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Study the following extract from the text Environmental problems and management by Andrew Jordan

and Tim O’Riordan (1999), and highlight the reference, make notes, organize it and write a summary.

Environmental problems and management

The origins of environmental policy

Recognition of the need to both transform and adjust to nature is a fundamental aspect of the human

condition. While we may think of “the environment” as a modern political issue that gained popular

appeal in the 1960s, the roots of environmentalist thinking stretch back far into the past (O’Riordan,

1976). The natural environment provides humanity with the material resources for economic growth

and consumer satisfaction. But throughout history there have always been social critics and

philosophers who have felt that humans also need nature for spiritual nourishment and aesthetic

satisfaction. John Muir, the redoubtable founder the Sierra Club in the USA, felt that without wild

places to go to humanity was lost:

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to

mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations

are fountains not only of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the

stupefying effects of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they

can to mix their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease

(quoted in Pepper, 1984, p.33).

Environmental protection is justified in remarkably similar terms today. What is dramatically different

is the extent of popular concern. The critical question which needs to be asked is why did modern

environmentalism blossom as a broad social movement spanning different continents in the late 1960s

and not before? There is strong evidence that environmental problems like acidification and pesticide

pollution materially worsened and became more widespread in the public mind in the 1960s and

1970s. The American sociologist Ronald Inglehart (1977), however, believes that we also have to look

to society for an explanation. On the basis of careful and intensive public opinion analysis, he argues

that modern environmentalism is the visible expression of a set of “new political” values held by a

generation of post-materialists” raised in the wealthy welfare states of the West. This liberated class

no longer had to toil to supply their material needs and set out to satisfy what the psychologist

Maslow (1970) terms its “higher order” requirements like peace, tranquility, intellectual and aesthetic

satisfaction this was surely a “post-materialist” sensibility, but at first it was confined to a vociferous

minority that tried to push their values onto the majority who steadfastly regarded themselves more

as consumers than as citizens.

Other commentators, however, highlight the tendency for environmental concern to exhibit a cyclical

pattern over time, with particularly pronounced peaks in the late 1960s and late 1980s. Closer

scrutiny reveals the these short-term “pulses” coincided with periods of economic growth and social

instability, which at first blush seems consistent with Inglehart’s thesis. Other sociologists have also

observed that materially richer and better educated sections of society tend to give much higher

priority to environmental protection than poorer ones, with the highest rates among those working in

the “non-productive” sectors of the economy, such as education, health and social care (Cotgrove &

Duff, 1980). Conversely, concern tends to tail off during periods of economic recession (Downs, 1972),

and is not normally as pronounced in poorer sections of Western society or in developing countries.

The birth of the modern environmental movement in the late 1960s certainly coincided with a period

of economic prosperity and societal introspection. Whether this led to or was caused by the

accumulating evidence of environmental decay is open to interpretation.