ENVIRONMETALISM
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 among 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.
IT’S A SERIOUS MATTER
We believe that environmentalism has never been as important a study or movement as it is today.
We would like to see this very agenda placed at the top of the political and social priority list for the next decade.
The UK and its surrounding shores has one of the largest renewable and sustainable energy resources in the whole of Europe, so much so that it could provide most of our electricity needs with some left over in reserve.
Should we take environmentalism moreseriously?
Despite this very exciting fact, successive governments have failed to face up to this, so energy policy continues to be based on outdated and polluting fuels including ridiculously expensive nuclear energy. This is an immense and diverse subject which we will keep you up to date on in the coming months.
Tree Planting scheme UK