|
|
|
JENNY PRICE
remaking american
ENVIRONMENTALISM:
ON THE BANKS OF THE L.A. RIVER
This essay was presented originally as the Lynn W. Day Distinguished Lecture in Forest and Conservation History, Forest History Society and Duke University, November 12, 2007.
| I CAME OF AGE with the glory days of environmentalism. In the 1960s and '70s, environmentalism's Heroic Age. In what historians like to call the "second wave," when the movement evolved to become a self-recognized movement, under one banner, and captured the hearts and imaginations of a mass population of Americans. As a nature girl in a white house in a suburb of St. Louis, I, like many upper-middle-class baby boomers, embraced saving the earth as nothing less than a mission to save our souls. I read Edward Abbey. I was at the forefront of recycling. I fantasized about blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam—as I imagine at least some of you, too, must have. But even if, like my parents, for example, you embraced environmentalism with enthusiasm but with a tad less religious fervor, and you were a thinking liberal citizen who wrote checks to the Sierra Club and Audubon Society not because you wanted to live in the Alaskan wilds in a cabin you built yourself off wild caribou you caught yourself, but still you wanted to save the Alaskan wilds for the people who might wish to do so, and for the caribou themselves, and if you also were a person who generally found persuasive the argument that we should breathe clean air and drink clean water ... well, back in those halcyon days, for so many people who leaned at least a little left in their politics, environmentalists were the good guys.1 |
1 |
|
But environmentalism has since gotten complicated. As we know, it has since come under serious attack. In the 1980s and 1990s, of course, the Reagan Right and the Wise Use advocates waged a major backlash, which inspired in part what historians call the "third wave," in which some mainstream environmental groups began to advocate market-based incentives. Since the late 1980s, the environmental movement also has drawn a rash of vehement criticism from within—and this is what I am far more interested in today. It has drawn major fire from good guys not only from within but from without—critiques that some have since labeled the "fourth wave," and that would dwarf (and greatly amplify) much of the grumbling within the movement about market-based incentives. |
2 |
|
Let me review a few of the greatest hits. In 1990, two different groups of civil rights leaders send what will become famous letters to ten of the most prominent environmental organizations—the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, and others—that accuse this Group of Ten of racist hiring practices and, more generally, of ignoring the economic needs and environmental hazards faced by "working people in general and people of color in particular." The letters ride the crest of a wave of grassroots campaigns in the late 1980s against the siting of toxic waste facilities in poor minority communities. This all culminates in 1991 in the formal establishment of the environmental justice movement at the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.2 |
. . . |
There are about 7665 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
