Environmental Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

Author(s): Christine Meisner Rosen

Source: Environmental History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 362-364
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Forest History Society and American
Society for Environmental History
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473094
Accessed: 04-01-2018 09:57 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Forest History Society, Oxford University Press, American Society for Environmental
History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Environmental History

This content downloaded from 103.98.135.2 on Thu, 04 Jan 2018 09:57:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
362 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (APRIL 2007)

CHRISTINE MEISNER ROSEN

environmental sustainability
in the twenty-first century
THE FILM Who Killed the Electric Car? concerns the life and death of the EV-i,
the electric car that General Motors developed and began leasing to Californians
in 1996 to meet the requirements of the state's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate
and then in 2002 brutally and quite literally destroyed, after the California Air
Resources Board rolled back the measure in response to pressure from the auto,
oil, and fuel-cell industries. It is one of a pair of documentaries released last
summer (the other was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) that, along with
Hurricane Katrina, drowning polar bears, and the skyrocketing price of oil, seem
to have finally awakened the American public's concern about global climate
change and our society's addiction to the fossil fuels that cause it. A surprisingly
instructive as well as an entertaining film, I found as I watched it that my mind
was racing with questions about the boundaries of the environmental history
field, how we communicate our findings, and why we do what we do.
The boundary issue that sprang to my mind as I watched the film had to do
with where we should draw the line between the past and the present. I teach
MBA courses on green corporate environmental strategy and green energy. I kid
you not when I say that the last ten years have been a time of incredible change in
the sustainable business field. We are on the cusp, possibly, of either catastrophic
disruptions in our planet's climate and biological ecosystems that will likely lead
to chaos and conflict within human society-or major transitions in business and
global markets that will lead us to environmental sustainability in our industrial
system, greatly improving our chances of achieving social, economic, and political
stability. Many developments have taken place over the past few years in how
corporate managers view the opportunities and risks inherent in meeting society's
growing need for solutions to our mounting environmental problems as well as
in how nonprofit organizations pressure and partner with businesses to help bring
about these solutions.1 Together with a broad array of ambitious environmental
policy initiatives with global impacts, mostly in the European Union, as well as
the Bush administration's perverse efforts to weaken environmental regulation,
changing consumption patterns in China, India, and elsewhere around the globe,
and emerging shifts in consumer values, these developments are promoting the
transition to sustainability, as well as blocking it.2 The creation and demise of
California's Zero Emission Vehicle mandate and GM's EV-i are just tiny
manifestations of a hugely interesting, important, and confusing emerging
transition of global significance and scope. But most of the changes that are giving
rise to this transition are very recent-and many are ongoing. Do we have the

Christine Meisner Rosen, "Environmental Sustainability in the Twenty-first Century,"

Environmental History 12 (April 2007): 362-64.

This content downloaded from 103.98.135.2 on Thu, 04 Jan 2018 09:57:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 RECOMMENDED FILMS | 363

? Sony Pictures Classics. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest.

The EV-1 funeral, in Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), directed by Chris Paine. Photograph by Matt
Bohling.

temporal distance and perspective to study them as historians? Or can we only

report on them, like newspaper reporters and documentary makers? Insight into
these issues is needed now, not twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now. What
special understandings can we offer as historians?
Other questions that flashed through my brain as I watched Who Killed the
Electric Car? had to do with how we communicate our research. The scenes of
people trying desperately to save their beloved EV-is from GM's car crushing
machines were so effectively infuriating, that even I, jaded as I am, found myself
thinking that conventional historical research and the writing of articles and
books were now passe, a distraction from what we really need to do-which at
that moment seemed to be that we should all become documentary filmmakers!
(A thought I have also had while watching some of Ken Burns's documentaries.)
But then I thought again. This is a nonissue. Environmental historians need to
be open to working with the new media, but the written word is still a beautifully
effective communication device. What is most important is the quality of our
research and the intelligence and sensitivity with which we interpret and present
it to an audience, whether it be in a lecture, a paper, a book, or a movie.
The third kind of question that flashed through my head as I was watching
Who Killed the Electric Car? had to do with whether we should follow the lead of
its makers and consciously embrace, as historians, a role in helping bring about
the hoped for transition to environmentally sustainable industrial production
and consumption. What should we be doing in our work-what can we do-to help

This content downloaded from 103.98.135.2 on Thu, 04 Jan 2018 09:57:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
364 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (APRIL 2007)

bring about a transition to sustainable business? Is this kind of commitment a

form of bias that will undermine the quality of our work by destroying our
objectivity and encouraging us to oversimplify our arguments to reach the largest
possible audience-or will it add energy and urgency to our work and so motivate
us to improve our analysis and make it more compelling?
I'd like to conclude by answering these questions. Even though historians will
undoubtedly have much more objectivity and historical perspective fifty or a
hundred years from now, I think it would be a good thing if more of us were to
investigate the history of what is taking place right now (and over the last few
years) in business, in the nonprofit sector, and in government policy that is paving
the way, or standing in the way, or complicating the path toward environmental
sustainability. These developments raise many extremely interesting and complex
issues for historians who want to explore the dynamics and limits of change in
modern society. And yes, there is an urgency about the subject. I'd like to think
that we environmental historians will be able to provide insightful, objective,
historical analysis that will help move this transition, in all its ambiguous and
controversial complexity, forward.

Christine Meisner Rosen is associate professor at the Haas School of Business

and Director of the American Studies Program at the University of California
Berkeley. She is working on a book, To Quell the Raging Waste: A History of the
American Response to Industrial Pollution 1840-1930. Her article, "The Role of
Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Modernization of the Meat Packing
Industry, 1865-1880," will be published in Enterprise and Society in June 2007.

NOTES
i. For pioneering overviews and cases see: Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter
Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston, New York,
London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999); lohn Elkington, Cannibals with Forks: The
Triple Bottom Line of 21st-century Business (Gabriola Island, BC Canada, Stony Creek,
CT: New Society Publishers, 1998); Andrew J. Hoffman, Competitive Environmental
Strategy: A Guide to the Changing Business Landscape (Washington DC: Island Press,
2000); and Charles 0. Holliday Jr., Stephan Schmidheiny, and Philip Watts, Walking
the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development (Sheffield, UK and San
Francisco: Greenleaf Publishing Limited and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002);
For further information and breaking news see: greenbiz.com and the World Business
Council for Sustainable Development (http://www.wbcsd.org/templates/
TemplateWBCSD5/layout.asp?MenuID=i).
2. Among the more innovative and potentially impactful EU environmental policies are
the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) initiative, the Waste
Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) takeback initiative, the Restriction of
the use of certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) initiative, and the policies enacted
in conjunction with the European Union's adoption of the Kyoto Climate Change
Protocol. For further information see the environmental, energy, and sustainable
development sections of EurActiv.com, the independent media portal dedicated to EU
affairs.

This content downloaded from 103.98.135.2 on Thu, 04 Jan 2018 09:57:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms