consequences of environmental problems and the best ways for dealing with them, it can be agreed that together they all contributed to the popularization of a common wisdom. Modern environmentalism can be thus regarded as “a box that contains anarchist and protofascist, Marxist and liberal, natural scientist and visionary alike; not because their world-views were identical, but because all shared an idea which by them was perceived as primary, although its secondary manifestations may have differed” (Bramwell 1989, 237–238).
The most prominent aspect of modern environmentalism—which deeply differentiates it from other sociopolitical movements—resides in the close interrelatedness of its sociopolitical claims with scientific findings and its dependence on scientists’ advice, so it has been often referred to as “scientific environmentalism.” Particularly the ecological paradigm of Ecosystem Ecology outlined by Eugene Odum, George Hutkinson, and Ramon Margalef (1977), together with the Global Ecology theory (the so-called Gaia hypothesis) elaborated by Jim Lovelock (1979) decisively contributed to the establishment of ecology as a unified and authoritative scientific discipline from the late 1970s onward, backing up on the widespread diffusion of the Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory (Certomà 2006). Moreover, ecosystem and global ecologists greatly contributed to the diffusion of basic concepts of ecology (e.g., ecosystem, natural balance, carrying capacity, etc.) as well as raising public awareness on the urgency of global action for ecological protection.
A wide range of best-selling books made the general public familiar with some of the most pressing dangers the global population was going to face because of the heedless alteration of ecological cycles and the erasure of nature’s capability to react and counterbalance anthropic stresses. Among them, some need to be mentioned for the large impact they had on both public and governments; these include the The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972), which predicted an impending ecological catastrophe unless exponential economic growth were to be replaced with “steady-state” economic development strategy; Silent Spring (Rachel Carson 1962), which described the toxic effects that pesticides have on humans, environment, and animals and which led to the global ban of the insecticide DDT; and The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968), which warned about the danger of human mass starvation due to overpopulation. Together with publications and campaigns describing the ecological and social consequences of Western modern lifestyle, a number of blueprints for survival that suggested new paths for achieving sustainability and restoring altered equilibrium also became largely popular (e.g., Barry Commoner’s The Closing Cycle (1971), Ernst Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and Arne Naess’ Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989)).
An important role was played by the emerging environmental associations, NGOs, and eco-communities that gathered ordinary citizens, practitioners, and scientists together around the cause of saving the planet from ecological disaster. A number of largely diversified associations were established, ranging from the radical environmentalism of Green Pirates (Taylor, 2013) and the so-called eco-terrorists of the Earth Liberation Front, to the hippie approach of the Global Ecovillages Network, the scientific environmentalism of large NGOs such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, to the more conservative struggle for nature preservation advanced by the WWF, and a plethora of initiatives aimed at promoting collective environmental friendly behaviors. Most of them became relevant actors in the international sociopolitical arena, entering the debate on a number of environmental issues and related matters, such as the unsustainable consequences of global free-trade economy, the bad working conditions in the poorest countries of the world, and the progressive loss of natural habitats, biodiversity, and cultural traditions worldwide.
The broad mobilization of energies and ideas found its momentum in the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. It was during the Stockholm Conference that international dignitaries first officially recognized that the ecological stability of the Earth is threatened by anthropic activity and worked collectively toward defining universal values and developing globally accepted rules and blueprints for global ecosystem protection. Environmental concerns, defined by the Stockholm conveners as “dangerous levels of pollution in water, air, earth and living beings; major and undesirable disturbances to the ecological balance of the biosphere; destruction and depletion of irreplaceable resources; and gross deficiencies, harmful to the physical, mental and social health of man [sic],” (UNEP 1972, 3) entered the international debate and rapidly climbed up the ladder of shared priorities to gain a prominent role in the global political agenda. Some years later the conference produced the seminal report Our Common Future (also called Brundtland Report, UN World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) elaborated by the newly established World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) and lead to creation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). This introduced the groundbreaking and heavily debated concept of “sustainable development” and started a process of environmental thinking mainstreaming in the context of global c...