Conversations on Europe: The History of Environmentalism: Right, Left, Center

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Venue:Webinar

For this first Conversations on Europe of Fall semester, join the University of Pittsburgh for an interactive virtual round table discussion on the history of environmentalism: Right, Left, Center.

Reactionary? Progressive? Localist? Globalist? How do our climate politics line up? This panel will explore the history of environmentalism as a way of thinking about the spectrum of political positions in climate response. Recall that the oil shock, acid rain, nuclear energy protests at Wyhl, concern over DDT, all in the 1970s generated a new environmental activism: citizens initiatives in civil disobedience against business and state.

In Germany and elsewhere very disparate interests came together to form what was understood as a new progressive political party: the Greens. Yet was it so progressive? Many people in the party came from a far-right political position, and with their entry into parliament, the Greens did not fit easily into the historic right-left spectrum. Such is not new. Indeed, environmental concerns have a longer and even a predominately conservative history. Romanticism praised pre-industrial bucolic patriarchal society. While climate change denialism may have become recently a hallmark of conservative politics, yet back to nature, back to the soil, survivalism, and prepping, are restoring environmentalism increasingly to conservative politics. And as with the Greens before, movements like Fridays for Futures and Last Generation do not align with any existing political party.

Moderator: Randall Halle, Director, European Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh

Panelists:

ImageIza Ding
Associate Professor of Political Science
Northwestern University






ImagePatrick Manning, Andrew W. Mellon
Professor of World History, Emeritus
University of Pittsburgh





ImageStephen Milder
Environmental Historian
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich

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Hosted by European Studies Center, a Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh

Co-sponsors and participating centers: The Miami-Florida Jean Monnet Center of Excellence at Florida International University, the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida, the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies at Georgia Tech, and the European Union Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union