Decolonisation and Environmentalism: Bringing the Winds of Change to Global Environmental History

This article argues that the decolonisation of European empires influenced the origins and spread of environmentalism throughout the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates how many of the social movements and institutions associated with decolonistion–such as civil rights activism, the criticism of imperialism, and the growth of international nongovernmental and intergovernmental organisations–inspired and shaped environmentalism globally. The rich historical connections between decolonisation and environmentalism have been obscured because histories of American environmentalism, which predominantly shaped global histories of environmentalism, favoured ‘bottom-up’ grassroots activist viewpoints and downplayed both global influences and ‘top-down’ institutional variants of environmentalism. Adding decolonisation to the history of environmentalism, this article concludes, allows historians to integrate bottom-up social activism and top-down institutional dynamics in different parts of the world within their proper global context.