Changes in the American landscape, in its physical and spatial order, reflect discrete social and economic changes, the result of the fundamental dialectic between environment and culture. Environmental harms cut across geographic boundaries and are both a cause and an effect of adverse societal conditions like declining social capital, political disaffection, rising economic inequality, racial segregation, and excessive privatization. Increasingly communities are transforming their environmental problems into an opportunity to address underlying social and economic problems, and they are using the lever of environmental protection strategies to push for systemic changes in the way people relate to each other and to the environment. As the four case studies demonstrate, the immediacy, persistence, and pervasiveness of environmental degradation spur social action and lend themselves to systems-oriented solutions. This is the great lesson of these case studies, and of environmentalism itself.
Civic environmentalism is the emerging model of social and environmental activism.
It is a dynamic and transformative enterprise that moves beyond top-down, centralized law and regulation to planning and implementation at the community and regional levels. It embraces an ecosystem approach to social problem solving, with the environment as both a prime subject and a principal metaphor of civic action. Civic environmentalism does not just focus on specific media or pollutants, as traditional environmental regulation does. Personal relationships and networks, neighborhoods and livelihoods, across geographic, cultural, and political borders, are the fuel that powers civic environmental projects and give rise to strategies backed by social investment, such open space taxes, brownfield cleanups, conservation easements, and mass transit. Civic environmentalism links urban, suburban, and rural constituencies in the pursuit of shared goals and visions, and enforces the notion that our fates are bound together by place and time.