Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Recommended reading
Journals which publish articles on science and environmental management
Ambio
Environment and Ecology
Environmental Management
Journal of Environmental Management
Note: So many sources cover this field that it is difficult to recommend a fair and
brief selection.

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151
Chapter 8
Environmental
management,
environmentalism
and social science
♦ Growing environmental concern (1750 to 1960)
152
♦ Environmental concern between the First
and Second World Wars
153
♦ Environmental concern in the 1960s and 1970s
154
♦ Environmental concern in the 1980s and 1990s
156
♦ Environmentalism, ecologism and the Green
Movement
157
♦ The value of the social sciences and
environmentalism to environmental
management
161
♦ A late-twentieth-century paradigm shift?
166
♦ Social science and environmentalma
nagement in practice
167
♦ Recommended reading
167

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152
‘When the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important
social movement of the period will be environmentalism’ (Nisbet, 1982:10).
Growing environmental concern (1750 to 1960)
Some societies protect certain plants and animals for reasons of religion or local
economy (e.g. baobab trees are protected by people in most of Africa), and here
and there rulers established reserves (for example, in parts of India before the
fifteenth century). From the late seventeenth century European and American
geographers, explorers and naturalists popularized natural history (mainly for the
leisured classes), stimulated academics to seek better understanding of it, and
encouraged policy makers to legislate for better treatment of nature. By 1700 the
forests and wildlife of colonies like Mauritius had been degraded, the timber had
been cleared on Madeira, the Cape Verde and several other islands. By the 1760s
there was legislation to try to protect forests, e.g. on Tobago, Mauritius and St
Helena (Grove, 1992; 1995).
Two broad groupings of environmentalists evolved in Europe and America:
1
Utilitarian environmentalists
In the late nineteenth century the British sought assistance from German foresters to
sustain timber production in Burma and India. In South Africa, other African colonies
and India, legislation was passed to try and reduce soil erosion, control hunting and
conserve forests and outstanding natural beauty. By 1900, reserves had been
established in Kenya and South Africa, often by hunters or ex-hunters (Fitter and
Scott, 1978).
In North America by the 1850s, damage to forests, wildlife and soil was evident.
Some feared the open frontiers were closing and that limitless land and resources
were a thing of the past. One of those who was concerned was George Perkins Marsh,
who in 1864 published an influential, if somewhat deterministic, book on environment
and development, Man and Nature. This and publications by others prompted action—
essentially two groups concerned for the American environment formed in the late
nineteenth century: ‘preservationists’ and ‘conservationists’. The former included
John Muir, who wished to maintain unspoilt wilderness areas; the latter included
Gifford Pinchot, and were prepared to see environmental protection combined with
careful land use (McCormick, 1989; Barrow, 1995:8). Environmental managers still
face this preservation or conservation choice today (in the UK National Parks have
chosen to allow controlled resource exploitation).
During the 1860s the US National Parks Service and the US Forest Service
were established. Pinchot, Chief of the US Forest Service between 1890 and 1908,

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ENVIRONMENTALISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
153
was a major force in establishing parks and reserves (and probably coined the term
‘conservation’ in 1907, although the British already had conservancies in India)
(Kuzmiak, 1991). John Muir has been hailed as ‘High Priest of the Sierras’ and
‘Father of the US conservation movement’. In 1892 he founded the Sierra Club in
California—still an influential NGO, it played an active role in promoting popular
environmental concern between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s; it also gave rise to
Friends of the Earth, one of today’s foremost environmental NGOs (for a history
of the American conservation movement, see Kuzmiak, 1991). Political theorists,
like Pyotr Kropotkin in Russia, professed forms of ‘utilitarian environmentalism’
by the 1890s, which aimed to improve man through better working and living
conditions (Kropotkin, 1974). Kropotkin, an anarcho-communist, argued for small,
decentralized communities, close to nature and avoiding industrialization and the
division of labour—something quite similar to what many environmentalists seek
nowadays.
Conservation bodies began to spread in America, Europe and colonies before
the First World War (Dalton, 1994:25). After 1917 divergence of development paths
between Russia (and later other socialist economies) and the free-enterprise west
made little difference—both had and have serious environmental problems
(Gerasimov et al., 1971; Komarov, 1981; Smil, 1983; De Bardeleben, 1986) (see
chapter 12). The eastern bloc has, however, played an active part in international
conservation and environmental protection activities, and the former USSR and China
have established many national parks and reserves.
2
Romantic environmentalists
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrial revolution led, especially in Europe
and North America, to overcrowded, filthy cities, damaged countryside, loss of
commons, and misery. A diverse group of intellectuals questioned capitalism,
agricultural modernization and industrial growth. Some were anarchists most were
dubbed ‘romantics’, and saw nature as a source of inspiration. They include poets
like Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge, writers like Henry Thoreau (1854), artists
like Holman Hunt and John Turner, ‘utopian liberals’ and proto-socialists such as
William Morris (1891), and social reformers like John Ruskin and Robert Owen (the
latter founded utopian colonies, with limited success, in the UK, Ireland and the
USA in the 1820s). These romantics have certainly inspired twentieth-century
environmentalists, but their contribution is ‘more escapist than visionary’ (for a review
of romantic environmentalism see Bate, 1991).