High-profile ecological catastrophes over the past few years provided tangible evidence of the global problem and gave impetus to the growing political movement.
"The news media," says Stavins, "is event-driven, not subject driven. [Catastrophes are] not what makes environmentalists care about these issues, but it is what makes the average American care about them."
Stavins points to three important incidents responsible for the current explosion of environmental consciousness.
In the summer of 1988, untreated human waste and used medical syringes washed up on beaches across the Eastern seaboard.
That same summer, record sizzling temperatures set off warning calls about a coming crisis in global warming.
"Rightly or wrongly, that was portrayed by the news media as tied into the greenhouse effect," Stavins says. When NASA scientist James Hanson testified before Congress in June, 1988, that the ecological phenomenon was at the root of the hot weather, the issue of global warming burst into the mainstream media.
Lastly, the recent Exxon Valdez oil spill spurned concern about the pollution of the oceans and the threat to marine wildlife, as well as drawing attention to the underside of industrial expansion.
"The dramatic nature of the photographs [from the Valdez spill] has had a profound effect on the perceptions of the American public about the severity of environmental issues," Stavins says.
Search for a New Issue
All this happened at a time when the American public was searching for a new cause around which to orient its political views. The end of the Cold War has left a gap in American political life that many think now is being filled by environmental activism.
"One of the things that has spurned this on," says Robert M. Gogan, head of the student environmentalist group at the School of Education, "is the seeming thaw of the Cold War. People ask `so what's left as the big issue?" Many of them, Gogan adds, have concluded that it is saving the planet from ecological collapse.
"We operate in a crisis mentality. U.S. culture seems to be `let's wait until it's really bad and then make a big fanfare of it and give it a lot of attention,'" says Gogan.
And just as Cold War consciousness told Americans that they were responsible for fighting the spread of communism around the world, the ever-strengthening environmental movement calls on them to stop ecological destruction beyond the shores of the United States.
"It would have been unheard of 20 years ago for people [in America] to be concerned about the Amazon River Basin," says Wilson, "Now, it regularly makes the cover of Newsweek and Time magazine."