Word: movement
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since the dawn of the Green movement, critics have argued that environmentalists exaggerate the dangers that humans pose to planet earth and understate the resilience of nature. Historically, the naysayers have had a key influence on policy: they weakened the original Clean Air and Clean Water acts, and Reagan officials James Watt and Anne Burford nearly destroyed the Environmental Protection Agency. But a worsening environment has put the naysayers on the defensive as they struggle to explain ever dirtier air, moribund forests and lakes, oil spills, desertification and the ozone holes over the poles...
...Think Globally, Act Locally" was the watchword of environmental activism from its beginning in the '60s. That advice is as appropriate now as it was then. Just as the Green movement started more than two decades ago not with governments but at the grass roots, so today it is individuals who must occupy the front lines in protecting the environment. Over the years, droughts, energy crunches and garbage strikes have stimulated common-sense approaches to conserving resources and minimizing waste. It is time to begin applying these lessons in ordinary times as well as in emergencies...
...long, many U.S. companies have looked upon the ecology movement as bad for business. Putting scrubbers on smokestacks is expensive, they lament, and drafting all those environmental-impact statements can consume an enormous amount of time and resources. But while cleanup efforts cost money in the short run, they can eventually pay hefty dividends. As more and more firms are discovering, many environmentally sound practices can build up goodwill, win customers and produce a healthier bottom line...
...environmental bills now get "a tidal wave" of support in Congress. In elections to the European Parliament, Green parties scored impressive gains. In Hungary protests from local environmentalists led the government to cancel a $ controversial multibillion-dollar hydroelectric-dam project. And in the Soviet Union the budding Green movement showed its muscle by shutting down a new chemical-weapons dismantling facility in the Siberian town of Chapayevsk. "In the future," said Soviet People's Deputy Alexei Yablokov, "the Green movement may be so strong that without its support, no government can do anything sound...
Eastern Europe, Jeszenszky suggested, had already found a political form that made dramatic economic restructuring possible: the "grand national coalition," modeled on the government in Warsaw. "Poland's Solidarity movement set the pattern," he said, comparing loose non-Communist political groupings in Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia to national coalitions formed in Western Europe after World War II. "We are emerging from 40 years of war against the people. Changes have to be made -- economic, political and moral ones. These new governments soon will have to make unpopular decisions, so it's best to have governments credible to all parties...