| Given the tenuous scope of mechanisms in place to implement both national regulations and international environmental agreements, organized public action and intervention in the public sphere remain the most effective strategy to urge compliance with conservation policies or force retrenchment from destructive ones. The central contention of this argument is that the environmental movement has not only enriched public debates with a new field of publicity, but also that the actors have self-consciously accomplished a complementary intervention in the public sphere, successfully accommodating both the politics of reform and inclusion sought by environmental pragmatists and the politics of identity zealously pursued by radical ecologists. To examine the implications carried by the issues and the strategy of the environmental movement, this inquiry draws from two sets of empirical evidences: (a) the substantive issues that have defined a new domain of publicity, i.e., the natural environment, as it has enriched and expanded the public sphere and (b) the various institutional and non-institutional levels of action. To this aim, the following analysis examines the various public forums adopted by the environmental movement. To mention some: in the 1992 United Nations sponsored Earth Summit, UNCED; the street theaters, rallies, petitions, demonstrations; or the spectacular blockades against the transportation of hazardous material, as staged by Greenpeace in November of 1992 in its attempt to stop the transferring of twenty tons of plutonium sold to Japan by France. In addition, leaflets, posters, newsletters, regular publications constitute, among others, an assortment of material used by environmental organizations to reach the public and present it with competing reports on the status of environmental damage, which more often than not, will compete with the official version. Analogously, the formation of ecological political parties have promoted parliamentary debates that have promoted environmental laws that challenged the conventional economic model and security policies. |
