Ideas do not move in a vacuum; they need mediators like activists, politicians, experts, social organisations, and the media. All act as transmitting agents for relevant information, ideas, and values. What is required is more than a mere placing of ideas into a different context. A willingness of the receiving society to accept the new ideas and values, absorb them, and adjust them to their specific circumstances is also needed. Such transnational mediators are observed and analysed in this issue. Environmental history, as the essays argue, cannot be fully understood without reflection on their transnational, indeed transcontinental, dimensions.
This special issue is the outcome of the symposium “Going Green. The Emergence and Entanglements of The Green Movement in Australia, the USA, and Germany — 1970 to Present Day” held at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, 2013. The contributors met for a couple of days in order to allow participants to discuss papers that they had prepared and distributed beforehand and then refined the form and structure of this issue together.
The following structure was defined at the symposium and is followed in this collection:
1. Scientists and Explorers — Personal Dialogue across Borders 2. Institutions — Tensions and Coalition Building in the Transfer Process 3. Leading Activists — Globalised Intellectual Debates
This special issue addresses the following questions:
1. How did leading activists, politicians, experts, media, and social organisations mediate and direct the flow of transnational environmental concepts? 2. In which directions did the supranational diffusion of knowledge and ideas communicated by those mediators develop, thus shaping movements and institutions around the globe? How did these actors “speak” to movements and link them globally? 3. What contributions did scientific experts make to the transfer of environmental concepts? What new forms of expertise are now brought to bear on environmental problems? 4. How did social movements, politicians, and bureaucrats in different nation-states interpret and then act on ideas transferred from elsewhere? 5. What were the temporal dimensions, and the local/global nexus critical to the reception?
Table of Contents
Introduction
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Chris McConville: Transcontinental and Transnational Links in Social Movements and Environmental Policies in the Twentieth Century (pages 331–338)
1. Scientists and Explorers — Personal Dialogue across Borders
Anna-Katharina Wöbse: Separating Spheres: Paul Sarasin and his Global Nature Protection Scheme (pp. 339–351)
Sabine Sauter: Australia's Dust Bowl: Transnational Influences in Soil Conservation and the Spread of Ecological Thought (pp. 352–365)
Emma Shortis: “Who can resist this guy? Jacques Cousteau, Celebrity Diplomacy, and the Environmental Protection of the Antarctic (pp. 366–380)
2. Institutions — Tensions and Coalition Building in the Transfer Process
Chris McConville: Dams, Freeways and Aerospace: How Australian Environmentalists responded to Transnationalism and World Heritage, 1964–1984 (pp. 381–396)
Frank Zelko: The Umweltmulti Arrives: Greenpeace and Grass Roots Environmentalism in West Germany (pp. 397–413)
Christopher Rootes: Exemplars and Influences: Transnational Flows in the Environmental Movement (pp. 414–431)
3. Leading Activists — Globalised Intellectual Debates
Astrid Mignon Kirchhof: Finding Common Ground in Transnational Peace Movements (pp. 432–449)