This is more true than ever today...

This is more true than ever today, as the government of the United States of America, the world’s number one polluter, holds ever more firmly to a Pollyanna-esque notion that environmental concerns are overstated and trumped by the unrivaled importance of permanent economic growth.

It seems significant that in March 2005, the publication of the so-called “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment”[^6] in which a five-year study by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries concluded that human activities have severely compromised two-thirds of the earth’s ecosystems in only the past fifty years, made front page headlines in Europe and elsewhere in the world but was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media in the US.[^7] The US is the world’s richest country, and environmental degradation is typically less worrisome to the rich who can mostly shield themselves from its effects, than it is to the poor who suffer from environmental problems most immediately and most severely.

In the developing world the environmental crisis if often experienced most profoundly by rural women, who are the primary users of natural resources (and whose husbands may quite disconnected by comparison, away working in urban factories). At the same time rural women tend to be the most disempowered members of traditional societies, thus the least able to react to the crisis.

Ironically the United States, while remaining the world’s major agent of environmental destruction as well as the leading proponent of unsustainable economic policies and practices, is also the original home of environmentalism in its modern sense. Environmental consciousness, in its contemporary form, emerged in the late nineteenth century among Americans such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Revisionist philosophies which placed humans within and not above natural systems were articulated by Americans such as Aldo Leopold in the 1940s and Edward Abbey in the 1970s. Contemporary environmentalism, as exported to the rest of the world, is thus largely an American product. This point has not gone unnoticed by environmentalists elsewhere.

In a 1989 article in the US-based journal Environmental Ethics , Indian sociologist Ramachandra Guha argued that whatever its inherent merits, an environmentalism derived within the particular history and culture of North America cannot simply be applied as a one-size-fits-all model to the rest of the world.