The Green Movement

Environmental activism is the combined political force of people who take action to protect the environment. Not content with passive empathy for environmental problems, the green movement is inspired by proactive opportunities to bring about its vision of a better world.

Camisea pipeline scars rainforest © Amazon Watch

The institutional profile of environmental activism ranges from tiny single-issue campaign groups to global brand names. Activist membership groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, vigorously defend their political independence by relying on individual donations for their financial resources.

Spurred by ecological scares linked to nuclear technologies, toxic chemicals and overexploitation of natural resources, environmental activism first emerged as a widespread movement in the 1960s. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 is generally considered to be a key milestone.

Public understanding of the vulnerability of our environment has been transformed over the last fifty years. Activists can claim many successes, including the rescue of the ozone layer and reduction of acid rain. The language of sustainable development has entered mainstream politics and environmentalists now aspire to be a leading force in shaping international agreements.

It is largely accepted that these advances have not translated into any fundamental change in consumer lifestyles in wealthy countries. Environmental degradation continues at an alarming rate, brushing aside even the most powerful tools of international law, the UN Conventions on biodiversity and climate change.
Traditional Strategies

A wide range of traditional strategies and tools remains at the disposal of environmental activists in the search for democratic change. Petitions and letters to policy-makers or business polluters are the bedrock. Consumer boycotts of products associated with environmental abuse are extremely effective and greatly feared by the corporate sector.

Logging campaign, US © Rainforest Action Network

Membership groups also engage in protests, often involving visual stunts to capture media attention.

Where such efforts fail in their goals, some activist groups will resort to non-violent direct action or civil disobedience. Direct action is so-named because it often pursues the objective of the cause itself, such as the closure of a coal-fired power station. By its nature such activism may involve a breach in the law but is more likely to provoke media and public debate.

Many environmental campaigns stretch over a long period of time, involving NGO back office support in professional media work, scientific research, public education and legal advice. The 2010 European Union ban on the trade in illegal timber was the outcome of ten years of campaigning.

Having learned that negative messages about the fate of the planet can be counter-productive, environmental groups strive for positive solutions, often reinforced through partnership with businesses, governments, and financial institutions.

Activists are deeply ambivalent about relationships with the corporate sector, aware of the adverse impact of the powerful fossil fuel lobby on climate change legislation in the US and on European regulations for vehicle emissions.

Nevertheless, consumer product labelling is an effective approach and involves working with corporate retailers. Arrangements such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) trademark for sustainable timber products, or financial products branded as ethical investments, enable consumers to make environmentally friendly choices in their spending.
Social Media

_ © Peter Armstrong

The digital world brings campaign groups much closer to their supporters, gearing up participation in traditional activism and fundraising. As well as sending electronic communications to decision-makers, activists can now develop their own campaigning identities through the creation of blogs, videos and mapping data.

As youthful activist memberships increasingly organise their lives through popular social networking websites, no campaign group can afford to be without a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Each brings its own fresh opportunity to establish widening participation in green initiatives, with unparalleled outreach beyond traditional political and geographical barriers.

These tools were deployed with devastating effect by Greenpeace supporters in a successful 2010 campaign against Nestlé. Legal action by the company for copyright infringement in the Greenpeace YouTube video, Have a Break, unleashed a viral earthquake of opposition across the internet.

Social media have been put to work to synchronise actions across the world. Regular calendar slots are now reserved for Blog Action Day and Earth Hour. The 10/10/10 Global Work Party organised on 10th October 2010 by the climate change campaign group, 350.org, reported over 7,000 actions in 188 countries, a rare triumph for globalisation. CNN described the corresponding 2009 event as the “most widespread day of political activity in the planet’s history.”


Have a Break – the flagship video component of the Greenpeace campaign against Nestlé’s destruction of the rainforest habitat of the orang-utan.
Southern Voices

Environmental activism is gradually emerging in developing countries. There has been high profile publicity for Wangari Maathai’s work with the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and for Marc Ona Essangui, one of the winners of the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize, for his defence of protected areas in the Congo Basin Rainforest.

Wangari Maathai © Martin Rowe / Women Thrive Worldwide

However, the majority of activists in the poorest countries face obstacles out of all proportion to their western counterparts.

Low or non-existent bandwidth denies ease of communication and research. The right to public assembly cannot be taken for granted in many developing countries, nor even the registration of non-governmental pressure groups. Typically lacking financial muscle and awareness of their rights, NGOs all too often face prosecution by corrupt governments and businesses.

Above all, southern activists will be acutely aware that the fight for the environment may conflict with the interests of poverty reduction and human rights. For example, opposition to genetically modified crops is far from straightforward in countries faced with chronic food insecurity.

The converse is also true. Sustainable livelihoods depend on a stable environment. The international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, was founded to stand up for the rights of small farmers against global agri-business. As environmental problems increasingly trouble these farmers, the movement has established an activist presence at global negotiations on biodiversity and climate change.

The injection of southern voices into multilateral negotiations on these and other environmental issues is constrained by the complexity involved. Appropriate legal and scientific expertise is more readily available to well funded northern groups.


One man in Africa challenges an illegal contract between his government and the China Development Corporation. Marc Ona Essangui was a 2009 winner of the Goldman Prize.
China and India

Rapid industrialisation presents both China and India with severe environmental problems. But the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people remain desperately in need of yet more benefits of industrialisation.

India has many highly respected and long established environmental campaign groups, such as Toxics Link and Centre for Science and Environment. Greenpeace India campaigns across the full range of issues with which it is associated internationally.

Activists in India have grounds for cautious optimism in the person of Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Environment and Forests. Respected for his empathy with environmental concerns, the Minister may have influenced a sequence of success stories for campaigners, notably the refusal of permission for Vedanta to develop a bauxite mine on tribal lands in Orissa.

Chinese citizens protesting © Asia America Initiative

In China there are surprising signs of tolerance of environmental activists, certainly far more so than human rights campaigners. There are believed to be over 2,000 environmental NGOs capable of mounting protest and legal challenge. They boast a track record of some success in prompting environmental regulations, even within the prevailing limits of political criticism.

There is speculation that the Chinese government welcomes a degree of local activism to compensate for its own difficulties in preventing municipal authority collusion with polluting industries. The Green Long March initiative, dating from 2007, is an example of state-sponsored activism in which students are encouraged to engage in environmental projects.
Climate Change

The looming threat of climate change and its disproportionate impact on poor countries have recalibrated the scale and profile of environmental activism. Agencies historically engaged only in global poverty reduction or human rights have introduced their supporters to climate change campaigns and joined global environmental networks.

G8 Edinburgh 2005 © Peter Armstrong

Bolstered by the impact of Al Gore's powerpoint presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, these combined forces provoked new attitudes towards climate change from governments, corporations and municipal authorities. In 2008 a grassroots campaign led by Friends of the Earth in the UK persuaded the government to become the first to pass landmark legislation committing the country to 80% emissions reductions by 2050.

The toothless outcome of the 2009 UN Copenhagen climate change conference therefore represented a major setback from which the green movement has yet to recover. Activists may now drift away from the seemingly doomed UN negotiations. Popular targets now include specific sources of carbon pollution such as the inefficient extraction of oil from tar sands in Canada.

Nevertheless, activists must face up to their failure to silence the voice of climate scepticism. This has enjoyed a revival in light of the ambiguous contents of emails hacked from UK climate scientists at the University of East Anglia.

The economic recession has done no favours to the movement. And the sheer weight of funding provided by the corporate fossil fuel lobby continues to distort the balance of public debate.

This is especially true in the US where the proportion of the population that considers global warming to be a very serious problem has been declining, down to 32% in an October 2010 poll. Not even the climate disasters in Pakistan and Russia, nor the summer melting of the Arctic Ocean, has shifted public opinion. The prospect of President Obama’s promised climate change legislation has evaporated.

Prior to the Copenhagen conference, the Maldives government held an underwater cabinet meeting, gaining widespread media coverage. This unprecedented instance of a government resorting to direct action in protest against its peers may come to haunt the current generation of environmental activists. They will be judged by the long term stability of the climate.


Bill McKibben is deeply moved by the global grassroots response to the dream of 350.org to find creative ways of communicating the importance of capping atmospheric carbon dioxide, from Dreamfish.
The New Decade

Time is running out for the radical steps necessary to shore up the planet against the various ecological tipping points that lie in wait. The environmental movement in richer countries needs to ask tough questions about why it has failed to dampen all-powerful consumerism.

One suggestion is that activists should focus more on questioning the values that underpin this prevailing culture. Encouraging people to travel less often and more slowly may never succeed in a society where time equates with earnings. If time could be associated more with strengthening family ties and personal fulfilment, the message of “slow” resource consumption might gain traction.

Consumer trolley (Greenpeace) © Greenpeace International

The second challenge for environmental activists is to understand that being green is not enough. The planet will survive almost any degree of climate change but human beings may not be so fortunate.

The fight against global warming, and other ecological dislocation, is therefore more about human rights than the traditional concerns of environmentalists. Much could be learned from community activists in poor countries where the fate of the land is tied more closely with the fate of their people.

This perspective has a champion in President Evo Morales of Bolivia. He suggests that our current grounding in human rights offers insufficient protection to humanity. The right to food in international law is irrelevant if we remain compulsive polluters of our air, soil and water.

Morales proposes a universal declaration of earth rights to plug this gap. Earth laws enforced by an international tribunal would bring environmental offenders to account. Oxfam has taken up this baton in the context of climate change by organising experimental people’s tribunals in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. The question of accountability for the impact of global warming is explored.

There are no easy answers to the challenge of the forthcoming decade. The recent appointments of Kumi Naidoo and Salil Shetty as the respective heads of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International are potentially significant. As both have recently led poverty reduction campaigns, we may see environmental activism blending into the more powerful concept of global justice.


Art and Environmental Activism? – a 2009 exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London explored how radical artwork, such as guerrilla gardening, might broaden the concept of environmental activism.