Environmental movements

Some of the strongest responses to environmental damage come not from governments but from ordinary people: volunteers in environmental movements, mostly working locally.

Forest movements of the South: forests in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa and India face huge pressure from logging and clearing, which has not stopped. These forests are peopled: communities live in and depend on them. In the North, by contrast, forest campaigns usually aim to protect 'wilderness', land with no people at all.

Mining: mining companies, often multinationals, cause pollution and displace people. A well-known campaign was against the Australian Western Mining Corporation in the Philippines, which also faced protests in Australia itself, where people backed the rights of Aboriginal communities.

Anti-dam movements: big dams flood forests and villages and change rivers. The movements now call themselves pro-river: they want rivers protected and managed better. The first anti-dam movement in the North was the campaign in the early 1980s that saved the Franklin River in Australia from a dam.

In India, the best known is the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which campaigned against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada because of the many families it displaced.

Indian environmental movements share one idea: non-violence. They use protests, marches, hunger strikes and courts, not force.

These movements show that environmental politics is not one vision but many, shaped by who lives on the land and how they depend on it.