Annotated list of popular movement literature

Environmental movements

Vandana Shiva: Ecology and the politics of survival, Sage 1991

Review of the Indian environmental movement as farmers' defense of their own resource base against overexploitation: movements to protect the forest, for groundwater, for traditional fisheries. According to Shiva, a conflict between profit and survival, and between sectoral growth and the needs of the whole, due to the market’s inability to distinguish between basic and frivolous needs.

Christoph Conti: Abschied vom Bürgertum, Rowohlt 1984

About the resistance to the authoritarian bourgeois society in Germany around 1900, as it expressed itself mainly in various youth environments. It's amazing how all the themes that came up again in youth environments in the 1970s are already there then: collective, interest in nature, non-toxic food, anarchism, home-woven.

Timothy Doyle: Environmental movements in majority and minority worlds, Rutgers University Press 2005

Six “exemplary” mobilisations from different parts of the world are used to characterize environmental movements, with particular emphasis on North-South differences: forest saver movements in the US, mine resistance in the Philippines, wilderness defense in Australia, Road resistance in England, river savers in India and nuclear resistance in Germany. It is not unexpected to note that people and/or the environment are defended in the south, and that the settler societies of the USA and Australia are most extreme on the other side – save Nature against people – with Europe in between.

Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez Alier, Varieties of environmentalism, Earthscan 1997

Development and theorization of the above. Noting that the settler communities’ focus on “man versus nature” opens up the most opportunistic collaborations with deprecating forest companies, if it is “man” who is the villain, we are all on the wrong side of the barricade. You don’t make that mistake if you fight for your resource base.

Matthias Finger (ed): The green movements worldwide, JAI Press 1992

Short chapters on environmental movements in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the USA, Brazil, Asia and Japan during the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, often through a correct state political filter -- what is portrayed tends to be the influence of environmental movements on government decisions, or even worse: the influence of environmental parties on government decisions. The best and most versatile chapters are those dealing with the South.

John McCormick: Reclaiming paradise - the global environmental movement, Indiana University Press 1991

Despite its title, mostly about what the state, and various scientists, have done for the environment. However, two chapters are devoted to environmental movements -- one on nineteenth-century movements with a focus on wilderness reserves, and one on the twentieth century with a focus on environmental parties. In short, a disappointment.

Margaret McKean: Environmental protest and citizen politics in Japan, University of California Press 1981

An accurate description of the time when environmental policy was mainly local groups that protected the interests of the local community against exploiters coming from outside, i.e. the 1960s and early 1970s. Not only the “big four cases” of industrial poisoning but also a number of lesser known ones are covered in the form of overview history plus interview summaries of the positions of the participants. The ideological ballast is the so-called the resource mobilization paradigm, i.e. the focus is on how the participants gathered so much power that they could win. Perhaps the funniest thing is the observation of how the “ideologically unaware” Japanese, who imagine the environmental struggle as local people’s resistance to various authorities win, while more “ideologically aware” Americans who imagine the environmental struggle as resistance to human destruction of nature only lose.

Jeffrey Broadbent: Environment politics in Japan, Cambridge University Press 1998

In addition to an account of a protracted environmental struggle in a small Japanese town, this book depicts how political results are created. By focusing on the relationship between the environmental movement and the state/capital alliance, it makes it understandable that the end result can be something that neither of them had expected, something that cannot be considered a total victory for either, but depends on the force field between them. The whole thing becomes an ironic and wittily mean commentary on the slightly too simple theories through which the most common popular movement theorists usually view reality.

Elim Papadakis: The green movement in West Germany, Croom Helm 1984

A small, thin book -- but perhaps the best I’ve read about environmental movements. Not just a lot of ideological opinions about what this movement “is”, but a lot of empirical evidence about both actions and mobilization principles and ideological currents, and also the only book I know of that points out implicitly that the environmental movement has two roots: on the one hand people from mainly social reformist circles (but also conservative farmers) who strive for concrete local improvements alt. prevent local deterioration, partly people from the youth movements of the big cities and university towns with an extreme background in the anti-consumerist beat culture. The author points out that they were usually able to cooperate in what was then West Germany, which is why they succeeded well with their mobilizations. At the end, there will be some about party formations and thus growing career considerations, but unfortunately the book is too old to follow that far down the road.

Reimar Paul (hrsg): ... und auch nicht anderswo, Verlag Die Werkstatt 1997

The description of the German anti-nuclear movement, the strongest environmental movement mobilization during the height of the environmental movement in the seventies, mainly expressed as 120 pages of date notes which makes the overview not the best although the diversity is covered. There is possibly an overview in Wolfgang Ehmke’s chapter Bewegte Zeiten, but unfortunately it is written in a strongly slang-influenced language that I do not understand. A number of smaller themes are also available.

Alain Touraine: Anti-nuclear protest, Cambridge University Press 1983

Examines the French nuclear resistance which, after a promising start, completely crashed after the violent demonstration against the Malville reactor in 1977. Touraine rejects the simple explanation that the defeat was due to police violence; instead, he believes that from the very beginning there was tension between the local resistance, which was founded in defense of livelihoods and the local community, and the metropolitan-based environmentalist movement, which primarily saw nuclear power as a pretext to gain access to those in power and the system. This conflict could have been resolved just as easily as happened in Germany, but during the build-up to the demonstration, all discussion within the latter category of what was wanted to be achieved disappeared, instead everything came to center around the question of violence or non-violence -- which was “resolved” with everyone being allowed to do as they pleased, whereupon the strong local nuclear resistance refused to participate in the demonstration on these vague terms and the total division and escalation of violence was a fact.

Bruce Rich: Mortgaging the earth. Earthscan 1994

Actually a book about the World Bank’s grotesque projects. But at the same time, of necessity, a book about the protests these have provoked -- and an account of how a collaboration between NGOs in Washington and an alliance of rubber tappers and Indians in the Amazon forced the bank into retreat and gave the South the leadership of the world’s environmental movement.

Tord Björk: The emerging global NGO system, Dept of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, without year

A comparison between the UN conference in Stockholm in 1972 and the UN conference in Rio in 1992 which shows how the popular movements have become less and less independent in the meantime despite their numerical growth.

Ramachandra Guha: The unquiet woods, Permanent Black 2010

A book about the Chipko movement and its predecessors in Uttarakhand in northern India. Shows that the movement from 1973-80 had a long tradition of farming communities’ defense against encroaching forest industry, which at least stretched back to 1910. That the whole thing was then presented as an environmental movement (and not about basic local economy) had both advantages and disadvantages, Guha believes.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen: Dispossession and resistance in India - the river and the rage, Routledge 2010.

This is the definitive book on the Narmada movement. It describes both currents that the movement consisted of - the marginal farmers’ movement against local strongmen and the urban middle class environmental movement against dams – which together became strong both globally and locally. Although not strong enough: Nilsen also describes why they ultimately failed.