The Eighties began as a bad decade for the environment. Reagan removed Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House, threw out any notion of energy conservation, and reignited the cold war by placing cruise missiles in Europe. The fragile European and American environmental movements, whose protests against civil nuclear power had escalated during the later Seventies, were forced back into campaigning against nuclear weapons. Peace and green movements fused, as they had during the late 1960s.
CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was revived in the UK and roared into life, reaching new peaks of membership. The government pamphlet Protect and Survive, detailing how to survive a nuclear attack (including the extremely useful tip of painting one's windows white) was subverted by the anti-nuke movement. Raymond Briggs crystallised it all in When the Wind Blows (1982).
But even under this nuclear cloud there were some silver linings. The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greenham Common Peace Camp, formed in 1981 to protest against the siting of cruise missiles in the Home Counties, became an icon of defiance and a meeting-place for feminists and environmentalists. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet in Australia, an equally significant direct action protest began in opposition to the proposed Franklin Dam, which would have flooded a pristine forest valley. The Franklin Blockade, as it came to be known, halted the dam, helped usher the pro-conservation Labor party into power in 1983, and inspired activists for decades afterwards - including, much later, the decision by the UK Climate Camp in 2008 to stage a blockade against new coal.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Though by 2008 people were starting to mobilise properly about coal in the context of global warming, in the 1980s the only protests to do with coal were about keeping the mines open. Maggie's preoccupation in the early Eighties was breaking the power of the trade unions, rather than the environment (even if her decision to shut the pits and switch to gas was, inadvertantly, the main reason why Britain was able to meet its Kyoto emissions reduction targets over two decades later). In 1982 Thatcher, embarking on the Falklands war, muttered to an aide: "It’s exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you’ve spent half your political life dealing with humdrum things like the environment."
The early Eighties also saw the USA acquire a radical, direct-action wing to its green movement. Earth First!, founded by David Foreman in 1980, modelled itself loosely on the wilderness vigilantes of Edward Abbey's 1975 book The Monkeywrench Gang, and in a nod to these inspirations, took for its symbol a monkeywrench.
Lying in front of bulldozers must have seemed more exciting, but arguably one of the most successful environmental campaigns of the 1980s was conducted along more humdrum and traditional lines. CLEAR, the Campaign for Lead-Free Air, started in the UK in 1982, calling for the banning of leaded petrol, arguing rightly that it polluted air and was a health hazard. (Lead, incidentally, had been introduced into petrol in the 1920s as an anti-knocking agent.) Patient lobbying saw the government and car industry cave in to CLEAR's demands, and by the end of the decade lead emissions from cars were 70% lower than when they started campaigning.
Lead was in the air, and the rain was turning acid. Though the problem of acid rain had been identified back in the Victorian era (the term was coined by the first Alkali Inspector, Robert Angus Smith, in 1872), it had not been taken seriously for over a century, until in the mid-1970s Swedish studies showed that sulphur from coal power stations in northern Europe was acidifying Sweden's lakes and killing its forests. During the Eighties, agitation over acid rain intensified, especially amongst German Greens, when a 1984 report indicated that the Black Forest had been badly affected. New controls on sulphur emissions in the later 1980s significantly reduced the scale of the problem in Europe and America (though in China, the problem was only just beginning).
Lead was in the air, and the rain was turning acid. Though the problem of acid rain had been identified back in the Victorian era (the term was coined by the first Alkali Inspector, Robert Angus Smith, in 1872), it had not been taken seriously for over a century, until in the mid-1970s Swedish studies showed that sulphur from coal power stations in northern Europe was acidifying Sweden's lakes and killing its forests. During the Eighties, agitation over acid rain intensified, especially amongst German Greens, when a 1984 report indicated that the Black Forest had been badly affected. New controls on sulphur emissions in the later 1980s significantly reduced the scale of the problem in Europe and America (though in China, the problem was only just beginning).
Temperate forests, however, were faring well compared to those in the tropics, which by the Eighties were coming under renewed pressure for timber and farmland. The assault on the world's equatorial forests became epitomised in the fate of the Amazon. The mighty Amazon, the 'Great Mother Forest', 5 million square kilometres of it: superlatives abound, and are matched only by those recounting its devastation - by 1985, it was being lost at a rate of 8000 square miles a year. Western greens reacted with horror and anger to such facts, and by the mid-Eighties it had become the quintessential pastime of the middle-classes to 'Save the Rainforests'. Friends of the Earth launched their rainforests campaign in 1985, Sting organised a charity concert in 1988, and by 1989 you could even buy a Rainforest Crunch ice cream from Ben & Jerry's (with proceeds going to conservation projects in Brazil). Of course the concerned citizens of Europe and North America were heavily implicated in the destruction: sales of ethical ice creams were as nothing compared to the demand for Brazilian beef (and soy) that customers would happily chow down in their local McDonalds (for more on which, see the forthcoming post on the 1997 McLibel trial).
Meanwhile, Australian environmentalists launched their own programme to defend native rainforests, the Wet Tropics Campaign, in 1985; whilst the agitation of the rubber-tapper, unionist and environmental activist Chico Mendes in Brazil led to his murder by ranchers in 1988.
A rare bright spot for Eighties greens came in 1986 when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) declared a moratorium on whaling. The ruling provided a successful conclusion to Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign, which had been initiated in the mid-Seventies. The public outcry against the hunting of the world's largest mammals had manifested itself in some strange pieces of pop culture: in 1984, Star Trek IV burst onto the silver screen, going boldly to save some whales (which turned out to be representatives of a higher extraterrestial intelligence). It's endangered life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Mid-decade, and the cold war had begun to thaw, with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev (who has green leanings), introducing policies of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) into the Soviet Union. The new, more liberal political climate encouraged activists within the USSR to become bolder, and the ensuing years saw 'legitimate' protests about pollution and the environment advanced as covers for democratic agitation. Then in 1986, just as everyone was starting to worry a little less about nuclear weapons, Chernobyl reminded everyone why they should worry about civil nuclear power. The disaster underlined for many environmentalists why nuclear should never be an option, and has since made it very hard for the green movement to compromise on the issue, even in the face of climate change and the need for low-carbon energy sources. Chernobyl was prefigured, uncannily, in 1985 with the airing of classic BBC drama Edge of Darkness (starring Bob Peck, below), a six-hour epic with haunting music by Eric Clapton, which centred on the hazards of nuclear waste and wove a complex plot involving a Yorkshire detective, a CIA agent, civil servants, the nuclear industry and a green protest group called Gaia. Pure magic. Dee-dow-dow-do-do-doooo....
Yet perhaps the most defining environmental crisis of the 1980s, the real ticking timebomb, was not to be found in a heavily-guarded power station on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but in our fridges, deoderants and styrofoam burger-boxes. Collectively, the CFCs (ChloroFluoroCarbons)released by these staples of modern consumer society had increased to such a level that by 1985 a rapid thinning (or 'hole') could be detected in the Earth's ozone layer. No ozone layer, no protection from solar ultraviolet rays. More UV rays, more skin cancers. With such an obvious and direct causal link to human health - and, just as importantly, with replacements for CFCs being so relatively easy to find - the world moved with unusual speed to bring about the phasing out of ozone-depleting gases, leaving hardly any time or need for the green groups' consumer campaigns against aerosols. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 has to stand as one of the most successful pieces of environmental legislation ever (and for that matter, more effective than the Kyoto Protocol for mitigating global warming, too, since CFCs are also powerful greenhouse gases).
Ah, yes - global warming. Better known in the Eighties as simply 'the Greenhouse Effect'. But it wasn't until the late 1980s that the subject really got any public attention. That all changed when a certain James Hansen of NASA appeared before Congress to testify about the severity of likely future climate change in 1988. That certainly caught people's attention, and set the ball rolling for the formation of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. But such events are quite another story.
For now, this account of Eighties environmentalism will stop at 1988. That's because 1989 (and 1990) deserve a special section of their own in Green History. They were the years when public environmental awareness rose to new heights, and when it seemed - just for a moment - that the greens might actually win...
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