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The classic late 19th/early 20th century environmentalism articulated by John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and others didn't stray far from protecting the land and the species that live upon it. But as the 20th century wanes, the field has become far more crowded with issues, and complicated by our technological society. In our first edition of 2000, E offers a progress report on some of the movement's emerging trends. These issues, on the fringes a few years ago are, for better or worse, moving into the mainstream, and their momentum can't be denied.
Recycling: Source Reduction and the Rise of Reuse
There's no question that, despite some skeptical articles, recycling is a 1990s success story. In a 1997 cover article entitled "Talking Trash," E noted that home-based recycling is favored by 73 percent of Americans, and they've been putting their blue bins on the line. The most recent 1999 Environmental Protection Agency report puts the national recycling rate at 28 percent, up from just 6.6 percent in 1970. "There was a steady increase in recycling in the early 1990s, but the growth rate has slowed," says Kelly Lease, a program associate at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. The kind of recycling abuses that saw bin-collected paper, plastic and metal thrown into landfills have mostly been curtailed, Lease says. And reuse, the second of the three Rs, is also on the increase. "That's where we'll see a lot of the growth in coming years," she adds.
John Ryan, who is research director at Northwest Environment Watch and author of a new book entitled Seven Wonders, is glad to see what he calls a "big push" on recycling, but he's not sure it deserves its reputation as "poster child for ecological living." In his book, Ryan celebrates simple reuse options like taking books out of the library and renting videos instead of buying them.
One of the most effective ways to save resources is to make producers responsible for their packaging, as E noted in a 1997 piece entitled "The Producer Pays." The big news then was Germany's new and stringent packaging law, which has become a dramatic success. The national law has since been copied by the Netherlands, in the so-called Dutch Packaging Covenant; unlike the...