United States environmental movement

In the United States, environmental advocacy groups make up what is known as the environmental movement . The history of this large, diverse social movement can best be understood by analogy to a river created by the confluence of about two dozen rivulets and tributaries. The main stems derive from two distinct nineteenth-century social movements, one promoting the conservation of natural resources, the other public health. 

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the combined effects of the toxics and EJ movements. Together, they redirected the environmental movement in the United States. The movement that had... 

In contrast, today we believe that our fundamental rights include clean air, clean water, and a healthy workplace. We are products of the same social movement that created the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and similar agencies around the world. We were part of that movement, as were many of the people who now work for Big Oil. Govenunents are providing the stick - steep fines and possible jail time for corporate executives - but the carrot comes from a basic change in our fundamental values. 

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a family of compounds, manufactured in the United States from 1930-1975, which were used in a number of discard applications and extensively as an electrical insulating fluid (see Chap. 1). Environmental concerns have led to strict controls on the use of PCBs and standards for cleanup of PCB discharges. One of the purposes of this section is to present information on the chemical and physical characteristics of these compounds. Based on this, the mechanisms of their movement in the surface/subsurface environment can be explained. 

Many historians trace the birth of this movement to April 22,1970, the first Earth Day celebrated in the United States. In this event, large groups of people made it clear that they would no longer sit quietly by and watch the destruction of their natural environment. They demanded that their governments take more purposeful actions to understand the nature of environmental destruction and to limit or prevent such destruction of land, water, and air resources. 

Around 1970, the environmental movement, dealing with both technical and political aspects of various environmental problems, sprang to life in the United States. American public opinion widely supported the movement, as did I. I taught courses on environmental problems, sponsored a student environmental action club, and became involved with a local group that went out in small boats to collect samples of steel mill discharges that I analyzed pro bono in my laboratory. 

Mertig, Angela G., Riley E. Dunlap, and Denton E, Morrison. 2002, The environmental movement in the United States, In Handbook of Environmental Sociology, edited by Riley E. Dunlap and William Michelson, 448-481. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press. 

There has been a large increase in recent years in the application of SSDs in ecotoxi-cology, as evidenced by the recent SETAC (Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry) book by Posthuma et al. (2002). This approach is being or will shortly be applied in the European Union, Australia, United States, and Canada, with a general movement (where possible) toward the use of ECx in preference to the historical use of AFs and NOECs in deterministic PNEC calculations. The toxicity endpoint used will depend on the objective. For deriving a MAC-EQS, LC(EC)50 data are appropriate, while chronic NOECs (or preferably chronic ECx values, where available) are applicable for AA-EQSs. 

Oris Blackwell (chair), Kentucky Community Study Group, Draft Final Report (July 1987) David Zurick, Grassroots Environmental Opposition to Chemical Weapons Incineration in Central Kentucky A Success Story (Lexington, KY International Conference on Grassroots Environmental Movements in Japan and the United States, 2003). Lambright, Searching for a Safer Technology . 

In the United States, where 80% of the population professes the Christian faith and 33% attends weekly worship services, this tributary of the environmental movement has the potential to reach large numbers of people with the compelling message that the Earth belongs to God and humans have a duty to care for it. 

The publication of Silent Spring was a seminal event in the environmental movement in the United States... 

The United States s approach toward dealing with environmental problems has evolved since the early stages of the environmental movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Most approaches have centered around the command and control approach to pollution. In its earliest form this involved the government allowing potential releasers of toxic substances to release materials only in certain limited... 

The goals of pollution prevention complement many of the strategic goals of the United States. It is obvious that the national goals of environmental protection as reiterated in the Pollution Prevention Act are served by this relatively new focus of the environmental movement. However, it is also true that interests of the country s economic competitiveness, health and well-being of the nation s populace as well as its basic science and research capabilities are also beneficiaries of this new pollution prevention policy. It is for these reasons that there is such a widespread support for more environmentally benign processes to be developed throughout all sectors of the economy and the scientific community. 

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