David Peat

Re-envisioning the Planet 157Amazon rain forests is not an internal matter for the Brazilian governmentbut an issue vital to the climate of the entire world. The choice ofa family car or the act of switching on an air conditioner is no longer amatter of purely personal choice. It is on issues like these that the environmentalmovement takes its stand.EnvironmentalismIn the mid nineteenth century only a small percentage of Americanslived in cities. Today the figure is around 50%. It is really only whenpeople leave the countryside for a world of streets, high-rises, and shoppingcenters that they develop a nostalgic conception of an untouchedworld called “nature.” For farmers and peasants, nature is something tocontend with, something ever present. Nature feeds and nurtures, exhaustsand threatens.While it is true that William Wordsworth once wrote a sonnet deploringa railway planned to run though the Lake District of the northwestof England, country people do not generally romanticize theirenvironment. To the citizens of our modern industrial world, however,nature represents an ideal, something “out there” that should remainforever pristine and uncontaminated. And, when we began to realizethat that dream of lakes and woods, of birds and flowers was seriouslyat risk, the movement called environmentalism was born.The word “environment” itself was not really used until the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. It derived from earlier words like“environ” and “environing,” terms reserved for notions of the surroundingand encompassing. The idea that an environment was a sortof entity, and that this environment could be at risk from humanprogress, only occurred to people in the mid twentieth century. Biologistsunderstood the complex interlocking of natural systems, but thereal interest in environmental issues dates from Rachel Carson’s landmarkbook Silent Spring (1962), in which she pointed out the dangersof indiscriminate use of pesticides. Suddenly people realized that theidea of pollution did not apply simply to one lake or patch of woods,but to the entire environment. Ironically, the use of science and tech-