Ecology movement

The global ecology movement is one of several new social movements that emerged at the end of the sixties; as a values-driven social movement, it should be distinguished from the pre-existing science of ecology. The movement's growth has been stimulated by a widespread acknowledgement of an ecological crisis of our planet. Its story has run alongside the environmental narratives that have reached popular consciousness. From the conservation movement at the beginning of the 20th century, then with concern in the sixties about chemical pesticides, the ecological movement was born with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. There was a great deal of concern over nuclear weapons and nuclear power in sixties and seventies, then there was acid rain in the eighties, ozone depletion and deforestation in the nineties, and now climate change is the biggest concern for many. As well as the bigger global issues like these and species extinction, the ecology movement also encompasses any group wishing to protect the environment.

The ecology movement has evolved and branched out to different means of effecting change. There is the political branch with the Green parties. Organisations like Greenpeace were more radical, taking direct action against environmental destruction. Its views on people, behaviors, events centered around the political and lifestyle implications of the science of ecology and the idea of nature as a value in itself. "Ecology movement" is an umbrella term for different groups, ideologies and attitudes.