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Article: Communing with nature: continuing our series on History and the Environment, Thomas Dunlap explores the development of quasi-religious environmentalism in North America.
- Article from:
- History Today
- Article date:
- March 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 History Today Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ANY MOVEMENT THAT BRINGS people out to lie in front of logging trucks, risk jail by tearing up survey stakes, or risk life and limb by running a small boat in front of a whaling ship deserves the attention of historians. Environmentalism has always done that. It has roused particularly strong passions in the last forty years, since the denunciations of DDT that followed the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, and they show no signs of dying down.
Reformers of all kinds have commonly been zealous -- in the early years of the twentieth century British suffragettes chained themselves to fences, and in the 1960s American civil rights demonstrators ...