Search

While considerable attention has been devoted to the repertoires of social movements, we know considerably less about how the repertoires of industry groups evolve as those industries face movement-driven contention. This is particularly important for environmental movements, which regularly target industries seen as contributing to environmental harms and risks. Focusing on contention surrounding hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), we compare the repertoires of the two central industry associations promoting fracking in the Marcellus Shale region of the United States: one that is more transgressive and likely to counter-attack activists (Energy in Depth) and one that is more conventional and likely to tout the industry's economic benefits (Marcellus Shale Coalition). We examine the tone and topical content of each of these industry groups' communications between 2009 and 2019. We examine a number of specific features of industry groups' communications: whether they use a more positive or negative tone, and the extent to which their communications address activism, government regulation, jobs/economy, and climate change. We find that the more transgressive association focuses far more directly on countering activism, both in the timing and content of communications. Both engage with government roughly evenly, and each engages with the politics of climate change in unique ways. We develop insights for our understanding of how targets strategically respond to environmental activism, and how industry groups develop a meta-level division of labor to engage multiple audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Art is the property of Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher Ltd. co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison's theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a 'critical community' within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study of the emergent U.S. wind energy sector, 1978--1992, this paper examines how large-scale social movements external to an industry can influence the creation of new market opportunities and hence encourage entrepreneurship. We theorize that through the construction and propagation of cognitive frameworks, norms, values, and regulatory structures, and by offering a preexisting social structure, social movement organizations influence whether entrepreneurs attempt to start ventures in emerging sectors. We find that the direct and indirect effects of social resources (e.g., environmental groups) had a larger impact on entrepreneurial activity in this sector than the availability of natural resources such as land with high-quality wind. Greater numbers of environmental movement organization members increased nascent entrepreneurial activity, and this effect was mediated by favorable state regulatory policy. Greater membership numbers also enhanced the effects of important natural resources, market conditions, and skilled human capital on entrepreneurial activity. Taken together, these results have important implications for the study of social movements, entrepreneurship, and institutional theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study measured changes in the constituency of an organizational field centered around the issue of corporate environmentalism in the period 1960-93, correlating those changes with the institutions adopted by the U.S. chemical industry to interpret the issue. The article develops the ideas that fields form around issues, not markets or technologies; within fields, competing institutions may simultaneously exist; as institutions evolve, connections between their regulative, normative, and cognitive aspects arise; and field-level analyses can reveal the cultural and institutional origins of organizational impacts on the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite opposition from social movements, the animal agriculture industry has largely succeeded in averting serious challenges to its basic business practices. This outcome reflects not only the industry's political and economic clout, but also divisions among the industry's opponents and the difficulties that their proposed solutions pose for consumers. Albert Hirschman argues that those dissatisfied with a product or organization have three options: exit, voice, and loyalty. We argue that "voice," the public expression of protest, has been fractured by disagreement over ultimate goals and the proper form of "exit": substitution or abstention. Both forms of exit are difficult for the consumer. The default response is therefore "loyalty": continued consumption. This loyalty is based not on ignorance or acceptance of the industry's shortcomings, but on socially organized denial of the evidence and its implications. Our methodology is a "qualitative metasynthesis" of previous scholarly analyses of the primary social movements involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research extends existing scholarship on the environmental movement by examining different groups of participants, building on the distinctions between public and private modes of engagement. The article uses data from the 2010 United States General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme to first conduct a latent class analysis to explore the existence of different classes of participants, and then presents a multinomial logit model to examine factors that affect class membership. The study finds there are four classes in the analysis of the environmental movement: a group of non-participators, a group that engages primarily in more organizationally-based environmental movement activities, a group that engages in green lifestyle activities, and a group that engages in both types of activities, but only at a high-intensity level. The study also finds that there are distinct differences in the composition of each group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the field of green criminology, scant attention has been paid to prison ecology, or the unique characteristics of the common environments of correctional facilities. As investigative reports by human rights and prison abolition organizations have highlighted, there is growing evidence to suggest a systemic pattern of prisoners being exposed to environmental injustices resulting from their proximity to federal Superfund and other contaminated sites. One of the most expensive Superfund sites in the Midwest, the former Velsicol Chemical Corporation plant site in St. Louis, Michigan has been contaminated with DDT, PBB and pCBSA. Located one and a half miles from the site is one of the State’s largest correctional compounds- the Central Michigan and St. Louis Correctional facilities- which house more than 3500 prisoners who are disproportionately men of color. Despite multiple civil rights lawsuits filed by prisoners at the facility, little has been done to address the problems of water contamination at the prison. Furthermore, the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency to consider prisoners within federal environmental justice guidelines facilitates continued harm for this vulnerable population. Given the increasing revelations of toxic prisons across the U.S., it is necessary for environmentalists and green criminologists to work together with prison abolition organizations to fight the epidemic of toxic prisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demise of the soil fumigant, Midas, was heralded as a major environmental movement achievement, when Arysta LifeScience eventually deemed it economically non-viable and withdrew from US markets just before resolution of a lawsuit. Building on scholarship that focuses on strategy to understand how social movements sometimes win, we show how activist tactics were able to exploit the missteps of their opponents. These included the unreasonable expectations of Arysta for grower adoptions, the foibles of the director of California's Department of Pesticide Regulation in registering the chemical, and the reluctance of California's strawberry industry to discontinue use of methyl bromide. Although activist tactics, such as public comments and protests, had only a modest impact on the regulatory process, they had a major impact on grower adoptions of the chemical. This, together with a lawsuit that was not going well for the defendants, ultimately led to the withdrawal. Still, there was a great deal of luck involved, especially in the lawsuit in which the judge made rulings and statements favourable to the plaintiffs. Here, ‘scientization’, worked in favour of the movement rather than the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on theories of social movements and environmental sociology, this article considers a frame transformation that is taking place within ecological social movements. This transformation produced a new frame: 'total liberation.' We explore this phenomenon by analyzing interviews with activists, fieldwork observations, and documents from radical environmental and animal rights movement networks in the United States. Beyond introducing the total liberation frame, the article expands current understandings of how and why frame transformations occur through a consideration of how multiple frames, as well as intra- and intermovement tensions and influences, shape frame transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations within challenger movements often exhibit differences in what they do, with whom they interact, and how they understand or present themselves. This article attempts to understand what underlies such heterogeneity in challenger movements. Adopting a mixed method approach, we explore the heterogeneous nature of the work undertaken by institutional challengers in the US environmental movement. Drawing on the tools of social network analysis, we develop a method to identify a set of distinct social positions. Next, drawing upon qualitative data on identity and work from websites and interviews with senior managers in environmental non-governmental organizations, we identify configurations of social position, identity, and work that result in a distinct set of challenger roles. Our analysis reveals how identity and social position can both enable and constrain individual organizations within a challenger movement in terms of their ability to undertake different types of institutional work. We also identify a form of work thus far not explicitly identified in prior studies of institutional work–indirect work, which we theorize may be an important potential moderator to the effectiveness of direct forms of institutional work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The labor and environmental movements have had a complicated relationship with periods of cooperation as well as conflict, but recently there has been increasing collaboration at the national level. Whether such a trend of cooperation can be sustained will partially depend on grassroots-level connections between the two movements. However, there has been little empirical research on the environmental attitudes of union members, which is important for understanding the potential for shared values between union members and environmental activists. This article analyzes 1993, 2000, and 2010 General Social Survey data to examine if the environmental attitudes of people in union households have changed given shifting labor-environment relations and broader political-economic conditions. We find that union membership does not influence environmental concern in weaker economic times (1993 and 2010) but that it has a positive effect on environmental concern in stronger economic times (2000). Thus, union households are generally no less concerned about the environment than nonunion households. Therefore, strengthening connections between union members and environmental activists may be a feasible strategy for invigorating both the labor and environmental movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One enduring question in social movements research is the relationship between cultural representations and organizational structure. In this article, we examine the development of different discursive frames over time, and how such frame shifts affect movement structure and practices. This approach seeks to illuminate the dialectical interplay between the movement community's discursive frame and its practices, and thus expand our understanding of the process of social movement growth and change. Through a close qualitative and historical analysis of a discursive shift within the hunting community of the United States in the 1930s from a focus strictly on game protection to a more expanded discursive frame of wildlife management, we show how this cultural shift led to major changes in both the organizational structure and advocacy goals of this social movement. We conclude with a discussion of how this process can be further studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the environmental movement in the U.S. between 1962 and 1998 and the role that ecological threat played in the level of activity among various environmental organizations. The authors state that environmental activism increased following ecological developments such as declines in wildlife population and increases in air pollution. The authors assert that the threat concept demonstrates that mobilization and organization patterns of environmentally-motivated groups respond to environmental conditions.

The authors utilize organizational ecology theory to examine variations in the formation of environmentalist organizations across U.S. counties during the periods of 1990 to 1999 and 2000 to 2008 as they relate to the location and density of other civil rights and environmental groups in the areas. The authors assert that, during the 1990s, civil rights density was positively associated with environmental justice organizations, and negatively associated in the 2000s. The authors posit that the results suggest initial cooperation followed by competitiveness among civil rights and environmental organizations.

This article considers the significance of Victoria Lee Burton’s authorship, specifically The Little House, for lifestyle preferences and the development of environmental consciousness in the postwar period. The article argues that Burton deliberately designed her work to evoke country-friendly sensibilities and ambiences in her audience and portrayed the city in troublesome ways. The enduring success of The Little House for young audiences suggests that Burton struck a chord. Burton’s origins and upbringing probably also infused her depiction of a cosmopolitan rural idealism. Burton’s importance for modern environmentalism deserves greater recognition than it has received and may bear comparison to that of Rachel Carson. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Revista MAD is the property of Revista MAD and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: The National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Improving Risk Analysis Approaches Used by the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) recommended that low-dose risks be estimated in some situations using human variability distributions (HVDs). HVD modeling estimates log-normal distributions from data on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic variables that affect individual sensitivities to the toxic response. These distributions are combined into an overall log-normal distribution for the threshold dose (dose below which there is no contribution to a toxic response) by assuming the variables act independently and multiplicatively. This distribution is centered at a point-of-departure dose that is usually estimated from animal data. The resulting log-normal distribution is used to quantify low-dose risk. Objective: We examined the implications of various assumptions in HVD modeling for estimating low-dose risk. Methods: The assumptions and data used in HVD modeling were subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Results: We found that the assumption that the variables affecting human sensitivity vary log normally is not scientifically defensible. Other distributions that are equally consistent with the data provide very different estimates of low-dose risk. HVD modeling can also involve an assumption that a threshold dose defined by dichotomizing a continuous apical response has a log-normal distribution. This assumption is shown to be incompatible (except under highly specialized conditions) with assuming that the continuous apical response itself is log normal. However, the two assumptions can lead to very different estimates of low-dose risk. The assumption in HVD modeling that the threshold dose can be expressed as a function of a product of independent variables lacks phenomenological support. We provide an example that shows that this assumption is generally invalid. Conclusion: In view of these problems, we recommend caution in the use of HVD modeling as a general approach to estimating low-dose risks from human exposures to toxic chemicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the influence of types of protest activities, Congressional hearings and political characteristics on environmental legislation enacted from 1961-1990. We find that rates of environmental protest rise with increases in the amount of previous institutional activities, but extra-institutional activities do not raise the overall rate of protest. Protest has no direct effect on the passage of legislation, but institutional protest activities significantly raise the rate of Congressional hearings on the environment. When comparing all environmental laws to those designated as having a major impact, we find both similarities and differences. For example, prior legislative activity decreases both rates, but increases in criteria air pollutants and partisan characteristics of Congress significantly affect only the rates of major environmental legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women of color are the precious jewels of the environmental justice movement because without them the movement would be stagnant, non-existent or similar to other social movements in the United States. Women make up the majority of the Environmental Justice Movement and they are the engine that drives the movement. Women of color view themselves as devoted grassroots social justice activists and environmental justice organizers who use direct and indirect actions to create healthy, sustainable, safe, and livable communities. In general, women of color involvement and participation in the environmental movement are not adequately documented such that their "voices" in the environmental justice movement can be heard from the west coast to the east coast and in many communities in between. Their community organizing model is egalitarian in nature yet women-centered, family-centered, children-centered, equity-centered, community-centered, and health centered to name a few. Women of color organizing are built around their established relationships in the community which include the Black church, civic organizations, voluntary organizations, and community-based organizations. This exploratory article provides the history of how women of color have taken the lead in the environmental justice movement and places their contributions in the broader context of race and class inequalities and social injustice issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over the “death of environmentalism” juxtapose two approaches to environmental advocacy: an issues-based environmentalism that relies on technocratic, legal, scientific, policy-oriented and issue-specific advocacy activities and an ethics-based environmentalism that has as its primary focus the promotion of deep-seated changes in individual and societal values and behavior as they pertain to stewardship of the earth. The latter is presented both as a critique of the former and as a road map for a more effective environmental movement. This study documents the practice and challenges of ethics-based environmentalism through an analysis of the religious-environmental movement in the United States. Interviews with forty-two U.S.-based religious-environmental organizations revealed that the majority of these groups see themselves as engaged in an ethics-based environmentalism grounded in frameworks that tie God to nature and emphasize action, community, and justice. Groups also identified some of the challenges inherent in ethics-based environmental advocacy, including the need to confront societal norms, work on long time horizons, access funding, recruit support, and measure and document success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Republican Party in the United States and its members' views of environmentalism during the 1980s. The author claims that the party viewed environmentalists as extremists that posed a threat to the development and exploitation of the country's natural resources. The modern environmental movement in the 2000s is compared to the environmental movement in the 1980s, with a specific focus on the social and cultural dimensions of environmental activism and reform as well as opposition to environmentalism.

The article reports that two recent and high-profile law-enforcement initiatives have viewed animal-advocacy and environmental groups as threats in the U.S. They are the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) prosecution and the Operation Backfire. One of the prosecution targeted SHAC, a campaign to close one animal-testing firm and referred also to the underground Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The second prosecution was unfolded in Eugene, Oregon, targeted both the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the ALF. SHAC involved a campaign against a testing firm Huntingdon Life Sciences in 2004 was indicted by a jury in New Jersey of several of the SHAC campaign's young followers for conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.

The article focuses on methodical and expansion of government crackdown against animal-rights and environmental activists in the U.S. Politicians and corporations have successfully campaigned to label the activists as ecoterrorists, and make people afraid to use their First Amendment rights. The environmental and animal-rights movements like all other social movements have both legal and illegal elements. Some recent incidents by anonymous activists have used increasingly aggressive and claiming that physical violence against human beings might occur if the targets do not cease harming animals and the environment.

The biologist Barry Commoner has been instrumental in shaping American environmentalism over the past fifty years. The breadth of Commoner's activism—against nuclear fallout and the synthetic productions of the petrochemical industry—marked a new direction for American environmental activism that sought to raise awareness about the kinds of technological decisions that were giving rise to an environmental crisis. Similarly, his concerns over air pollution, energy production, and waste management demonstrate that Commoner considered not just individual problems but also the larger systems that spawned them. Just as significantly, however, Commoner's activism introduced a new praxis that stressed the importance of an informed citizenry and a new relationship between experts and the public. Commoner invented the science information movement, a method of disseminating accessible scientific facts to the public so that they could participate in decision making. This essay seeks to situate his historical significance within the broader context of American environmental history. I outline Commoner's contributions in three related avenues: science, democracy, and environment. Commoner saw these three pillars of his activity not as independent aspects of his political sensibilities but as part of a single, intrinsic whole. That science, democracy, and environment should be so related is indicative of Commoner's deep-seated conviction that human societies, their politics and economies, and their physical environments functioned in larger, holistic systems. The intersections between science, society, and the environment that serve as the cornerstone of Commoner's career and work are not simply historical points of interest but remain vitally relevant to contemporary debates and struggles to address toxic contaminants, energy productions crises, and global climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the implications and concept of civic environmental approach in the U.S. Accordingly, civic environmental approach serves as a valuable strategy for the establishment of political alliances with an objective to participate in environmental movement as well as to strengthen the scope of environmentalism. In addition, the author notes that the approach aims to establish a proactive campaign as its advocacy to focus on the teaching and exercise of skills of active citizenship.

Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in how humans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approached their concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering arguments that suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, the countercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly American practice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter to the urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on notions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producing a healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandon American consumer practices and take up a "primitive" and down-to-earth pastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, the greater movement's ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used the consumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in a growing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in the connection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identity helped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers perspectives on the comparison between U.S. environmentalism and environmental groups in Europe. In the U.S. institutions have shaped and constrained environmental action but have also empowered forms of environmental activism and advocacy. Meanwhile, the debates highlighted concerns how environmental issues should be framed and understood. Moreover, U.S. environmental groups, faced by a hostile Republican administration, have shifted their energies towards persuading the public and shaping public discourse.

The United States has failed to develop an effective policy to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. This policy failure is the result of many factors, one of which is the inherent limitations of 'interest group politics' in producing the kinds of broad political and economic changes required to reduce the threat of disruptive climate change. This article first examines interest group politics in environmental policymaking, emphasising the role of groups in institutionalising the broad social movement that produced modern environmentalism in America. It then explores the nature of climate change and its political and policy implications, and explains why an interest-group-centred model of policymaking is insufficient to address the threat posed by climate change. It then analyses what kind of political actions might be better suited to produce the kinds of dramatic policy developments the likely consequences of climate change compel us to make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]