ABSTRACT
W.B.Yeats, writing about the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland, once proclaimed that “a terrible beauty is born.” A similar phrase can describe how elaborations of environmental crisis have expanded over the last several decades, despite the concerted attempts chronicled above to deny
and discredit them. A terrible heterogeneity has appeared. Environmental crisis, already seen as diversified and multiform by many in the 1970s, has steadily assumed a striking new variety and multiplicity. Even a short list of current environmental crises is of necessity quite long. At the least it must include an energy (and also other resources) crisis; a multifactoral waste crisis; an open space crisis; a wetlands crisis; a food production crisis; a crop diversity crisis; a forest crisis; a soils crisis; an ocean crisis; a freshwater crisis; a biodiversity crisis; an acid rain crisis; an ozone hole crisis; a global warming crisis; an environmental toxification crisis; a global disease crisis; a population crisis; and a growth or development crisis. Many of these individual crises themselves are plural. Problems with wastes, for example, include garbage, sewage, and toxic wastes-and the latter of these problems breaks down further into wastes from agricultural chemicals and fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and nuclear energy and weapons, items often treated as separate crises; soil crisis includes loss of arable soil, runaway development, factory farming, salinization and desertification, radically different problems requiring radically different action; and ocean crisis includes overfishing, warming temperatures, dieback of coral reefs, and massive eutrophication and pollution, again very different problems requiring different forms of action.
