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This article provides information about the socio-political implication of green peace movement:
Green Peace is an organisation that has garnered world attention and new member through its rather unorthodox approach and techniques meant to call attention to the degradation of the earth’s ecosystem. In other words, Green Peace is about ringing an ecological fire alarm, waking mass consciousness to the true dimensions of our global predicament, pointing out the problems and defining their nature.
Image Courtesy : upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/Greenpeace.jpg
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The activities of Green peace could bring the issues of environment and sustainable development into the forefront. Many developed countries around the world are increasingly integrating environmental protection into the mainstream of economic and political policy. Governments and bureaucracies, industry and professional associations unions and workplaces are moving together to put ecologically sustainable development into practice.
Green peace doesn’t necessarily have the solutions to these problems and certainly isn’t equipped to put them into practice. This requires the combined efforts of governments, corporations, public institutions and environmentalists and demands a high degree of cooperation and collaboration. Many developing countries already started research to solve the problems, which affect employment and environment. They began promoting green jobs that may not deteriorate the environment.
In 1990s more and more developed countries began to concern about the rapid deterioration of environment and the unsustainable development practices adopted world over. Some of them even began policy initiatives to restrain this. Norway, Netherlands, European Commission and Japan are some of the countries implementing strategic plans which placed the environment in the policy mainstream. They advocated the adoption of new development model to make the economic-ecological relationship a positive instead of negative one.
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The key for doing this lies in the creation of a new clean technology base. For example, in West Germany, drastic action was taken to reduce power plant emissions by 90% over 10 years period in order to save the destruction of their forests from acid rain. Far from acting as an impediment to economic growth, this greening of energy industry has proved an extra ordinary stimulus.
In many of the developed countries, it has been noticed that in spite of the economic growth on the one hand unemployment does not stop growing. Furthermore although a series of programmes have been established and legal measures taken, there was a deterioration of environment situation. Attempts were made to find ways that may generate more employment along with environment regeneration.
It has been found that adopting an economic and political- ecologist policy may reduce job opportunities in certain sectors but in certain other sectors it may create more opportunities, more than what have lost. For example, renewable energy with respect to nuclear power, management of the demand for water, repair measures and rational irrigation as opposed to large hydraulic works, the development of public transport and the railways rather than automobiles, recycling rubbish instead of dumping wastes, etc.
There are also other measures such as forestry activities designed to reduce the risk of fires, surveillance of natural and national parks, environmental studies and inspections, waste water treatment, anti-pollution control and measurement in industry, eco-audit and environmental management systems in companies etc. which not only have a positive environmental impact, also create employment.
If a job or industry is to be characterised as sustainable in the long term then it must have the overall effect of reducing the negative impacts on the environment. According to Sarah Bloustein, environmental sector is a term used to collectively describe the companies involved in business designs to limit negative environmental impacts. ILO has identified nine broad sub-sectors of environment industries.