Environmental Movement

By whamburger05

  • Population 1 Billion

  • Population 2 Billion

  • Founding of IUCN

    Summary description: The International Union for Conservation of Nature is what their name stands for. The IUCN, supports and takes part in national conservation legislation, policies, and practices through its member organizations, and promotes environmental scientific research. The IUCN's efforts are split up into a number of theme-based programs, covering everything from commerce and biodiversity to preserving forests and wetlands.

  • Population 3 Billion

  • Agent Orange

    Agent orange is a deforesting chemical used during Vietnam because a lot of the north Vietnamese would smuggle things through the dense forest and brush, so the Americans would try to use this foliage destroyer to have better visibility. What they didn’t take into account was what this chemical did to people and how it affected them

  • Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring Published

    This book had a huge impact on how we look at the environmental harm that pesticides cause such as DDT. She was mocked for being a woman who was studying these types of topics.

  • Minamata

    According to research from the University of Saskatchewan (USask), one of the worst environmental catastrophes in history, the mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, may have been brought on by an as-yet-unstudied type of mercury released directly from a chemical factory. Up until 1968, industrial trash including mercury from the Chisso Corporation's chemical plant was dumped in Minamata Bay.

  • Nixon signs NEPA

    This would establish the first national policy/law for the environment in which the government would have a focus tackling negatively impactful environmental issues as well as having a mix of ecocentric and anthropocentric ideology in mind rather than technocentric view

  • The First Earth Day

    Earth day was established to commemorate the issues that the environment faces, to which humans can make efforts to improve to better the Earth. It was founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson that would later become an international holiday

  • Gaia Hypothesis

    According to the Gaia hypothesis, self-regulating feedback processes involving species closely tethered to their surroundings keep the Earth's surface in a habitable state. The idea is supported by a number of observations: Due to the activities of life, the atmosphere is in an extreme state of thermodynamic disequilibrium, although some features of its composition are astonishingly constant. The Earth's surface currently offers nearly ideal circumstances for the prevalent creatures.

  • Papua New Guinea's Panguna Mine War

  • Oil Embargo

    When the US stopped oil trade with OPEC after a dramatic rise in cost, they had to conserve energy which advanced alternative efficient energy which can be seen in automobiles

  • Population 4 Billion

  • Whaling

    Greenpeace began the first anti-whaling campaign in history on April 27, 1975, from Vancouver's docks. The trip would eventually assist in establishing a global ban on commercial whaling and serve as the catalyst for the "Save the Whales" movement.

  • Love Canal Disaster

    William T. Love had an idea for a city to build a canal for underground electrical currents, however this failed, and the unearthed area would become a waste dump. From there, owners of the dump would “patch” it up and sell it to the city, to which future houses built of the fragile foundation of waste would face an explosion of corrosion to the land

  • Valley of the Drums

    Industries in Kentucky dumped several thousand drums of waste into what would become the valley of drums. These drums would be buried in trenches and holes and cause imbalances of chemical substances that would take a while to clean up

  • Bhopal

    On December 3, 1984, a chemical leak in the Indian city of Bhopal led to the Bhopal tragedy. An estimated 15,000–20,000 people perished as a result. It was the worst industrial accident in history at the time. A few hundred dollars in compensation were given to many of the about 500,000 survivors who experienced respiratory issues, eye irritation or blindness, and other illnesses as a result of being exposed to the deadly gas.

  • Chernobyl

    Due to a problem with the design of a reactor near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union, the accident of Chernobyl occurred. The official count for deaths was 31 people. Human error also played into effect here because certain people running the reactors had disagreements on how far they should push the reactor.

  • Population 5 Billion

  • Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act

    Act that banned the dumping of toxic material into the ocean, specifically that would degrade or negatively impact human health/oceanic life.

  • Kyoto

    The Kyoto Protocol has 192 Parties as of right now. The Kyoto Protocol, in short, operationalizes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by requiring industrialized nations and economies in transition to set and achieve individual emission reduction targets for greenhouse gases (GHG). The Convention only requires such nations to develop mitigation-related policies and procedures and to report on a regular basis.

  • Population 6 Billion

  • Documentary film An Inconvenient Truth released

    In addition to the numerous awards it won, it is undeniable that the film increased people's awareness of climate change. The movie "had a significantly greater impact on public opinion and public knowledge of global climate change than any scientific article or report," according to a well-known climate scientist. There is evidence, however, that it may have had an unforeseen influence, polarizing American public opinion on climate change, 11 years after its publication.

  • Deep Water Horizon oil spill

    This was the biggest oil spill in history to which 4 million barrels of oil were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico causing 8.8 billion dollars' worth of damage that would take a long time to clean up fully and resort to several chemicals to be used in offense

  • Population 7 Billion

  • Paris Climate Agreement

    It was established recently and is an organization that seeks to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent growing climate changes, specifically no more than 2 degrees celsius.

  • Population 8 Billion (projected)