COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT MOVEMENT

Community Development and Environment Movement

Community Development and Environment Movement

The environmental movement has been described as “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997 p. 67). Indeed, “it is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism” (Nisbet 1982 p. 101)

Grand claims have been made for the centrality of the environmental movement to processes of macrosocial and political change. Thus Touraine et al. (1983) saw in the ecology movement of the late 1970s the embryo of the transformative social movement that would be to the “postindustrial” society what the working-class movement promised to be for industrial society. Robert Brulle (2000 p. 101) suggests that, because it is able “to mobilize a wide variety of symbolic and material resources over a sustained period,” the environmental movement is capable of the scarcely less ambitious task of recreating civil society, an undertaking that is essential if humankind is to be saved from the destructive logics of the market and the state. Moreover, the environmental movement is often regarded as a uniquely global social movement and one that is pioneering the development of a global civil society (Wapner 1996).

Conceptions of the environmental movement are as various as those of social movements in general. The chief difference has been between a mainly American tradition that adopts a catholic, nominalist, and empirical approach, and a European macrosociological tradition that conceives of social movements restrictively as agents of profound structural change or, at least, as extraordinary phenomena of periods of dramatic social change. From the perspective of the latter, the continuing existence of an environmental movement is problematic.

Certainly, environmental movements are the great survivors of the wave of new social movements that arose throughout the industrialized Western democracies from the 1960s through the 1980s. Despite fluctuations in the salience of environmental issues over the years, they and the organizations that arose from them enjoy widespread public support. Moreover, in most industrialized countries, the public is more inclined to trust what environmental movement organizations (EMOs) tell them about environmental issues than what they are told by governments or corporations (Worcester 1999 p. 40; Christie and Jarvis 2001 p. 141).

EMO and Community

EMOs are supported by millions of citizens in Western industrialized countries. In the US, in 1995 over 10,000 environmental organizations, with a combined membership of over 41 million, annual income of $2.7 billion and assets of $5.8 billion, had registered as tax-exempt bodies with the Internal Revenue Service (Brulle 2000 p. 102-4). The density of EMO membership is at least as high in several Western European countries.

Environmental issues have moved up the political agenda to become embedded in the programs of mainstream political parties. Green parties have become established in most liberal democratic states of the industrialized world and collectively constitute the most significant new “party family” to emerge since the rise of social democracy in the first half of the ...