The Growth of the Environment as a Political Issue in Britain

Various commentators have expressed their subjective impressions that ‘the environment’ emerged suddenly as a political issue. That the number of groups, journals and books relating to ‘the environment’ has dramatically increased is indisputable. What is not clear, however, is whether the increase has been in the awareness of relationships between problems which could then be subsumed under the general heading ‘the environment’ or whether increased attention has been paid to the component problems. It is possible that the interest in issues such as water pollution, resource conservation and air pollution was of long standing and that the only change was a growing popularization of the label ‘environmental’ by those who wrote about the subject in the press. The object of this study is to test the latter hypothesis by means of a content analysis of The Times .