Deforestation is proving hard to counter, despite public concern (Image: Eduardo Martino)

Far from being anti-science, environmentalism is the future in a world of finite resources and global perils, concludes Joachim Radkau in The Age of Ecology

IT IS a new Enlightenment, a lodestar for our intellectual and political life in the 21st century. Far from being romantic, anti-science and anti-progress, environmentalism is the future in a world of finite resources and global perils. So concludes The Age of Ecology, a pioneering and highly readable history. Reversing 18th-century reductionism, the fundamental insight of this brand of environmentalism is that “everything is connected to everything else”, a phrase popularised by 1970s US ecologist Barry Commoner.

The key insight of this environmentalism is that everything is connected to everything else


As befits this new age, author Joachim Radkau is no dispassionate outsider. He admits at the start that since his youth he felt ecology was his movement. But nor is he a firebrand or doomsayer, and his range and scholarship are impressive.

His narrative starts with diarist John Evelyn’s diatribes against 17th-century London smogs, and the French Romantic painter Henri Rousseau’s evocations of nature as a wild paradise. He tracks 19th-century concerns that nature needed protection, leading to the invention of national parks and early green lifestyle movements such as vegetarianism. And he notes the 20th-century cult of wilderness and the importance of the 1930s American dust bowl, where a “desert on the march” became a symbol of emerging global environmental perils.

But the core of his history is the rise of environmental activism in the past half century. In particular, he charts how this social and ideological movement has been tightly linked to concerns about the fate of the planet. These were raised by ecologists such as Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 bestseller Population Bomb, Garrett Hardin in his hugely influential paper “The Tragedy of the Commons”, published in the journal Science in the same year, and the writings of E. O. Wilson and others on the demise of tropical rainforests and the importance of the newly minted concept of biodiversity.

Radkau isn’t afraid to put individuals at the forefront, quoting German sociologist Max Weber that “charisma” is a big part of history. The result is that this book is also a tour of ecology’s hall of fame – of whom a large number are women, striking for the times.

Championed here are biologist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring and the power behind modern concerns about “invisible” chemical pollutants, and Kenya’s tree-planting Nobel prizewinner Wangari Maathai.

Then there are primatologists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, who revolutionised ideas about our nearest relatives, chimps and gorillas. Jane Jacobs deserves her place, too, through her 1961 book The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, which tore up modernist ideas about the urban environment. And let’s not forget Petra Kelly, the fiery but chaotic leader of the German Green Party, and Indian physicist Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s foremost eco-feminists.

Radkau logs many victories when science and activism came together. Pride of place goes to the discovery of the ozone hole, its swift attribution to CFCs, and how angst about skin cancer from UV radiation seeping through prompted global treaty-writing.

True believers

There are forgotten successes, too, like getting lead removed from petrol in most countries. But despite scientific and public concern, halting the triple perils of deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss have proved a great deal harder.

Sometimes greens have been their own worst enemies. Radkau takes on “anomalous” factions – how he describes, among others, the violent British animal liberation movement of the late 20th century, or the Greenpeace renegade Paul Watson’s escapades ramming Japanese whalers with his own concrete-coated vessel, the Sea Shepherd. Watson is driven by “love and hate, not ecology and environmental politics”, writes Radkau.

Instead, he wants to see a broad environmental church, one that is underpinned by proper science. He rails against “monomaniac passions”: targets include those who would accept as true environmentalists “only those for whom the undisturbed mating of toads is more important than a new express train line”. He also takes aim at “climate determinists” who have disabled environmental campaigns in other areas, such as opposition to nuclear power and large dams. Low-carbon energy, he says, doesn’t make these power sources worthy of green support.

Sometimes, like many German greens, Radkau appears to hate anything nuclear. From Hiroshima through Chernobyl to Fukushima, atom-splitting is his number one enemy. Even so, he reflects well the environmental movement’s diversity, in its causes and intellectual approaches. Jostling for space in the 500-plus pages is everything from deep ecology and guerrilla gardening to water wars and the joys of cycling.

The new Green Enlightenment, he concludes, isn’t a creed. It is a “patchwork affair, with no grand definitive solutions”. But it is a major intellectual, spiritual and ideological calling that is taking over our lives. Its disparate forms draw on a common concern for the future and a common holistic approach to the world. It is, he says, “the only intellectual force giving context to the new global horizons”. For good or ill, we are living in the age of ecology.

The Age of Ecology Joachim Radkau Polity

This article appeared in print under the headline “Following new paths”