ABSTRACT
For most of us, even the committed activist, the Green movement has no history. Worries about environmental destruction seem very modern. Acid rain, the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion are concerns of the last twenty years, especially of the last four or five. Our great-grandparents never had to worry about nuclear waste. Prior to Hiroshima and Nagaski, a Green movement would, in one sense, have been impossible. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the team that unleashed the power of the atom, watched the first test detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, first with awe and then with mounting horror. He recalled a phrase from the Hindu epic, the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds’ (Worster 1991:339). The verse and its implications echo through the years since. In a dozen ways, or more, we can now destroy life on a world-wide scale. Global warming, degraded seas, an ever rising tide of lowlevel radiation, species loss, high-technology warfare, the risks of biotechnology and even electromagnetic pollution, all come to mind as potentially terminal threats to Planet Earth. The contemporary Green movement was born in response to the feeling that we have ‘become death’.
