Hamblin conclusion
Example of the anti-capitalist branch
of the environmental movement
science was deeply integrated in the cold war
earth surveillance started for military purposes but
became crucial for science
military surveillance and funding
encouraged science to grow in particular
directions (and not others)
Cold war both led to the idea that humans could
fundamentally change world systems
and also generated catastrophe theory fatigue
as well as negative views of international treaties
and regulation as being not capitalist enough
(because the Soviet Union used them for propaganda)
cold war patterns shaped the politics of
environmental issues
- liberals
adopted environmental issues, made it a core political
issue
- because
of their political bias towards big government,
they focused on regulatory solutions
- conservative
environmentalism would want to preserve the
natural world, for example for hunting
- can
capitalism solve these problems? is the best
solution to set up market mechanisms? makes
possible the creativity of capitalism
- a
good number of environmentalists are socialists
- cold
war pattern of capitalism vs. socialism, that habitual
pattern of argument continued with socialism associated
with environmentalism
- propaganda
patterns distorted the way people saw
environmental issues after the cold war
Al Gore took the approach that saving the
environment would be our new common focus after the
end of the cold war
The cold war led to a lot of new scientific
understanding made it possible to imagine destroying
the world
but catastrophic arguments are bad strategy
Eugene Odum
- professor at University of Georgia
- wrote the very first textbook on ecology in
1953
- funded by the Atomic Energy Commission to do
research at the Savannah River Site
- forest
succession
- radioactive
tracers
