Environmental Justice for Whom? Class, New Social Movements, and the Environment: A Case Study of Greenpeace Canada, 1971-2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1970s saw an explosion of new social movement activism. From the break up of the New Left into single issue groups at the end of the 1960s came a multitude of groups representing the peace movement, environmental movement, student movement, women's movement, and gay liberation movement. This explosion of new social movement activism has been heralded as the age of new radical politics. Many theorists and activists saw, and still see, new social movements, and the issues, or identities they represent, as replacing the working class as an agent for progressive social change. This paper examines these claims through a case study of the quintessential new social movement, Greenpeace. This paper explores the history of Greenpeace Canada from 1971 to 2000 and its relationship to the working class. In order to understand the ideology behind Greenpeace, I investigate its structure, personnel, and actions. The case study illustrates important contradictions between new social movement theory and practice and how those contradictions affect the working class. In particular, Greenpeace's actions against the seal hunt, against forestry in British Columbia, and against its own workers in Toronto, demonstrate some of the historic obstacles to working out a common labour and environmental agenda. Resume Les annees 1970 ont vu une explosion d'un nouvel activisme des mouvements sociaux. La Nouvelle Gauche, en debâcle, a cede la place a une multitude de groupes aux revendications plus ciblees : soit le mouvement pour la paix, le mouvement ecologiste, le mouvement etudiant, le mouvement feministe et le mouvement de liberation des gais et lesbiennes. La febrilite du nouvel activisme des mouvements sociaux a ete presentee comme l'annonce d'une nouvelle ere de radicalisme politique. De nombreux theoriciens et activistes ont vu, et voient encore, ces nouveaux mouvements sociaux, leur identite et les questions auxquelles ils s'adressent, comme une alternative a la classe ouvriere en tant qu'agent de changement social progressiste. Cet article examine ces interpretations par l'intermediaire d'une etude de cas du nouveau mouvement social quintessenciel : Greenpeace. Il explore l'histoire de Greenpeace de 1971 jusqu'en 2000 et ses rapports avec la classe ouvriere. Afin de comprendre l'ideologie qui sous-tend Greenpeace, l'auteur a mene une enquete sur sa structure, son personnel et ses actions. Cette etude de cas met en evidence d'importantes contradictions entre la theorie et la pratique de ce mouvement social et comment ces contradictions affectent la classe ouvriere. Ainsi, les actions de Greenpeace contre la chasse aux phoques, la coupe forestiere en Colombie-Britannique et contre ses propres employes a Toronto, demontrent certains obstacles historiques a l'etablissement d'un programme repondant a la fois aux besoins des travailleurs et de l'environnement
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".