The Spirit Of The Age

Ecologist, The, July, 2000 by Fred Pearce

1975

Teddy Goldsmith returns from a five month stay with the Gandhi Peace Foundation in India to produce a special issue of the magazine on the continuing relevance of Gandhi's ideas.

1975

'Atlanta 2000' conference on building a green future and responding to the energy crisis. Teddy Goldsmith a key speaker, with David Brower, head of Friends of the Earth and other key greens.

1977

Special issue on 'The Future of America', dedicated to President Jimmy Carter. It is a manifesto for a sustainable US future, which is also presented at a conference in the US chaired by leading ecologist Eugene Odum.

1978

The Ecologist splits in two. The Ecologist becomes a more detailed quarterly, while The New Ecologist becomes a monthly, more mainstream magazine. The experiment lasts less than a year.

1975

Greenpeace's first anti-whaling campaign sets sail from Vancouver. By taking camera crews and physically putting themselves between harpoon and whale, Greenpeace's eco-warriors give the public a heroic icon of environmental activism far removed from the old images of sandals, brown bread and paper recycling.

1977

Green Belt Movement established in Kenya. Africa's first genuinely nongovernmental environment group is formed by a woman, Wangari Maathai (left). It pays poor rural women to plant trees across the country to protect their farms from soil erosion and desertification. Over the next 20 years, more than 20 million trees are planted.

1977

Windscale Inquiry starts. Greens scale new heights in public debate when the long public inquiry into nuclear reprocessing at Windscale (now Sellafield) is dominated by FoE, whose opposition is based as much on economics as safety. FoE loses the inquiry but wins the argument. The resulting THORP plant remains a lame duck.

1979

Die Gr[ddot{u}]nen founded. Though not the first Green Party, the German Die Gr[ddot{u}]nen swiftly becomes the biggest and most influential, riding a tide of opposition to pollution in the heart of Europe's post-war 'economic miracle.' Soon winning parliamentary seats, the Greens are the heirs to 1960s student protests and the anti-nuclear movement.

The 1980s was the decade of Thatcherism, Reaganomics and the ruthless expansion of the global market. It was also a decade of rising environmental concern, as ozone loss, rainforest destruction and the first signs of global warming sank into the public consciousness, and the greens began to register on the political radar.

TIMELINE: Key Events in the 1980s

GLOBALENVIRONMENT

1982

Acid rain scandal in Europe. Widespread tree deaths in Germany caused by air pollution trigger major electoral gains for Die Gr[ddot{u}]nen in 1983 and add to pollution fears raised by fish deaths in acid streams and lakes in Scandinavia; Most of Europe joins '30% Club' of nations committed to cutting acid emissions from power plants.

1984

Ethiopian famine. The second great famine in Africa in just over a decade brings growing concern about climate change. The drought belt of Africa has had almost two decades of exceptionally dry weather. And it is clear that traditional coping strategies among poor farmers and herding communities have broken down.