Human environments through history

Environmentalism: a political and social movement focused on protecting, restoring, and improving the natural environment.

Human societies through history have viewed the natural world in many ways: as a sacred space, a home for living things, or a source of essential resources. As societies grew more complex, people relied more heavily on their surroundings to support growing populations and new technologies. From small bands of foragers to farming villages to industrial societies, humans have reshaped their environments to meet their needs and wants. With advancing technology came an even greater capacity to alter those environments, and with it new challenges that prompted many to rethink humanity’s relationship with nature.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution dramatically accelerated this process. Powerful new technologies allowed industries to extract resources faster than nature could replace them, creating environmental pressures on an unprecedented scale. In response, networks of writers, scientists, and citizens began calling for a different way of understanding and protecting the natural world. Their efforts helped spark a movement that became known as environmentalism.

Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution

Romanticism: a European artistic and intellectual movement of the early nineteenth century, characterized by an emphasis on individual freedom from social conventions or political restraints, on human imagination, and on nature, usually in an idealized form

The roots of the modern environmental movement can be traced back to Romanticism, an intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Romantic writers and painters celebrated emotion, imagination, and the beauty and power of the natural world. Their works challenged the Enlightenment idea that nature existed mainly to be studied, measured, and controlled. Instead, Romantic thinkers emphasized nature’s spiritual value and its ability to inspire wonder. Their art and literature appealed mostly to educated and middle-class audiences as powerful reminders of what was being lost as industrial society expanded.

At the same time, the Industrial Revolution was rapidly increasing humanity’s ability to reshape the environment. Steel mills needed coal, electrical wire required copper, textile factories demanded cotton—nearly every new machine required more raw materials. The benefits of the Industrial Revolution came at a staggering environmental cost. In England’s industrial cities, the skies turned black with smoke, rivers stank with pollution, and life expectancy for the urban poor fell sharply—from about 40 years in 1700 to roughly 30 by 1850.

Romantic art helped people make sense of these changes. People saw once-vast forests disappearing and clean air and water turning foul, and they then wanted to protect and preserve these valuable resources. Britain’s growing middle class began forming conservation groups, and this loose network of activists began lobbying Britain’s Parliament to legislate environmental protections.

The environmental movement in the United States

Similarly, conservation groups began to form in the United States during the nineteenth century. A young Scottish immigrant named John Muir emerged as a leading voice in the early American environmental movement, advocating for the conservation of wilderness and the creation of a national park system. In 1872, Congress established Yellowstone as the first national park, and this movement ultimately led to the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

Conservation: the preservation of a resource, especially a natural resource such as soil, water, or forests, from loss, pollution, or waste

In the decades that followed, conservationism remained the dominant approach in the United States. The government continued to expand national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, while conservationists such as Aldo Leopold introduced new ideas about ecology, wilderness, and responsible land management. At the same time, rapid industrial growth after World War II created air and water pollution on a new scale.

By the early 1960s, a growing body of scientific research on pollution, pesticides, and industrial chemicals and the resulting public concern about them led to the rise of a new American environmental movement. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, exposed the dangers of pesticides like DDT, showing how chemical pollution threatened both wildlife and human health. Her work inspired other writers, scientists, and citizens to join the expanding environmental movement.

American environmentalism started with individuals like Muir and Carson, whose efforts convinced governments and politicians to take action, and continued in the decades that followed. In 1970, politicians and activists organized the first Earth Day to raise awareness and inspire people to take action to protect the planet. That same year, the United States established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to safeguard human health and the environment by enforcing laws and regulating pollution to ensure clean air, water, and land. Since its creation, however, the EPA has been at the center of the debate over how to balance environmental protection with economic growth. This debate continues today as policymakers, industries, and communities work to address the challenges of climate change while sustaining economic opportunities.

The international environmental movement

Since the 1970s, the environmental movement has expanded into a global effort. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1972 when the UN made its first formal declaration—the Stockholm Declaration—to protect the environment. This marked the beginning of coordinated international action on environmental issues.

Through the late 1970s and 1980s, several major environmental disasters heightened global awareness. In 1979, the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania raised serious concerns about the safety of nuclear energy. Just a few years later, in 1986, a catastrophic nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) released radioactive fallout that threatened communities across the Soviet Union and Europe.

Against this backdrop, international cooperation intensified. In 1987, UNEP enacted the Montreal Protocol, a legally binding treaty designed to limit and phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals that were destroying Earth’s ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol is, to date, the only international agreement that’s been ratified by every one of the 198 UN member countries and remains one of the most successful environmental agreements in history.

The next year, the UNEP formed a subgroup focused entirely on a new issue: climate change. Called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, this subgroup is made up of scientists and researchers who assess the impact of and possible responses to global warming, and create reports for policymakers. While the IPCC is about compiling and reporting knowledge on climate change, another group, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), is all about putting that knowledge into action. Every year, members of the UNFCC meet for a Conference of the Parties, or COP, to discuss new approaches for taking on climate change. In 2015, the COP meeting led to the Paris Agreement, which set the goal to reduce climate warming to well below 2°C—ideally 1.5°C.

Whether or not we keep warming to under 2°C, the Paris Agreement has been significant because it kicked off an unprecedented wave of climate action at the political, corporate, and individual levels. Many of the major climate victories of the last few years—the plummeting cost of renewable energy and batteries, major investments in innovative climate technologies—are thanks in part to the Paris Agreement. What’s more, in the past decade, youth-led movements like Fridays for Future and the Sunrise Movement have helped mobilize a new generation of climate leaders and activists.

Conclusion

You may have heard the saying, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Bioecologist Barry Commoner used it as one of his Four Laws of Ecology to remind us that every action in nature has a cost.

Take coal, for example. It can be burned to produce electricity—a necessity that millions of people around the world still lack reliable access to—and it lies in the ground seemingly free for the taking. Yet burning it pollutes the air and releases greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Do the environmental costs of pollution and climate change outweigh the economic benefits coal provides?

Almost every environmental challenge comes down to the same dilemma: how to balance human needs with the planet’s limits. The tension between economic growth and environmental protection remind us that, in nature, nothing is ever truly free—the cost may be hidden, at first, but eventually someone will pay.