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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement
Slide Nr 1From the first photo of our planet through to the ‘Greta Effect’, these are the influential events, actions and people that shaped the environmental movement.
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 21968: Earthrise – The 1968 ‘Earthrise’ photo, taken during the Apollo 8 space flight, wasn’t the first photograph of our planet. However, taken in colour with the moon’s surface in the foreground, the awe-inspiring photo set our small planet against an endless black background. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later said: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” This, added to ‘The Blue Marble’ photo (taken from Apollo 17’s 1972 spacecraft) of an illuminated global Earth, became two of the most famous images in history – and ultimately helped kickstart the modern environmental movement by revealing Earth for what it is: a single, fragile planet in which everything is connected. [Photo via Wikimedia Commons]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 31974: Human Population Reaches 4 Billion – In 1800, after more than 5,000 years of civilisation, the human population on Earth reached one billion. It was the middle of the industrial revolution. In 1930 the population reached two billion, and in 1960 it climbed to three billion. By 1975, there were four billion people on Earth, the same year scientist Wallace Broecker used the term “global warming” in the title of one of his scientific papers.
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 41986: Is Nuclear Energy The Answer? – For some people, nuclear power was the answer to the world’s energy and environmental challenges. Until, that is, the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in today’s Ukraine. Add in the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan in 2011, and societal trust that nuclear was the future of energy generation took a massive blow.
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 51988: Thatcher’s Moment Of Clarity – Back in 1988, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had a reputation for being stubborn and ideological, looking rigidly to the free market for answers. She was, however, also a trained scientist. In a 1988 speech, she provided leadership, unequivocally laying out the dangers of human-made climate change: “We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope.” On this, she was right. [Photo via Wikimedia Commons]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 7The Ubiquitous Polar Bear? – It was for many years an iconic image of the effects of global warming: a solitary polar bear stranded on floating ice in the Arctic. Such photos were – and are – arresting: magnificent but endangered, white polar bears floating on sea ice that shouldn’t be breaking up. The Arctic is heating up faster than anywhere else on Earth, and it’s shrinking 14% every decade. But with floods, storms and fires ravaging parts of the planet, there’s no need to see Arctic sea ice nowadays to witness climate change. [Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 91997: Toyota Prius – As a symbol of the technological direction of travel, the ground-breaking Toyota Prius was a prime example of the transition from fossil-fuelled power to something more environmentally friendly. It was the first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid vehicle, hitting the market in 1997 – the same year as the Kyoto Protocol set targets for industrialised nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. [Photo: Mytho88/Wikimedia Commons]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 102000: T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth – This was one of the first widely read literary novels focusing on global warming. In its dystopian future, the world of 2025 was already ravaged by torrential downpours and scorching winds. Interestingly, alongside massive species loss and deforestation, scientific advancements gave humans a life expectancy of more than a 100 years. [Photo via Wikimedia Commons]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 142005: Kyoto Protocol – The Kyoto Protocol is one of those ‘things’ most people have heard of but can never quite work out what it is, what it does. It was adopted in the Japanese city at the end of 1997, and it extended the UNFCCC, mentioned above. It set out that different countries have different capabilities and responsibilities in combating climate change. It came into force in 2005 with a monitoring and verification system to hold countries accountable. [Photo: UNclimatechange/Flickr]
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 162010+: Festivals Go Green – Another sign of the times that ‘going green’ is the here, the now and the future is that all the best summer festivals are desperate to show off their sustainable credentials. Glastonbury has evolved into an impressive eco-conscious leader, but in recent years a number of festivals have been founded that owe their very existence to being green. Denmark’s Northside, Italy’s Terraforma and France’s We Love Green have sustainability at the very heart of what they do.
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20 Moments That Changed The Eco Movement.
Slide Nr 172015: In (And Out) Of The Paris Climate Agreement – In 2015, it looked as though the world had reached a historic agreement – when 190 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global temperatures to well below 2°C, or 1.5°C if possible. And then Donald Trump became US president. In 2019, he started the formal withdrawal procedure. Just to make the US exit more dramatic, the process won’t be finalised until the day after the November 2020 US presidential election. Until then, we won’t know whether the US is in or out of the Paris Climate Agreement door. [Photo: UNclimatechange/Flickr]
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