Description: Some concerns about the environment began in the 1950s and 1960s. They were mainly directed at the impact of lead in the gasoline that cars used. These led to some regulation on car mileage. A marine biologist, Rachel Carson, in a bestselling book, Silent Spring, raised concerns about the pollution of springs and rivers, and about the environmental impact of dams. <break>An environmental movement came into existence, worried about the impact that growth would have on the future availability of some essential resources. This led to the Club of Rome and to the No-Growth Society. The EPA was created in the USA and the Clean Water Act was created in those years. President Nixon strongly endorsed a clean environment that he called a “crusade.” But the choice between jobs and a clean environment led to strong opposition to the environmental movement.<break>In the 1990s, the focus changed toward more dangers, such as the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its impact on the world temperature. The concern became an existential one, as stressed by the Stern Review, by Vice President Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, by UN Reports, and by NASA estimates of climate change. Global warming started to be seen as an existential threat. The issue could no longer be ignored.

This chapter unpacks Garrett Hardin's 1968 landmark article "The Tragedy of the Commons" by exploring the controversial views of its author and the explosive social context from which it emerged. More than an essay about resource management in the abstract, Hardin's admitted main point in "The Tragedy of the Commons," often excerpted out of many anthologies and reprints, is at its core an argument for population control. Hardin’s views veered from the mainstream and openly incorporated racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant ideas. Given this, it seems quite surprising today that the article was received so well, both popularly and in academic circles. But in reality, Hardin's success came because of his focus on population – not in spite of it. The article came at just the right time to catch on: precisely when the environmental movement neared its crest and just before his most controversial idea – population control – was about to enter the public realm as a serious matter of debate.

Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

The first part of Chapter 3 introduces the diverse roots of environmental thinking and identifies the normative core around which modern environmentalism is built. It traces the evolution of different strands of environmentalism and outlines the main debates that have shaped the evolution of environmental thinking and activism since the nineteenth century. The second part of this chapter identifies the different ways in which environmental ideas can be applied to the international realm. Employing the English School’s conceptual dyads of pluralism/solidarism and international/world society, it identifies four ideal types of how a green global order can be created: ‘Green Westphalia’ and ‘global environmental governance’, representing the pluralist and solidarist variants of a green international society; and ‘eco-localism’ and ‘eco-globalism’ as the pluralist and solidarist versions of a green world society.

We argue in this chapter that the rise of social movements and the emergence of more popular forms of management, including the appeal of the management guru should be linked. In reading these histories together, especially around the environmental movement and the work of Peter Drucker we find resources for building our Liberal Management Education.