Radioactive leaks at Windscale and Three Mile Island; the Amoco Cadiz oil spill off Brittany and the North Sea oil slick; the toxic dioxin leak in Italy: the 1970s saw one ecological disaster after another, giving rise to a new and urgent awareness of the state of the Earth. Environmentalism became an issue.
In 1971 Greenpeace was formed by two Americans and a Canadian, campaigning against the proposed underground testing of nuclear bombs on the remote Alaskan island of Amchitka. Greenpeace went on to become a worldwide organisation, protesting against pollution, the decimation of the rain forest, and the whaling industry, often using spectacular tactics of confrontation to attract media attention. Organisations such as the Friends of the Earth in Britain began to demonstrate against the wasting of the Earth's resources, calling for recycling.
In 1973, German economist Ernst Schumacher turned traditional big business ideas on their head in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. He argued that nations should stop seeking economic growth through a few energy-intensive industries which harmed the environment, and concentrate instead on small, local businesses.
American biologist Barry Commoner, in his book The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology (1971), argued that neither population nor affluence were to blame for "the environmental crisis". He said the problem stemmed from post-war technologies that produce products which are not part of natural ecological cycles, such as non-degradable detergents instead of soap, and nylon instead of wool or cotton. The cause of this shift into wasteful technology was the desire for short-term profits in private industry. He suggested integrating future technology into an ecological cycle harmonious with nature: "Nothing can survive on the Earth unless it is a co-operative part of a larger, global whole."
In 1979, British scientist James Lovelock proposed the Gaia Theory: that the Earth is a single, living organism, and that all life is linked together. He suggested Earth is therefore both self-regulating and self-organising, just like any other organism, and thus can cope with temporary changes like the greenhouse effect (how mankind, especially those living in low-lying countries, will cope with the melting of the polar icecaps is another matter).
The Green Party was established in West Germany in 1980 and devoted primarily to ecological concerns. Although green politics became institutionalised, environmental disasters continued to occur in the 1980s: the chemical leak at Bhopal in India that killed 2,000; the horror of the radioactive leak at Chernobyl. And in 1985 French secret agents sank the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, to prevent its crew protesting against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
Localised resistance remained strong: in 1982 women in Greenham Common in Britain started a dogged vigil in protest against the planned siting of US cruise missiles in the country.
In 1987, more than 70 nations agreed to reduce CFCs to decrease damage to the ozone layer. The US and USSR signed a pact to cut their nuclear arsenals in half. At the 1992 UN Summit on the Environment in Rio there was recognition of the importance of protecting the environment on a global level, but due to a general reluctance to curb industrial growth, very little direct action ensued to translate hopes for a greener future into reality.
