Academic literature on the topic 'Environmental ethics. Sustainable living. Environmentalism'

One of the marks that distinguishes sustainability from classic environmentalism is the former’s cheery optimism. Indeed, reading side by side the 2005 guidebook Green Living—a fairly typical how-to for sustainable living—with, say, Paul Ehrlich’s doleful Population Bomb (1968) offers a case study in contrast. Green Living is constructive and buoyant whereas Population Bomb is frenzied and cynical. Yet it’s striking how much Green Living takes its inspiration not only from Ehrlich but from other titans of mid-century environmentalism—albeit with a noticeable shift in tone. Paul and Anne Ehrlich are cited approvingly in the opening pages of the book. The epigraph comes from the still-very-active David Suzuki. There are also references to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which, of course, is named after the esteemed Aldo Leopold. But gone is the gloomy tone, replaced instead by a heartening “You can do it!” attitude. This brief observation illustrates how much the modern sustainability movement owes to the critics, intellectuals, and protestors of the 1960s and 1970s who raised awareness about environmental problems, advocated for social justice, and defended the rights of the oppressed. While the three Es of sustainability were rarely paired in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the basic concepts that shaped sustainability were clearly articulated before the 1980s. This chapter should not be taken as a comprehensive look at the environmental movement, about which there is reams more to say. Instead, it will examine in general terms some of the disparate sources that contributed to the holism of sustainability. Particular emphasis will be laid on the key ideas, associations, and scholars who developed the environmental movement and the success that environmentalists had in getting politicians, economists, and the public at large to think in ecological terms—a singular achievement that continues to inform the world of sustainability. It is important to note that the reason that this book jumps from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s is not because the era of the two world wars has nothing to do with the history of sustainability.

The first thing to know when starting to climb a hill is where the summit lies. The second is that there are no completely painless ways to get there. Failing to know those things may lead one up a deceptively easy path that never reaches the top but meanders off into a dead-end, frustrating the climber and wasting energy. The currently popular slogan of “sustainable development” threatens to become such a road. Though appealing at first view, it appeals particularly to people who are disheartened by the long, arduous hike they see ahead of them or who don’t really have a clear notion of what the principal goal of environmental politics ought to be. After much milling about in a confused, contentious mood, they have discovered what looks like a broad easy path where all kinds of people can walk along together, and they hurry toward it, unaware that it may be going in the wrong direction. When contemporary environmentalism first emerged in the 1960s and ′70s, and before its goals became obscured by political compromising and diffusion, the destination was more obvious and the route more clear. The goal was to save the living world around us, millions of species of plants and animals, including humans, from destruction by our technology, population, and appetites. The only way to do that, it was easy enough to see, was to think the radical thought that there must be limits to growth in three areas—limits to population, limits to technology, and limits to appetite and greed. Underlying that insight was a growing awareness that the progressive, secular, and materialist philosophy on which modern life rests, indeed on which Western civilization has rested for the past three hundred years, is deeply flawed and ultimately destructive to ourselves and the whole fabric of life on the planet. The only true, certain way to the environmental goal, therefore, was to challenge that philosophy at its foundation and find a new one based on material simplicity and spiritual richness—to find other ends to life than production and consumption.

Poisoned towns and rivers, species extinctions, and now climate change have confirmed many times over how modern dreams of limitless growth combined with relentless technological exploitation have compromised planetary life at every level. In response to such degradation, the integrity of local place has been a major orientation for environmental ethics and criticism. The origins of localism are conventionally traced to late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critiques of urban industrialization, and Romanticism’s corresponding veneration for rural authenticity and wilderness spaces. Mid-twentieth-century environmentalism revived this ‘ethic of proximity’ in denouncing the release of pollutants and carcinogens into local soils, waters, and atmospheres by civil offshoots of military manufacturing and industrial agriculture. Those releases did not stay local, but soon penetrated regional water systems and wind patterns to become worldwide problems. Such networks of devastation continue to grow, especially in developing countries eager to mimic the worst aspects of Western consumer culture. In response to these developments, ecotheorists have partially revised locally focused models of environmental protection. Planetary threats such as rising global temperatures, melting polar ice sheets, and more intense storms have made it imperative to update the famous Sierra Club slogan and to act globally as well as locally. Localism has also been reshaped by conservation biology’s new recognition that geophysical disturbances and organic change are structural features of all healthy ecosystems. Within these more complicated ecological paradigms, the cultivation of relatively balanced and genuinely sustainable local relationships nonetheless remains an important conservationist worldview. In early modern England it was the leading life experience out of which responses to new environmental dangers were conceived. In this chapter I shall discuss Shakespeare’s representations of one of the three most significant of these threats—deforestation—in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The other two, exploitative land-uses and gunpowder militarization, will be the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Early modern English writers and governments treated deforestation as a national problem, even though its impacts were concentrated mainly in the Midlands and the south-east.