ABSTRACT
Is there a European environmental movement? This might seem a curious question to be asking at this stage of the histories of both Europe and environmentalism. There are, after all, many reasons to suppose that environmentalism has now produced a mature social movement. Indeed, one of the arguments advanced in recent years is that it is now so mature, has been so successfully institutionalized, and is now so embedded in ‘constructive’ relationships with governments and corporations that it is no longer a social movement at all. I do not intend here to discuss such arguments at length. Suffice it to say that I disagree with them, principally because to focus upon their institutionalization is to overlook the extent to which even relatively institutionalized environmental organizations are still in conflict with and present a quite fundamental challenge to the power structures of increasingly globalized capitalism, and because it is also to overlook the new radical environmentalist groups that have arisen during the last decade or two (Rootes 2003b).
