🎯 Context

Last lesson covered how perspectives change over time and how to read a behaviour-time graph without over-claiming.

This lesson is about the environmental movement itself, and the seven kinds of influence the syllabus names. You will work on three of them here: the media, an individual, and an author. The other four come in the next lesson.

By the end you should be able to explain what the environmental movement is, and give a named example with dates and detail for each of those three categories.

Phase 1: What the environmental movement is

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1.1.10 The development of the environmental movement has been influenced by individuals, literature, the media, major environmental disasters, international agreements, new technologies and scientific discoveries.

Select one example of influence from each of the following categories.

• An individual environmental activist

• An author

• The media—for example, Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), No Impact Man (2009), Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet (2021)

• An environmental disaster—for example, Minamata disaster (1956), Chernobyl disaster (1986), Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011)

• International agreements—for example, Rio Earth Summit (1992) and Rio+20 (2012); 2015 and 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COP 21, COP 27)

• Technological developments—for example, the Green Revolution, reduction of energy inputs and enteric fermentation, plant-based meats

• Scientific discovery—for example, pesticide and biocide toxicity, species loss, habitat degradation

Examples may also be recent, from indigenous cultures or local/global events of student interest.

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The environmental movement has no membership list, no headquarters and no leader. It is a loose alliance of individuals, organisations and ideas pushing in roughly the same direction, which is why nobody can say exactly when it started or who is in it.

That matters for the way you are examined on it. The statement lists seven kinds of influence, and you need one named example from each. A name on its own is worth very little. A good example does three things:

• Names it precisely, with a date.
• Says what it actually was, in a sentence.
• Says what changed afterwards, which is the part most answers leave out.

The table below is your record for the whole of this sub-unit. You will fill three rows this lesson and four next lesson. Keep it, because it is the thing you will revise from.

1. Explain why the environmental movement cannot be dated to a single year in the way that a law can.

2. An answer that names an example but says nothing about what changed after it earns very few marks. Explain why.

Phase 2: The media, one photograph and its echo

Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph, 24 December 1968

Artemis II Earthset photograph, 6 April 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVAPn4jIG4E&ab_channel=TheSchoolofLife

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8, the astronaut Bill Anders turned his camera away from the Moon, which was the point of the mission, and photographed the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. The image became known as Earthrise.

It showed people something they had never seen: the whole planet at once, small, finite, and protected by an atmosphere thin enough to look like a haze. The media carried it everywhere, and it is now routinely described as the picture that launched the environmental movement.

Hold that claim up to the dates. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published in 1962. The first Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970. The Stockholm Conference, the first international environmental meeting, met in 1972 and created the United Nations Environment Programme. Earthrise sits inside that sequence rather than starting it.

Fifty-eight years later the crew of Artemis II, on the first crewed flight around the Moon since 1972, deliberately took the reverse photograph on 6 April 2026: Earth setting behind the lunar horizon. They called it Earthset.

1. Identify what Earthrise showed people that they had not seen before.

2. Earthrise is often called the image that started the environmental movement. Using the dates in the text, explain why that claim needs qualifying.

3. Suggest one reason why the Artemis II crew chose to take the same photograph in reverse.

4. A photograph changes how people feel rather than what they know. Explain why that can still influence a movement.

Phase 3: Two individuals, and which row each belongs in

The syllabus asks for one individual environmental activist. That word does work. An activist campaigns, organises or protests. Someone who changes what millions of people think, without ever campaigning, is influential in a different way and belongs in a different row.

Read both of the following and decide which row each one belongs in. A third individual arrives in the next phase.

David Attenborough