There are three points about 'the environment' as a social phenomenon emerges. First, environmentalism in its grass-roots forms has been a vector for the selection and definition of the particular risks which have become magnets for social anxieties aroused by vulnerabilities inherent in the technological commitments in which our societies are, willy-nilly, embedded.
These processes have occurred largely outside the nexus of 'formal' political and research institutions. In particular, seen in anthropological terms, it is environmental groups-for an adventitious mixture of reasons, moral, institutional and cultural-who have helped give definition to the risks and dangers which American society now recognizes as part of its description of the 'natural'; hence their immense resonance and credibility with the public at large over the past few years.
It is through social processes like these that the political agenda of environmental concern has become defined. The particular concatenation of concrete issues-water quality, whales, wastes and so on-on which the agenda came to focus in the 1970s and 1980s had a somewhat arbitrary, opportunistic character, the product more of a set of political and social contingencies than of any magisterial advance of more 'objective' processes of understanding.
In the second place, the successes of environmentalism in its pre-1988 phase reflected realistic intuitions-vivid in the case of NGOs and green parties, more attenuated in the case of wider groups-about the ways in which life in modern complex societies is now shaped and dominated by technological and corporate-bureaucratic systems outside the agency of formal political institutions in which there is any genuine sense of shared public control. Indeed, in the US's case it is no coincidence that the gap between 'reality' and constitutional 'fiction' in this regard has become so striking that it is a topic of routine concern to such political scientists as David Marquand (1988)........
