The historical roots of ecological modernization

To be able to understand the present political dynamics of ecological modernization we will have to go back to at least the early 1970s when the environment quite suddenly became a political topic in Western societies. Since that day environmental discourse has taken many twists and turns, from the collective concern about the prophecies of doom of a coming resource crisis that would bring the whole world to a grinding halt, to the localized concern over pollution of water, soil, and air; from the concerns about the possibility that the modern world will come to an end with the bang of a nuclear catastrophe to the idea that Western civilization is slowly ruining its heritage now cathedrals and sculptures crumble away as the consequence of acid rains. The historical sequence of emblematic issues is often retold in the literature. Yet there is a parallel story that is not often told. While the alleged catastrophes made the headlines and have always dominated both the academic and popular literature, there was another process that laid the foundations of the present age of ecological modernization. Here I want to reconstruct the specific argumentative inter play between the state, the environmental movement, and key expert organizations that made ecological modernization into such a powerful force. Hence I have no interest in trying to summarize all the complex currents of environmental politics and ecological thinking over the last twenty-five years. Likewise, it should be obvious that this argumentative interplay should be understood against the background of changing socio-economic parameters, such as the changing political and economic climate, and the confrontation with the unprecedented scaling up and speeding up in industrial (and particularly chemical) production after World War Two. What we will focus on here is the institutional process out of which the new discourse of ecological modernization could derive its social support. This institutional genealogy will help to explain the specific emphasis and orientations that now characterize ecological modernization and the dynamics of the debates on the regulation of emblematic issues like acid rain in the 1980s or global environmental problems in the 1990s.