Environmental Consciousness
Environmental consciousness refers to the awareness and concern for the impact of human activities on the environment. It encompasses a sense of responsibility towards preserving and protecting natural resources, reducing pollution, and addressing climate change. Environmental consciousness often influences political and international relations decisions, policies, and agreements related to environmental protection and sustainability.
6 Key excerpts on "Environmental Consciousness"
eBook - ePubEcologically Conscious Organizations
New Business Practices Based on Ecological Commitment
- András Ócsai(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...The concept began to be distinguished from Environmental Consciousness at the end of the 1960s by environmental activists and philosophers, who believed that conventional nature conservation movements were interpreting environmental problems too narrowly. This philosophical viewpoint, initially proclaimed by few, has since become the perspective adopted by environmental movements over the last few decades, and has led to profound changes in society, cultural, political and economic institutions by redefining the concepts of individual, society, and nature (Christopher 1999). In the formulation of Christopher (1999), ecological consciousness is concern for environmental problems fueled by the knowledge and experience of the degradation of nature. Ecological consciousness also implies that modern thinking is based on false ontological and epistemological presuppositions that prevent modern people from correctly perceiving and responding to environmental problems. According to ecologist thinkers, conventional Environmental Consciousness degrades environmental problems into technical problems; it is therefore unable to help with understanding their root causes. Environmental problems can only be solved if concern for the devastation of nature is accompanied by an “ecological” understanding of the relationship between nature, society, and the individual (Christopher 1999 : p. 358). At the center of ecological consciousness is the belief that environmental problems are the inevitable consequence of an instrumental rationality embodied in the social and cultural institutions of modernity (modern capitalism, industrial technology, individualism, and mechanistic science); thus without new social and cultural institutions based on a new rationality, global disaster is unavoidable (Christopher 1999 : p...
eBook - ePub- Pamela S. Chasek(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The realization that environmental threats have serious socioeconomic and human costs and that unilateral actions by individual countries cannot solve these problems produced increased international cooperation aimed at halting or reversing environmental degradation. This chapter provides an introduction to global environmental politics. It highlights key economic and environmental trends, introduces and defines important concepts, and traces some of the major intellectual currents and political developments that have contributed to the evolution of global environmental politics. Global Macrotrends Global demographic, economic, and environmental macrotrends describe key factors that drive global environmental politics. 1 Humanity’s potential stress on the environment is to some extent a function of three key factors: population, resource consumption, and waste production. One way to measure this impact is through an ecological footprint, which measures humanity’s demands on the biosphere by comparing humanity’s consumption against the earth’s regenerative capacity, or biocapacity. 2 The ecological footprint measures the sum of all cropland, grazing land, forest, and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fiber, and timber we need and to absorb the wastes emitted. Since the 1970s, humanity’s annual demand on the natural world has exceeded what the earth can renew in a year. This ecological overshoot was at a 50 percent deficit in 2010. 3 This means that it now takes natural systems about 1.5 years to regenerate the renewable resources that we use and absorb the waste we produce in a year, and it could reach three years by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario. 4 Population Growth and Resource Consumption Population growth affects the environment by increasing the demand for resources (including energy, water, food, and wood), the production of waste, and the emission of pollution...
eBook - ePubThe Green Challenge
The Development of Green Parties in Europe
- Dick Richardson, Chris Rootes(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 12 Environmental Consciousness, institutipnal structures and political competition in the formation and development of Green parties Chris Rootes The rise of Green parties in Europe has been variously attributed to the development of Environmental Consciousness, the pattern of opportunities and constraints imposed by institutional arrangements and the shifting balance of political competition. 1 It is time to assess the balance of the evidence. Environmental Consciousness There can be no doubt that the development of the electorate for Green parties has been built upon unprecedented awareness of environmental problems. However much Green party theorists and activists insist on the distinction between environmentalism and ecologism, between anthropocentrism and biocentrism, most people in even the most environmentally aware Europeari societies identify Green parties primarily with concern for the environment in the loose sense of opposition to pollution and environmental degradation. But, if consciousness of environmental deterioration is a necessary condition of support for Green parties, it is by no means a sufficient one; there is no simple correspondence between the state of Environmental Consciousness in a country and the level of development or electoral fortunes of its Green party. Two of the countries where Environmental Consciousness has been most consistently high and where the environment has regularly ranked highly as a salient political issue— Denmark and The Netherlands—have produced only tiny and poorly supported Green parties, while in others where environmental awareness is less highly developed—such as Belgium and France—Green parties have been relatively successful...
eBook - ePubThe European Environmental Conscience in EU Politics
A Developing Ideology
- Thomas Hoerber, Gabriel Weber, Thomas Hoerber, Gabriel Weber(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Introduction – the European environmental conscience in EU politics 1 Thomas Hoerber and Gabriel Weber DOI: 10.4324/9781003022855-1 The political landscape in the European Union (EU) is undergoing fundamental change. The European integration process and its content and values will inevitably change with it. Based on empirical studies of European energy and environmental policies, this book will suggest that both policy fields can be seen as a consensus which has developed in the EU and that they might also become the basis for a new European ideology: European ‘sustainabilism’. The book will examine the formation of the European environmental ‘conscience’ (Hoerber, 2012). The term European environmental conscience was created in order to differentiate it from ‘consciousness’. “There are hundreds of thousands of sensible citizens who agree wholeheartedly with the need to find clean solutions to energy, fuel and climate problems, without themselves feeling any kind of guilt, though perhaps some degree of responsibility” (Dunn, 2021). That responsibility of us all for our environment carries the greening of our societies as we see it today. A detailed definition of the criteria defining the European environmental conscience will be given below. What can be emphasised here at the outset is the notion of a common responsibility, which is signified by the term ‘conscience’. It will pose the question, why has this phenomenon grown so spectacularly since the late 1960s and early 1970s in the industrialised world. Even though there has been an undeniable environmental degradation during this time, it is argued here that a European environmental conscience has mainly developed through successive steps forward of European integration in energy policy. It became a European environmental conscience when the peoples called for solutions to the pressing environmental problems of the 1970s and when the EU, particularly the Commission, devised policies to counter such effects...
eBook - ePubEnvironmental Consciousness in China
Change with Social Transformation
- Qiu Zhong, Guoqing Shi(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Chandos Publishing(Publisher)
...People thought environmental issues have become serious social problems in China. In the top 13 ranked issues, environmental pollution was addressed as the fourth, closely after medical needs, employment, and the income gap (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2007). The influence of politics is not unilateral. The environmental movement in the United States gave us a model of a movement that became a channel for the grassroots aspirations and which in turn was present in presidential campaigns of the United States. Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign partner and the author of Earth in the Balance has shown the environmental desire of people. Earth in the Balance is the 1992 best-selling book which expressed politician willing for environmental concern and determination to protect the earth. As soon as Clinton entered the White House, he gave an “Earth Day” speech which not only showed his support for environmental protection but also inspired the enthusiasm of the “Earth Day.” 8.1.3 Global interactions In the previous subsection, we can see the awakening of the Western Environmental Consciousness and environmental movement (especially the United States) estimated by the concern of the United Nations (UN). At the same time, the UN concern strengthened Environmental Consciousness all over the world. The UN reinforced Environmental Consciousness by giving feedback to the United States and awakened Chinese. Then, although decisions always depend on every situation, policy, the environmental movement, and the United Nations joined as environmental allies. On June 16, 1972, the Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm was the UN’s first major conference on international environmental issues and marked a turning point in the development of international environmental politics...
eBook - ePubEnvironmentalism
The View from Anthropology
- Kay Milton(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The particular concatenation of concrete issues— water quality, whales, wastes and so on—on which the agenda came to focus in the 1970s and 1980s had a somewhat arbitrary, opportunistic character, the product more of a set of political and social contingencies than of any magisterial advance of more ‘objective’ processes of understanding. In the second place, the successes of environmentalism in its pre-1988 phase reflected realistic intuitions—vivid in the case of NGOs and green parties, more attenuated in the case of wider groups—about the ways in which life in modern complex societies is now shaped and dominated by technological and corporate-bureaucratic systems outside the agency of formal political institutions in which there is any genuine sense of shared public control (Winner 1977, Giddens 1990). Indeed, in the UK’s case it is no coincidence that the gap between ‘reality’ and constitutional ‘fiction’ in this regard has become so striking that it is a topic of routine concern to such political scientists as David Marquand (1988). The relationship of the environmental movement to these phenomena can be pictured, as Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (1991) have suggested recently, as one of tacitly generating ‘new knowledge’ about such matters for society as a whole, through processes of ‘cognitive praxis’ in real-life, day-to-day arguments with the prevailing orthodoxies. However, to repeat a point made earlier, the partial and selective way in which this ‘knowledge’ has come alive has reflected important social and cultural contingencies. Hence the third point is that because our public culture gives greatest recognition epistemologically to factors defined in objective ‘scientific’ —that is, on individual abuses of or incursions into the ‘natural’ environment terms, it has been on the physical manifestations of the wider social anxieties—that attention has focused most dramatically...
