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COPYRIGHT 2002 Journal of Business Administration
THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of a book that for many people--certainly for me--was one of the most influential and important works of the 20th century. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that dealt with pesticides, but could have been equally valid for virtually any modern technology. Carson pointed out that in nature, nothing exists in isolation because everything is connected to everything else. Humans invent powerful technologies and we use them for specific purposes, like DDT to kill insect pests. But because everything is interconnected, there are ramifications throughout the web of life that affect fish, birds and mammals, including human beings. Her book was a global call to action, an eloquent look at the natural world and the impacts that human beings are having on it. Her book galvanized millions of people around the world, including me, into becoming part of the modern environmental movement. Within 10 years the movement had grown to such an extent that the United Nations called the first global environmental conference on the Environment and Development in Stockholm. At Stockholm there were eminent scientists--Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Barbara Ward, Margaret Mead--who discussed many of the issues that remain familiar to us today: population growth, poverty, species extinction, and toxic pollution.
Awareness Grows
In the years that followed Stockholm we had constant reminders of the impact of humanity on the environment--names like Exxon Valdez, Bhopal and Chernobyl punctuated the steady increase in environmental awareness. And after Stockholm we learned of new phenomena that Rachel Carson and the Stockholm delegates didn't know about. We learned of the immense scale of destruction of tropical rainforests around the world, the acceleration of loss of species as a result of human activity, the overfishing of marine resources, ozone depletion when most of us didn't even know there was such a thing as the ozone layer, global warming and, more recently, the very worrying phenomenon of endocrine disruptors that leach out of plastics and affect sexual development.
Environmental concern had grown to such an extent, that by 1988 a man ran for President of the United States and said, "if you vote for me, I will be an environmental president." He was George Bush and, after being elected, he revealed how shallow promises are when made during the heat of elections. In 1988 Margaret Thatcher was filmed for television picking up litter in London and saying to the camera, "I'm a greenie too." In 1988 Brian Mulroney was re-elected for a second term and, to show his born-again environmentalism, he raised the Minister of the Environment into the inner Cabinet and appointed the biggest star of that election, Lucien Bouchard, to the Ministry of the Environment.
All of that awareness and concern peaked in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. At Rio, the largest number of heads of state in human history assembled to signal a fundamental shift: from that point on, whatever humanity did, the ecological implications would have to be considered. The rallying cry in 1992 was "sustainable development" and at the Earth Summit, Agenda 21, a massive blueprint to get us onto a sustainable path, was signed by most of the leaders at that conference. They also signed Conventions on Biodiversity and Climate that were to be formally ratified in later years.
As if to punctuate the significance of the Earth Summit in Rio, in 1992 the Canadian government finally admitted what fishermen had been warning of for years--the northern cod off Newfoundland were vanishing. This fishery had attracted Europeans for centuries; before Columbus, boats were fishing off the Grand Banks. The entire culture of the province was built on northern cod, and in 1992 the government admitted that they were commercially extinct and called a moratorium. That moratorium was to last for two years. It's now 10 years later and there's no sign that the cod are coming back. So we see the consequences of an ecological disaster in Newfoundland, the loss of a key species in the waters off that island and, as a result, a 500-year-old way of life is now vanishing in that province.
World Scientists' Warning
In November of 1992 a remarkable document called "World Scientists' Warming to Humanity" was released. Its list of 1500 signators reads like the All-star Hall of Fame of Scientists, including more than half of all living Nobel Prize winners. The introduction reads:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practises put at serious risk the future we wish for human society and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.
Then they go on to document the areas in which that threat is perceived: the atmosphere, water, oceans, soil, forests, species, population. And then the warning grows even more bleak (and I want to remind you that scientists are a very conservative lot. They don't want to say anything that's going to shake people up. So to have such an eminent group signing such a strong document is quite unusual.) They go on:
No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned senior members of the world scientific community hereby warn all of humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.
And then it goes on to describe what we must do.
Media Response
Now what was even more remarkable about this statement was the response of the global media to it. There was no response. The major television networks in the United States didn't bother to report it. Nor did the CBC or the Globe and Mail. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times rejected it as "not newsworthy".
So consider this: half of all Nobel Prize...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
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