Abstract
The growth of “environmentalism” in the United States is traced from the earliest efforts to preserve the American wilderness through the politicization of environmental crises, real and perceived, to Earth Day and the national commitment to protect the natural environment and human health. The initial opposition between private enterprise and an orientation to the natural environment is briefly sketched, and the emerging obligation to shepherd products from “cradle to grave”.
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- 1.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, New York, Oxford University Press, 1949, 224–225.
- 2.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, New York: Oxford University Press, 1949 pp. 129–130.
- 3.
Ibid pp. 224–225.
- 4.
The information came from the websites of the Sierra Club, of Restore Hetch Hetchy, and the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency, on July 1, 2007.
- 5.
Felicity Barringer, “Where Dams Once Stood, Prospectors Spur Anger,” The New York Times, September 4, 2010, A10.
- 6.
Ibid, p. A10.
- 7.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
- 8.
Carson, pp. 118–122.
- 9.
Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crises," Science, 155, 1967, p. 1205.
- 10.
See, for instance, Linda Breen Pierce, Choosing Simplicity, Carmel, CA 2000; Mark A. Burch, Stepping Lightly, Gabriola Island, BC: 2000. Also good is the history and literature of The Catholic Worker, founded by Dorothy Day.
- 11.
See John Hersey, “My Petition for More Space”.
- 12.
De Steiguer, J.E. Age of Environmentalism, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997, p. 90, citing Charles McCoy, “When the Boomster Slams the Doomster, Bet on a New Wager,” The Wall Street Journal, 225 (108) Monday, June 5th, 1995, pp. A1, A9.
- 13.
The legislative history is too long for this essay; that brief list was excerpted from Gaylord Nelson, “Earth Day’70: What It Meant,” in the EPA Journal, 1980. Found on the website http://www.epa.gov/history.
- 14.
Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, New York: Henry Holt, 1997, p. 429.
- 15.
Loc. Cit. In general, for the industry reaction to Silent Spring see Lear, Chapter 18, “Rumblings of an Avalanche.”
- 16.
Deed of Love Canal Property Transfer, Niagara Falls, New York, April 28, 1953. Emphasis added.
- 17.
Conversation with Eugene Martin-Less, Esq., Environmental Bureau of the Attorney General of New York State, Albany, New York. Senior Attorney, New York State versus Occidental Chemical Company (suit pending), asking $250 million punitive damages relative to Love Canal dumpsite.
- 18.
Nader, Ralph, Ronald Brownstein, and John Richard, eds., Who’s Poisoning America: Corporate Polluters and Their Victims in the Chemical Age. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981.
- 19.
Whitney, Gary. “Hooker Chemical and Plastics,” Case Studies in Business Ethics, ed. Thomas Donaldson, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1984.
- 20.
Michael H. Brown, “A Toxic Ghost Town Harbinger of America's Toxic Waste Crisis,” The Atlantic, vol. 263, #1, July 1989.
- 21.
“CDC Finds No Excess Illness at Love Canal,” Science_vol. 220, June 17, 1983.
- 22.
Vianna, Nicholas. Report to the New York State Department of Health. Reported in Science, June 19, 1981, p. 19.
- 23.
In the middle of a discussion of population problems and the natural environment, G. Tyler Miller, Jr. includes a sidebar (“spotlight”) on the 1970s story of infants in the developing world suffering from malnutrition because of inappropriate use of infant feeding products, contaminated with the local water, or too expensive for the family to purchase in sufficient quantity. Nestlé S.A. was accused of inappropriate promotion of the products. The infant formula case never at any point had anything to do with the natural environment; the INFACT protest had only to do with the health of babies in the developing world. Nothing substantially connected the two discussions, save that an NGO was opposing an industrial giant. Miller, Living in the Environment, 11th edition, Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2000. p. 272.
- 24.
John M. Broder, “After Lobbying, Wetland Rules Are Narrowed,” The New York Times, July 6, 2007.
- 25.
For a description of the wreck, see http://www.eoearth.org/article/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill.
- 26.
The full Protocol can be found on the United Nations Environmental Programme website: http://www.unep.org/ozone/pdfs/montreal-protocol2000.pdf.
- 27.
One of the foremost authorities on matters environmental, Gus Speth, then dean of Gifford Pinchot's old school, the Yale School of Forestry—now the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies—brought out a superb book on the subject, Red Sky at Morning, Yale, 2004.
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Newton, L. (2013). Environmental Background. In: The American Experience in Environmental Protection. SpringerBriefs in Ethics, vol 6. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00050-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00050-3_1
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