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Period: to
Preservation vs Conservation
Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) fought to preserve Yosemite National Park as place not disturbed by humans taking resources
Gifford Pinchot (director of U.S. Forest Service) believed that forests should be used and renewed both to maintain a flow of resources for human use and to conserve the environment -
1900-1960: Environmental Awareness Grows
1914 Aldo Leopold writes A Sand County Almanac: Argues nature is not our servant to be used and abused and we have and ethical responsibility to maintain the balance of nature. -
Modern Environmental Movement is born
Rachel Carson writes Silent Spring in 1962.
Warns of the effects of pesticides and how the chemicals work their way up the food chain to kill others (hence silent spring)
Chemical industries tried to discredit her and ban the book
Eventually, Federal Government bans pesticides like DDT. -
Movement Goes Global
Greenpeace established
Media coverage becomes more common
Earth Summit on the Environment held at UN with 113 nations
Convention on International trade in Endangered Species
Idea of Stewardship: Humans are responsible for caring for the environment, not exploiting it. -
Sustainability and Disasters
1983: UN World Commission on Environment and Development: Develop land without destroying it for future generations
1984: Bhopal, India: A pesticide plant releases 40 tons of pesticide gas killing 22,000 people.
1986: Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes killing estimated 60, 000.
1987: Montreal Protocol seeks to limit CFCs which were causing a hole in the ozone layer leading to skin cancer. -
Global warming (1990)
People made connection between carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, and the warming climate of the planet
Based on information from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), over 100 nations signed the Kyoto Protocol agreeing to limit CO2. U.S. refused to sign. -
Climate change (Early 2000)
Five areas identified as needing global attention:
Water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity.
The summit agreed to halve the number of people in the world who suffer a basic sanitation by the year 2015 -
Cyclone Sidr
also known as Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Sidr) was a tropical cyclone that resulted in one of the worst natural disasters in Bangladesh. The fourth named storm of the 2007 North Indian Ocean cyclone season, Sidr formed in the central Bay of Bengal, and quickly strengthened to reach peak 1-minute sustained winds of 260 km/h (160 mph), making it a equivalent tropical cyclone -
Cyclone Mora
Severe Cyclonic Storm Mora was a strong tropical cyclone that caused widespread impacts by devastation and severe flooding across Sri Lanka, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Northeast India in May 2017
