Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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)
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
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
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)
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