ABSTRACT
Climate change. Deforestation. Acid rain. Species loss. Ozone depletion. Pesticide poisoning. Genetically modified food. These are the issues that invigorated political life in the late twentieth century and will continue to do so in the twenty-first. This is an extraordinary circumstance and it has happened extraordinarily quickly. Even thirty years ago, the development of a political movement around these issues would have been unimaginable. Knowledge of some of them – pesticide poisoning, for example – was restricted to a few scientists and even fewer social commentators, and there was no knowledge at all of others, such as global warming. Now it would be hard to find anyone in the ‘developed’ world who has never heard of these environmental problems, and probably even harder to find anyone in the ‘developing’ world who would not accept that environmental decay was either a cause or a symptom of their social, political and economic difficulties. Upon this realization, in both the North and the South, a vibrant environmental movement has been built – a movement which now has an influential presence both in civil society and in the more formal political world of parliamentary politics.
