Sale, Kirkpatrick
. . . the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, (Signed into law on January 1, 1970, by a reluctant Richard Nixon . . . actually predated Earth Day but gained its support from the same forces.) This sweeping law created the enormous Environmental Protection Agency - very soon to become the largest regulatory body, in both people and budget, ever established by the government - which consolidated responsibility for enforcing and shaping the myriad of federal laws and regulations passed over the years, and a Presidential Council on Environmental Quality, which was assigned to oversee the nation's environmental health and prepare an annual report. The Green Revolution, 1993.
Environmental writer and lecturer. Among his books are Dwellers in the Land, The Conquest of Paradise, and Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy.
To Rachel Carson and those like her working in the hope that the tragic prophecy of Silent Spring does not come true: "To Albert Schweitzer, who said, 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.'" Ibid.
. . . the passage in 1973 of the Endangered Species Act , , , gave the Fish and Wildlife Service power to determine which animal and plant species were threatened with extinction (and how severely so) and to take certain modest measures for their protection and restoration; the rationale was that such species have "aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people," about as anthropocentric a justification as a wilderness act could have. Ibid.
Deep Ecology, originally formulated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the seventies, was brought to the United States primarily by George Sessions and sociologist Bill DeVall. who co-authored its first popular account in 1984. Ibid.
Ecofeminism, a synergistic blend of sixties-style feminism with eighties-style ecology, placed its emphasis on the connections between the domination and exploitation of women and the domination and exploitation of nature, both seen as products of a male-dominated society. Ibid.
The Gaia hypothesis, formulated by British scientist James Lovelock in a small book in 1979, suggested that because the earth was apparently so regulated as to maintain its temperature, its atmosphere, and its hydrosphere with extraordinary precision for millions of years, it could in fact be thought of as a living organism Ibid.
Earth First! the more or less organized expression of the activist side of the new radicalism, was started by Dave Foreman and a handful of other disillusioned operatives from mainstream environmentalism around a campfire in 1980. Ibid.
The promise of environmentalism is that of a society which runs on a safe, sustainable, and democratic use of its resources. The task for environmentalists now is to find or invent the means&endash;economic, technical, and political&endash; to transform this society into that one. Ibid.