Cultural Change for the We the People Amendment
[fourth in a series]

Yevgenia Nayberg
Human beings are undeniably part of and dependent on nature. History is filled with stories of people and groups who understood this reality and of others who ignored it, who didn’t care, or who arrogantly believed nature could be made subordinate to humanity.
Religious texts, mythologies and hymes on ecological awareness date back 5000 years. Caring for the natural world, the sacredness of wilderness and the need to control human’s negative impact on nature are among the earliest recorded human stories. “The goal of life is living in agreement with nature,” stated Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher.
Conversely, anthropological evidence dating back even further documents animal and plant extinctions from human activity. Nomadic communities migrated after exhausting local resources, and once agriculture emerged, destruction of land, water, and climate increased.. Intensive farming led to deforestation, land degradation,soil erosion and desertification in the early civilizations of the Southern Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, Central America, Peru, and Northern Africa.
The Industrial Revolution sparked a public reaction that helped give birth to the modern environmental movement. Massive coal-fueled factories in Great Britain, and later, the United States, produced unprecedented pollution, leading to the first first large-scale environmental laws in 1863 in Britain. The Revolution also sparked a deeper critique of industrial capitalism’s role in destroying the natural world.
The environmental movement is not easy to define given its global reach. Even within the United States, the focus of this piece, there is enormous diversity and range of organizations, individuals, missions, beliefs, goals, strategies, tactics and cultural elements. Any summary description of and cultural lessons learned from it, even from a U.S.-centric perspective, will be vastly incomplete.