Asia Pacific Relations and the Globalization of the Environment

Abstract

The phenomenon we now know as “environmentalism” emerged in the postwar period as a global movement and philosophical framework for rethinking humankind’s relationships with its surroundings. The rise of environmentalism was both triggered by, and in turn contributed to, the increasing pace of globalization. A multitude of factors converged to help foster the almost simultaneous emergence of environmental movements across the world in the years around 1970. On one hand, technological advancement had endowed humankind with the ability to reshape its environment with unprecedented scale and speed, and environmental problems that had previously seemed local increasingly began to take on regional, transnational, and even global dimensions. At the same time, scientific advancement shed new light on the fragility of ecosystems and their vulnerability to man-made pollutants. On the other hand, the rise of new visual media, especially television, made the world seem like a much smaller, and shared, space, and citizens around the world began to demonstrate much greater interest in events far from their local environments. Even the Moon landings contributed to growing environmental consciousness by providing photographs of Earth from the Moon, offering up the new perspective of the world as a tiny, fragile blue marble in a vast, lifeless void. In addition, the years around 1970 also coincided with both the emergence of large, grassroots transnational nongovernmental organizations, as well as stateless, truly multinational corporations who in their ceaseless quest for profits were no longer beholden or accountable to local communities or even individual nations; the former provided the means to create a new type of global movement, while the latter provided the most convenient targets in opposition to which such a movement might coalesce.