Just want to quickly throw out that right here:
Roe vs Wade for example.
You are demonstrating a rather significant point made by i2amroy:
I'd be willing to say that (in the US at least) the vast majority of important legal changes don't come through the legislative branch, they come through the judicial one. And as a reminder for those who don't live in the US, in the US all of our judges are appointed, not elected. That means that beyond choosing who is the governor/president and hoping they pick aligned judges (which there is no guarantee of them doing, it's not too uncommon to pick judges that you are misaligned with as a way of appeasing the other party), voters have literally no way to control who is making those decisions.
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Saying "yeah but it was just one river" seems like being deliberately obtuse too. If one river was that bad, it was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much sludge was being dumped everywhere.
I admit guilty to this. I overreact, because it's really annoying that I'm always presented with this one example of a single thing that used to be worse, whenever I try to talk about the dire state of the environment today.
As for the debate at hand, I can't find a good single source of information on this, but there is lots of commentary that environmental activism in the U.S. has severely declined in the last 20 years. To be concerned with anything more than recycling and switching to a different kind of lightbulb is considered politically radical, and to engage in any kind of direct action on the subject gets you officially labeled as a terrorist. The only notable example we have recently is obstruction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
It seems to me the issue is visible signs of environmental damage have been shunted away from first-hand visibility by populations with political power. We're still doing all the same damages, but they're exported to other places. We didn't get rid of the Love Canal,
it was just re-located to Guiyu. This wouldn't have been practical prior to the globalization of the last 50 years, and I wonder just how much clean-up we would have seen within the U.S. in this same period otherwise.
In other words, there's no pressure on politicians in the U.S. to care anymore. There was pressure back in the period you've brought up, because people's daily lives were being directly effected and there was grassroots action on this. There were significant protests over the Love Canal, and rising awareness of river pollution was one of the main driving forces behind the assembling of Earth Day, which pre-dated the Clean Water Act with 20 million Americans involved in demonstrations. In Central Park, NY alone, participants numbered around a million. And this is when the U.S. population was 2/3 what it is now. While Earth Day has since grown to boast impressive international numbers, there has not been any comparable environmental demonstration within the U.S. since that I can dig up anything on.
I'll say it again: show me a candidate that professes to make the environment a priority, and I will enthusiastically vote for them. But I posit that such a candidate will be incredibly rare until we see a resurgence of mass demonstrations or threat of significant direct action applying tangible pressure on politicians to care, and that will be the real driver of change. Voting matters only after public pressure forces political players to put action on the table. Every single time.
A good example is the current issue of police militarization. For most of Obama's tenure,
federal administration influence has overseen this issue getting continually worse. But only after it's become the subject of many, many protests and some riots,
Obama has begun efforts to reverse the trend. On the surface at least (I just started reading into it), this looks like a clear case of change being initiated by pressure, without any influence thus far by vote.
And there is plenty of direct action environmentalism in developing countries, but
it's extremely dangerous business. Literally hundreds of environmental activists are murdered and assassinated every year, and they aren't normally killed in confrontations initiated by the environmentalists.
They're killed in organized attacks. That kind of thing doesn't happen to people who don't pose a threat of making a difference, and U.S. businesses are complicit in plenty of it.
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Topic: Things that made you absolutely terrified today (Read 1975757 times)