‘Green waves’ and globalization: A Nordic view on environmental justice

Abstract

This article argues that the dominating interpretations of Western environmentalism have broadly reached a uniform shape. Only recently has this unification met profound criticism. In many ways this critical turn is linked to the emergence of new socio-environmental and post-environmental approaches, which share their intellectual background with multicultural and post-colonial views in the academic world and beyond. However, the protagonists of this intellectual renewal have met difficulties in locating themselves in relation to the general contested reconfiguration of environmental challenges. Whereas several of the pioneers of environmentalism, such as George Perkins Marsh and Carl Ortwin Sauer, were famous for their multilingual skills, the young critical generation is largely satisfied with the rapid anglophonization of the ‘environmental order’. Paradoxically, the critical environmentalists inspired by multiculturalism therefore have appeared in their practical scholarship as key promoters of the harmonization of environmental thinking. This article traces some alternative Nordic formulations of environmentalism. Particular attention is paid to the historical emergence of environmental justice concerns – which are regarded here as the most promising critical trends to ‘democratize’ the unified constitution of Western environmentalism.

Keywords:

• anglophonic globalization
• environmental justice
• Nordic socio-environmentalism
• waves of greening

Notes

1. The ‘Seattle activists’ is one label for those civic concerns and initiatives (against the tightening global governance of transnational corporations and agencies) that were initially introduced to broader publicity in connection with the Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, November–December 1999.

2. The longest of the ‘environmental waves’ (of which we have written documents) was launched by pre-Socratic philosophers in Ancient Greece. Many of the ‘classics’ of modern environmentalism refer to this early history. For example, G.P. Marsh (1964 [1864]), Clarence J. Glacken (1967), Max Oelschlager (1991), and Simon Schama (1995) elaborate on these roots (from different angles). The contours of the later versions of environmentalism owe much to these roots, as Glacken (1967, vii) convincingly emphasizes. However, the ‘ancient horizon’ is beyond the scope of this article, which mainly concentrates on the critical assessment of modern environmentalism.

3. The US Environmental Justice Movement was initiated in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina (USA) as a result of demonstrations against toxic waste dumping near a neighbourhood of coloured people. The movement emphasized from the beginning that environmental crises cannot be solved without unravelling the practices maintaining societal and cultural injustices. Many of the traditional environmental organizations, such as Earth First!, Sierra Club, and National Wildlife Federation, in particular, have been targeted by this critique (Harvey 1996, Low & Gleeson 1998, Proctor 1998, Lohman 2002).