New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment

New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment PDF Author: John-Henry Harter
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443830143
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment explores the history of Greenpeace Canada from 1971 to 2010 and its relationship to the working class. In order to understand the ideology behind Greenpeace, the author investigates its structure, personnel, and actions. The case study illustrates important contradictions between new social movement theory and practice and how those contradictions affect the working class. In particular, Greenpeace’s actions against the seal hunt, against forestry in British Columbia, and against its own workers in Toronto, demonstrate some of the historic obstacles to working out a common labour and environmental agenda. The 1970s saw an explosion of new social movement activism. From the break up of the New Left into single issue groups at the end of the 1960s came a multitude of groups representing the peace movement, environmental movement, student movement, women’s movement, and gay liberation movement. This explosion of new social movement activism has been heralded as the age of new radical politics. Many theorists and activists saw, and still see, new social movements, and the issues, or identities they represent, as replacing the working class as an agent for progressive social change. This paper examines these claims through a case study of the quintessential new social movement, Greenpeace.

New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment

New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment PDF Author: John-Henry Harter
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443830143
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 95

Get Book

Book Description
New Social Movements, Class, and the Environment explores the history of Greenpeace Canada from 1971 to 2010 and its relationship to the working class. In order to understand the ideology behind Greenpeace, the author investigates its structure, personnel, and actions. The case study illustrates important contradictions between new social movement theory and practice and how those contradictions affect the working class. In particular, Greenpeace’s actions against the seal hunt, against forestry in British Columbia, and against its own workers in Toronto, demonstrate some of the historic obstacles to working out a common labour and environmental agenda. The 1970s saw an explosion of new social movement activism. From the break up of the New Left into single issue groups at the end of the 1960s came a multitude of groups representing the peace movement, environmental movement, student movement, women’s movement, and gay liberation movement. This explosion of new social movement activism has been heralded as the age of new radical politics. Many theorists and activists saw, and still see, new social movements, and the issues, or identities they represent, as replacing the working class as an agent for progressive social change. This paper examines these claims through a case study of the quintessential new social movement, Greenpeace.

Explaining Environmentalism

Explaining Environmentalism PDF Author: Philip W. Sutton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135176523X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: The author examines those current theories which purport to explain the emergence and character of 'new' social movements in the 'advanced' industrial societies since the 1960s. In particular, it sets out to test the efficacy of these explanations in relation to the history of the environmental movement in Britain. The book breaks new ground in bringing together both short-term and the more historically orientated long-term explanations into a single volume, thus providing an invaluable resource for students of social movements. Its critical exposition of major theories also points to the need for a more developmental approach which seeks to connect old and new movement forms, thus allowing for a more balanced evaluation of the potential of the environmental movement to bring about significant social change.

Labor and the Environmental Movement

Labor and the Environmental Movement PDF Author: Brian K. Obach
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263993
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Relations between organized labor and environmental groups are typically characterized as adversarial, most often because of the specter of job loss invoked by industries facing environmental regulation. But, as Brian Obach shows, the two largest and most powerful social movements in the United States actually share a great deal of common ground. Unions and environmentalists have worked together on a number of issues, including workplace health and safety, environmental restoration, and globalization (as in the surprising solidarity of "Teamsters and Turtles" in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle). Labor and the Environmental Movement examines why, when, and how labor unions and environmental organizations either cooperate or come into conflict. By exploring the interorganizational dynamics that are crucial to cooperative efforts and presenting detailed studies of labor-environmental group coalition building from around the country (examining in detail examples from Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin), it provides insight into how these movements can be brought together to promote a just and sustainable society. Obach gives a brief history of relations between organized labor and environmental groups in the United States, explores how organizational learning can increase organizations' ability to work with others, and examines the crucial role played by "coalition brokers" who maintain links to both movements. He challenges research that attempts to explain inter-movement conflict on the basis of cultural distinctions between blue-collar workers and middle-class environmentalists, providing evidence of legal and structural constraints that better explain the organizational differences class-culture and new-social-movement theorists identify. The final chapter includes a model of the crucial determinants of cooperation and conflict that can serve as the basis for further study of inter-movement relations.

Forcing the Spring

Forcing the Spring PDF Author: Robert Gottlieb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Originally published in 1993, Forcing the Spring was quickly recognized as a seminal work in the field of environmental history. The book links the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s to earlier movements that had not previously been defined as environmental. It was the first to consider the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in the history and evolution of environmentalism. This revised edition extends the groundbreaking history and analysis of Forcing the Spring into the present day. It updates the original with important new material that brings the book's themes and arguments into the 21st century, addressing topics such as: the controversy spawned by the original edition with regard to how environmentalism is, or should be, defined; new groups and movements that have formed in the past decade; change and development in the overall environmental movement from 1993 to 2004; the changing role of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in today's environmentalism; the impact of the 2004 presidential election; the emergence of "the next environmentalism." Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition considers environmentalism as a contemporary movement focused on "where we live, work, and play," touching on such hot-button topics as globalization, food, immigration, and sprawl. The book also describes the need for a "next environmentalism" that can address current challenges, and considers the barriers and opportunities associated with this new, more expansive approach. Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition is an important contribution for students and faculty in a wide variety of fields including history, sociology, political science, environmental studies, environmental history, and social movements. It also offers useful context and analysis for anyone concerned with environmental issues.

The Right to Nature

The Right to Nature PDF Author: Elia Apostolopoulou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429763093
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Since the 2008 financial crash the expansion of neoliberalism has had an enormous impact on nature-society relations around the world. In response, various environmental movements have emerged opposing the neoliberal restructuring of environmental policies using arguments that often bridge traditional divisions between the environmental and labour agendas. The Right to Nature explores the differing experiences of a number of environmental-social movements and struggles from the point of view of both activists and academics. This collection attempts to both document the social-ecological impacts of neoliberal attempts to exploit non-human nature in the post-crisis context and to analyse the opposition of emerging environmental movements and their demands for a radically different production of nature based on social needs and environmental justice. It also provides a necessary space for the exchange of ideas and experiences between academics and activists and aims to motivate further academic-activist collaborations around alternative and counter-hegemonic re-thinking of environmental politics. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and activists interested in environmental policy, environmental justice, social and environmental movements.

Green States and Social Movements

Green States and Social Movements PDF Author: John S. Dryzek
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191530301
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Social movements take shape in relation to the kind of state they face, while over time states are transformed by the movements that they both incorporate and resist. Green States and Social Movements is a comparative study of the environmental movement's successes and failures in four very different states: the USA, UK, Germany and Norway. The history covers the entire sweep of the modern environmental era that begins in 1970. The end in view is a green transformation of the state and society on a par with earlier transformations that gave us first the liberal capitalist state and then the welfare state. The authors explain why such a transformation is now most likely in Germany, and why it is least likely in the United States, which has lost the status of environmental pioneer that it gained in the early 1970s. Their comparative analysis also explains the role played by social movements in making modern societies more deeply democratic, and yields insights into the strategic choices of environmental movements as they decide on what terms to engage, enter or resist the state. Sometimes it makes sense for a movement to act conventionally, as a green party or set of interest groups. But sometimes inclusion can mean co-optation, in which case a movement can instead emphasize action in and through civil society.

Image Politics

Image Politics PDF Author: Kevin Michael DeLuca
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136503064
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. The book presents a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age as it illuminates new political possibilities currently enacted by radical environmental groups. Chapters in the volume cover key areas of environmental activism such as: *The rhetoric of social movements; *Imaging social movements; *Environmental justice groups; and *Participatory democracy. This book is of interest to scholars and students of rhetorical theory, media and communication theory, visual theory, environmental studies, social change movements, and political theory. It will also appeal to others interested in ecology, radical environmental politics, and activism, and is an excellent supplemental text in advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in these areas.

Environmental Networks and Social Movement Theory

Environmental Networks and Social Movement Theory PDF Author: Clare Saunders
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1849660530
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Clare Saunders' book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories and it goes on to relate them to the practices of environmental networks. Theoretically and empirically rich, the book draws on extensive survey material with 144 UK environmental organizations, as diverse as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups, reformists, conservationists and radicals; interviews with more than 40 key campaigners and extensive participant-observation, particularly in London. Focussing particularly on the crucial question of networking dynamics, the book reveals that there are broad ranging network links across the movements' spatial and ideological dimensions. Combined with inevitable ideological clashes and a degree of sectarian rivalry, these links helps produce vibrant environmental networks that together work to protect and/or preserve the environment. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with environmental issues, politics and movements.

Climate Change as Class War

Climate Change as Class War PDF Author: Matthew T. Huber
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788733894
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How to build a movement to confront climate change The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

Dumping In Dixie

Dumping In Dixie PDF Author: Robert D. Bullard
Publisher: Avalon Publishing - (Westview Press)
ISBN: 0813344271
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
To be poor, working-class, or a person of color in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country’s environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental equity.