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Environmentalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2023
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In the mid-twentieth century, the term environmentalism became commonly used to refer to efforts to protect the natural environment from human abuse and disrespect. Attitudes to safeguarding the environment, however, had already been taking shape for some time, based on interpretive practices that affirmed the values, needs, and desires of some people and not others, and rarely those of nonhuman animals. Changing perceptions of species, race, gender, class, and wealth influenced who had the privilege, knowledge, and opportunity to recognize abuses of nature, envision environmentalist possibilities, and act on them. Philip P. Morgan observes, for example, in a study of Caribbean ecology across centuries, that global capitalism, extractivism, and ecological dispossession have skewed which parts of the human population and the natural world have been recognized as worthy of attention and the forms this attention has taken.
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References
Notes
1. Morgan, Philip D., “Introduction,” in Sea and Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean, edited by Morgan, Philip D., McNeill, J. R., Mulcahey, Matthew, and Schwartz, Stuart B. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The intersections of colonial and environmental politics are explored from multiple angles in DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and Handley, George, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hensley, Nathan K. and Steer, Philip, eds., Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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6. Throughout the past century, allowing nonhuman elements of nature rights or personhood has been an important field of discussion—environmentally, philosophically, and legally. See, for example, Salt, Henry, Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892; Clarks Summit, PA: Society for Animal Rights, 1980)Google Scholar; Stone, Christopher, “Should Trees Have Standing?—Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45 (1972): 450–501Google Scholar; and Rawson, Ariel and Mansfield, Becky, “Producing Juridical Knowledge: ‘Rights of Nature’ or the Naturalization of Rights?” Nature and Space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 99 – 119Google Scholar.
7. John Clare, “The Lament of Swordy Well” (1824 – 32), in Major Works, edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell, 147–52, lines 41–44 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
8. Salt, Animals’ Rights, 21.
9. Clare, “Swordy Well,” lines 193 – 96.
10. “Swaddywell,” Langdyke Countryside Trust, accessed Oct. 25, 2022, https://langdyke.org.uk/welcome-to-langdyke-countyside-trust/lct-reserves/swaddywell.