THE GREEN MOVEMENT
What is it all about?
Environmentalism - aka "The Green Movement". It is a social movement, which involves people who are environmentally concerned coming together with certain ideas and who become activists.
It protects the environment, makes others aware of environmental issues, and reduces deforestation, the extinction of species, the loss of habitats and indigenous knowledge. Environmentalism is concerned with both our own society, and those of SSS (Small Scale Societies) .
What we now know of as environmentalism began with the establishment of the first empire forest in 1855 in British India, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, over ten per cent of the land surface of the earth became protected as a public trust.
Sprawling forest reservations, many of them larger than modern nations, became revenue-producing forests that protected the whole ‘household of nature’, and Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt were among those who celebrated a new class of government foresters as public heroes. Imperial foresters warned of impending catastrophe, desertification and global climate change if the reverse process of deforestation continued.
The empire forestry movement spread through India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and then the United States to other parts of the globe, and *Gregory Barton’s pioneering study is amongst the first to look at the origins of environmentalism in global perspective.
*Gregory Barton: Professor of British, Colonial and Environmental History at the University of Redlands, California. He is the editor of American Environmentalism. |
