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"The Specter of Environmentalism": Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right
James Morton Turner
| For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web project at http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/teaching/.
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| In 1982 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives released an internal report titled "The Specter of Environmentalism." Coming on the heels of Ronald Reagan's landslide election in 1980, the appointment of James Watt to the Department of the Interior, and, above all, growing frustration with environmentalism, the Republican Study Committee's report reflected a new conservative opposition to the modern environmental movement. It described environmentalists as "extremists" who posed a growing threat to the orderly development of the nation's resources. It warned that environmentalism was not just about the environment anymore; it was about "an entire outlook of broad political and social affairs." And it cast environmentalism in the keywords of a culture war: it was the rallying point for liberals, revolutionaries, and the counterculture. The report concluded that challenging environmental reform offered a political opportunity for the Republican party. Just a decade after Richard M. Nixon had signed into law the legislative foundations of the modern environmental regulatory state, the Republican party saw political advantage in opposing efforts to increase protection of the environment, specifically, an expanding and cumbersome array of federal environmental regulations. It was a strategy that played particularly well in the American West, where citizens, local and state government officials, and their political allies in Congress had grown increasingly angry at what they described as the environmentalists' "War on the West."1 |
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The modern American environmental movement has been a broad and varied affair—spanning issues from clean air and water to nuclear energy to international trade treaties and mobilizing people and organizations at both the local and the national levels. Yet much of the historical literature on American environmental politics has explored the social and cultural dimensions of environmental activism and reform while neglecting the evolution of the opposition to environmentalism.2 This essay examines the formative role that debates over public lands and wilderness protection played in the reorganization and polarization of American environmental politics between the 1960s and 1990s. Focusing on those debates recasts our understanding of modern environmental politics. To explain the genesis of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, many scholars have emphasized a transition from an older generation of place-based conservation issues, such as parks, public lands, and wilderness, to a newer generation of environmental issues focused on clean air and water, toxics and hazardous waste, and other threats to human health.3 That transition has been important to the dynamics of the modern environmental movement, but it does not explain the organization and transformation of the environmental opposition. Some of the most popular manifestations of the environmental opposition since the 1970s, including the western stirrings known as the sagebrush rebellion and the wise use movement, emerged most forcefully and publicly in response, not to the new environmental issues, but to changed debates over the earlier conservation issues, such as public lands and wilderness. |
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