Because historians have often been sympathetic to the goals of environmentalists, they have tended to interpret the movement somewhat uncritically. Mainstream accounts often point out flattering continuities with the progressive movement, such as a reliance on the authority of science. Biology, for example, caused progressives to discard once popular theories of human exceptionalism and to see nature not as a simple warehouse of useful resources but as a series of interlinking systems. In similar ways, environmentalists have relied on ecological studies to provide a more sophisticated understanding of how those systems were interacting.

Recently some historians have become more critical of environmentalism. One confessed, "Where once I saw a movement founded in science, now I see a utopian political program." He compared modern environmentalism to the temperance crusade at the turn of the century. Although temperance advocates were divided over how to attack alcohol abuse, the more extreme factions successfully promoted prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment. It was a utopian experiment that, in the end, was doomed to fail. Similarly, some environmental reformers have called for "global schemes of economic and political control," according to this point of view. Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich's popular book The Population Bomb (1968), for example, warned of the dire consequences of overpopulation. Ehrlich suggested that voluntary efforts at family planning were likely to fail and that the state might have to step in to control birthrates, especially in developing nations.

The parallel between the environmentalists and the temperance reformers is instructive. Progressivism, we have seen, displayed a mix of reform and control. Its middle-class and upper-middle-class advocates worried about what the unruly masses might do without the guidance of "experts." A similar tension can be seen in the environmental movement, whose professional, white-collar advocates during the 1960s and 1970s paid scant attention to the environmental problems specific to poor urban residents. Only in the 1980s did a number of new organizations focus greater attention on the effects of hazardous industrial sites on lower-class neighborhoods or the danger of pesticides to migrant workers.

1			These two links about the environmental movement offer rather different views of its origins and its prospects for the future. What does the author of the first essay perceive as the originating sources of the environmental movement? How does the controversy described at the second site answer this question? Do they share a common view of the motivations and goals of the movement? If not, how do you explain these distinctions? Do either of these authors seem to promote an ideological agenda? If so, does that agenda make their arguments more or less compelling? http://www.gbn.org/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=1125 http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-intro/