Environmental movement

Environmental movement is a term often used for any social or political movement directed towards the preservation, restoration, or enhancement of the natural environment. Here are some of the most prominent and well-defined examples:

Renewed focus on local action

However, the environmental movement today persists in many smaller local groups, usually within ecoregions, furthering spiritual and aesthetic values Thoreau or those who rewrote Chief Seattle's Reply would recognize. Some resemble the old U.S. conservation movement - whose modern expression is the Sierra Club, Audubon Society and National Geographic Society - American organizations with a worldwide influence.

Related Topics:
Ecoregions - Chief Seattle - Conservation movement - Sierra Club - Audubon Society - National Geographic Society

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These "politically neutral" groups tend to avoid global conflicts and view the settlement of inter-human conflict as separate from regard for nature - in direct contradiction to the ecology movement and peace movement which have increasingly close links: While Green Parties and Greenpeace, and groups like the ACTivist Magazine for example, regard ecology, biodiversity and an end to non-human extinction as absolutely basic to peace, the local groups may not, and may see a high degree of global competition and conflict as justifiable if it lets them preserve their own local uniqueness. This seems selfish to some. However, such groups tend not to "burn out" and to sustain for long periods, even generations, protecting the same local treasures. The Water Keepers Alliance is a good example of such a group that sticks to local questions.

Related Topics:
Ecology movement - Peace movement - Green Parties - Greenpeace - Ecology - Biodiversity - Extinction - Peace - Water Keepers Alliance

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The visions and confusions, however, persist. The new tribalist vision of society for example echoes the concerns of the original environmentalists to a degree. And the more local groups increasingly find that they benefit from collaboration, e.g. on consensus decision making methods, or making simultaneous policy, or relying on common legal resources, or even sometimes a common glossary. However, the differences between the various groups that make up the modern environmental movement tend to outweigh such similarities, and they rarely co-operate directly except on a few major global questions.

Related Topics:
New tribalist - Consensus decision making - Simultaneous policy - Glossary

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Groups such as The Bioregional Revolution are calling on the need to bridge these differences as the converging problems of the 21st century they claim compel us to unite and to take decisive action. They promote bioregionalism, permaculture, and local economies as solutions to these problems, overpopultion, climate change, global epidemics, and water scarcity, but most notably to "peak oil"--the prediction that we are likely to reach a maximum in global oil production which could spell drastic changes in many aspects of our everyday lives.

Related Topics:
The Bioregional Revolution - Bioregionalism - Permaculture - Local economies - Climate change - Epidemics - Water scarcity - Peak oil

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