![]() By contrast, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything spotlights the cosmetic function of corporate support for a greener neoliberalism-gainsaid by globalization’s world-spanning production chains and the industrialization of China. ![]() Ramachandra Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History identified an ‘environmentalism of the poor’: local protests against toxic dumping or multi-national extractivism, from the Niger Delta to the Dakota hills. Population control was a major theme for environmentally minded US developmentalists in the Cold War era, anti-nuclear movements and the fate of the rain-forest for eighties Greens. In the inter-war period, water shortages called forth large-scale eco-tech solutions. ![]() In the late 19th century, wilderness was the dominant theme in the US, sanitation in the UK, pollution in Germany, forestry protection in Japan life-style movements often attracted greater interest than legislation. Historically, too, green thinking has oscillated between different emphases. In this context, global environmental strategies inevitably acquire a political-economic dimension. As Joachim Radkau put it in Nature and Power, glut has replaced scarcity as humanity’s main danger. Is advanced-industrial capitalism capable of finding solutions for the environmental devastation it causes? Undeniable socio-economic achievements in the past half-century-feeding and clothing a world population that has doubled since 1970 plummeting malnutrition, rising living-standards, longer life-spans-have come at a price of poisoned rivers and plastic-choked oceans, agrarian monocultures and felled forests, accelerated resource extraction and-for many, most alarming-apparent alteration in climate patterns.
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