Adam Rome's "Give Earth a Chance": The Environmental Movement and the Sixties from week 9 makes an argument that historians should include environmental activism and environmental social change when writing or teaching about the 1960s with equal footing with the New Left, Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Anti-War Movement. Rome asserts that there is a link between the environmental movement and the other movements specifically with the Women's Movement, New Left, and student radicalization.  He then sets out to establish with each of those three topics how there is a link between those and environmentalism chronologically. He first establishes that they aren't just occurring because of each other, but rather were  movements that interacted while also having their own objective.

        Rome begins with  the creation of the New Left and the difficulty with having a liberal agenda politically while the country was experiencing prosperity. This need led to advocates of new liberalism to push for new ideas. Rome uses examples of many historians and politicians from this time period to link these and this seems explained best in the quote by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. of, "Instead of the quantitative liberalism of the 1930s, rightly dedicated to the struggle to secure the economic basis of life, we need now a 'qualitative liberalism' dedicated to bettering the quality of people's lives and opportunities." (Rome, 528). Rome is arguing that while environmentalism already existed, the New Left making the environment a cornerstone of their new platform increased discussion of what was problematic such as pollution. The next part of this segment highlights how presidents addressed this new environmental importance through policy and speeches that addressed quality of life especially as people now had more opportunity for leisure, there was a need for beautiful places to still exist. While the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson didn't happen because of the political sphere, its popularity forced political figures to take action. Those specific speeches and actions of primarily Kennedy and Johnson are then detailed in the article to support the link between politics and environmentalism. 

      The next section attempts to link activism by middle class women to the Environmentalism Movement. Rome starts this section with a great line about how women have been concerned with the environment since women were involved politically at all starting in the Progressive Era and thereby attempts to create a link between women's movements and environmental movements that seems similar to the argument historians often use linking women's movements to civil rights movements. (Rome, 534). The entire section here addresses why women are more likely to care about environmentalism because of their role as mother's as well as providers of safe food and water for their families. It is also interesting that Rome links women's desire to be grass-roots activists to their desire to maintain traditional expectations of being home-makers with their desire to also have their own ambitions and that the increase in college-educated housewives then contributed to the number of women who felt conflicted about their role in society. (Rome, 541). 

       The link between the countercultural movement and environmentalism seems more difficult to make and Rome attempts to link both the childhood of those counterculture members as well as the fears over the atomic bomb to create a connection. He claims that because the young adults of the 60s grew up in a time when there was leisure opportunity, they became more attracted to the outdoors and so would wish to protect it. The link with the bomb is primarily that these are young people who grew up with a fear of the world ending and so they related environmental issues to the world ending and atomic bombs. This fear of the bomb made it more important to protect against what they could have control over like trying to prevent pollution. (Rome, 542). Rome is careful here to separate the student movements of this time from the hippies and how they differed in their views on the environment. On a similar topic, there is a link drawn here between Vietnam protests and the use of chemicals like napalm to destroy Vietnam's environment for the purpose of military tactics. The young people saw what they deemed to be big government ruining nature while also fighting an unnecessary war. (Rome, 546). 

      The conclusion of the article reiterates the point that the Environmental Movement did not stand alone, but was part of a much larger group of social and political movements that occurred during the 1960s and should be taught as such. He also points out that history frequently doesn't address environmentalism until the late 1960s and 1970s and that is a mistake as evidenced in the article. He closes with a rationale for why this is important in saying that by linking these movements, not only is environmentalism given more historical importance, but it also helps people to understand the time period in a deeper way. (Rome, 554).  This article is formatted in a way that is very easy to follow the logic of the argument and leaves the reader agreeing with the argument that environmentalism was a crucial part of 1960s history.