Saving the Earth

The Environmental Movement

In the late 1960s, this flag* first appeared – flying at gatherings in People’s Park in Berkeley and on patches sewn onto the sleeves of army-surplus coats. Continue reading "The Environmental Movement" essay »

These are dangerous, exciting and challenging times as we race to address the global environmental issues that place at risk life on Earth. The books recommended below offer cogent perspectives on the history, the heroes, the development and current status of the environmental movement in America.

Recommended Books on The Environmental Movement

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Paul Hawken

Environmentalist Paul Hawken believes that we are in the midst of a world-changing rise of activist groups, all "working toward ecological sustainability and social justice." Neither ideological nor centralized, this coalescence of activism is a spontaneous and organic response to the recognition that environmental problems are social-justice problems. Hawken compares this gathering of forces to the human immune system as people are joining together to defend life on Earth. Hopeful and inspiring.
2007, Viking

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

The authors argue that the politics that dealt with acid rain and smog can't deal with global warming. In short, "environmentalism" must die so that something new can be born. Break Through articulates a new politics for a new century, one focused on aspirations, not complaints; human possibility, not limits. What the new ecological crises demand is that we unleash a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union - those break throughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future. The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good.
2007, Houghton Mifflin

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History
Carolyn Merchant

This exciting compendium of American environmental history provides a thorough treatment of the topic beginning with Native-European encounters from 1000 to 1875 A.D. Subsequent chapters examine the transformation of New England from wilderness to farms; the development of the tobacco and cotton plantation economy in the South; the Western frontier, settlement of California and the Great Plains; the beginnings of conservation and preservation; the rise of ecology; and the modern "Era of Environmentalism." Extensive resource guide, bibliography and an environmental history timeline.
2005, Columbia University Press

Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism
Andrew G. Kirk

Andrew Kirk recounts the story of The Whole Earth Catalog which promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and groups who helped construct this pragmatic philosophy showing that The Whole Earth Catalog was more than a mere counterculture fad: it became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way.
2007, University Press of Kansas

Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice
Andrew Szasz

Author Szasz traces the history of environmental populism growing out of serious hazardous waste crises such as the Love Canal crisis which highlighted the failure of routine governmental regulatory approaches. "Toxic Waste" as a new mass issue was born. Szasz elaborates the broader political implications of environmental populism and the reconstitution of progressive politics.
1994, University of Minnesota Press

First Along the River: A Brief History of the U.S. Environmental Movement
Benjamin Kline

This concise overview of the environmental movement from the colonial era to the present recounts the movement's history as it parallels major social and political events in our nation's history. An ideal introduction for the interested general reader.
2007, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
Mark Hamilton Lytle

Biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) wrote the National Book Award winning The Sea Around Us (1951) but is best known for her ground breaking book, Silent Spring (1962), a scathing expose of the effects of DDT and other pesticides. This spirited biography shows the female scientist overcoming gender prejudice in a male dominated field, the stresses of caring for her ailing mother and Carson's battles with recurring breast cancer. This remarkable scientist's commitment was to "protect the living things she loved so dearly."
2007, Oxford University Press

Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism
Char Miller

Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), a pioneering environmentalist and progressive politician, was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. He believed that conservation should "produce the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest run," and was prescient in his concern about polution and the need for affordable and sustainable energy sources. Miller's animated biography presents Pinchot in all his ferver and environmentalism in all its complexity.
2004, Island Press

John Muir: Nature's Visionary
Gretel Ehrlich

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread," wrote Muir who walked away from the hubub of humanity and immersed himself in the wild until an "evangelistic urge" induced him to come down from his beloved Sierras and share his belief in the sanctity of wilderness. By focusing on Muir's unquenchable appetite for life and learning and quoting with great discernment from his works, including unpublished journals, nature writer Ehrlich beautifully captures Muir's essence and clearly defines the ongoing significance of his accomplishments.
2000, National Geographic

The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000
Michael Bess

In this penetrating new study history professor Bess argues that the accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in post-war France. He shows how ecological concerns have shaped France's economic and cultural life while human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment.
2003, University Of Chicago Press

Minding Nature: Philosophers of Ecology
David Macauley, ed.

Minding Nature provides a solid overview of ecological philosophy and original insights into a developing field of philosophical inquiry. Combining philosophy, ecology, and political theory this collection focuses on some of the most influential thinkers (Hobbes, Heidegger, Arendt, Marcuese, Carson and others) who have emphasized our natural relations to the Earth, our social creations, and each other.
1996, The Guilford Press

Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas
Donald Worster

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past. It traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature. The book includes portraits of Linnaeus, Gilbert White, Darwin, Thoreau, and such key 20th century ecologists as Rachel Carson, Frederic Clements, Aldo Leopold, James Lovelock, and Eugene Odum. An absorbing contribution to the history of ideas.
1994, Cambridge University Press

Nature's Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World
Bill Birchard

This generally admiring portrait of The Nature Conservancy, the organization that preserves uniquely functioning ecosystems, focuses on nine personalities who made a difference. It is a matchless tale of a half century of organizational growth and renewal leading up to the Nature Conservancy's recently announced goal of preserving ten percent of every ecosystem on earth.
2005, Jossey-Bass

Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870-2000
Thomas Raymond Wellock

Professor Wellock explores the international, rural, and industrial roots of modern environmentalism that emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century - three related movements in response to a rapidly expanding economy and population that depleted the nation's resources, damaged land in rural areas, and blighted cities. Accessible and insightful, Preserving the Nation is a thought-provoking history of environmental politics.
2007, Harlan Davidson

The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
Donald Worster

This collection of 16 essays from Bancroft Prize winning historian Worster concerns the impact on nature of Judeo-Christian beflief, Adam Smith's economic theories and humankind generally and also offers a historical perspective on the growth of environmental history. The ecological crisis, he stresses, is "the crisis of modern culture."
1994, Oxford University Press