American Environmental History

 From its origins in the conservation movement of the late 19th century to today the environmentalist movement in America has sought to limit unchecked corporate power. Corporations are the greatest threat to a stable ecology and sustainable economics. Their purpose is to make short term profits. Corporations do not look at the long term environmental and social impacts of their decisions. They want to make a quick buck to pay dividends to their stockholders. Every successful American environmentalist movement has always tried to limit corporate power. Today so-called innovators think they can offer market-based solutions to incentivize environmental conservation. This approach is too little too late. The looming global climate disaster proves the world cannot wait for the invisible hand of the market. A government controlled by the people must step in and control the economy. A democratically controlled economy can adjust to ecological needs and can ensure sustainability in environmental practice to preserve natural wealth for all the people.
    While the conquest of America from the 16th to the 19th centuries was marked by rapid commodification of natural resources and their integration into the emerging capitalist marketplace, the late 19th through the early 21st centuries have been marked by an attempt to backpedal the environmental damage capitalism had done. Conservationists in the 1930s and 40s argued the land should be used efficiently. Social environmentalists in the early 20th century argued its use should be equitable. Social justice environmentalists and environmental anti-racists argued the environment is tied to social issues in the 1960s and 70s. In the 1980s and 90s radical anti-capitalism and anti-neoliberalism connected environmental justice to workers’ struggles throughout the world. In each of these cases powerful grassroots movements were necessary to reduce capitalism’s harm to the environment.

Environmentalism and capitalism is an ouroboros that is constantly eating its tail. For every regulation that limits corporate power capitalism continues apace. Capitalism finds new resources to exploit and continues to create new environmental problems. Neoliberalism, a form of hypercapitalism that has been a bipartisan consensus in Washington, DC for nearly 60 years, seeks to roll back any and all limits on corporate power. For every step forward the environmental movement has taken it seems the world has taken two steps back. Today climate change is the looming disaster that the market cannot fix. During this critical time in environmental history, leaders like US President Donald Trump continue to deny science in the interest of unrestrained corporate power. A radical transformation from a neoliberal global capitalist order to an internationalist system of democratically planned economy is glaringly necessary.

    By the late 19th century it was clear to many Americans that corporate power had to be curtailed if America’s natural resources were to be preserved. Throughout the earlier part of the 19th century the federal government gave away the nation’s natural wealth to corporate interests. Railroads, mines and timber companies were granted land in the expanding American West as a gift of private property to the “Captains of Industry.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, was known as an outdoor enthusiast. He was also a businessman. Roosevelt believed American corporations were not making efficient use of the land they had been gifted. In 1905 Roosevelt appointed forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot head of the newly formed US Forest Service. Pinchot argued business would have to turn authority over to technocratic government officials. These scientific experts could properly judge and implement the most efficient use of the country’s natural resources. This was when the government went from gift giver to overseer. Under Pinchot the government took control over large sections of land to oversee that their use was in the best interests of the American public and America’s future.

    At the same time, naturalist and glaciologist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, argued the government had a moral responsibility to preserve nature. He believed humans had no more right to live on the earth than other species, but he also argued open spaces enriched human life. While Pinchot’s conservation philosophy was practical and utilitarian, Muir’s argument was more spiritual. Muir wanted corporations to stay far away from nature so that it could be used to uplift the human spirit.

Ultimately, both arguments were anthropocentric, debating over how humans should use land rather than whether the land is really meant to be used by humans to begin with. Additionally, both approaches to conservation limited the kind of humans they wanted to be able to use the land. When Pinchot and Muir imagined the kind of people that would enjoy the open spaces the government preserved presumably they imagined white, middle class families who could afford exotic vacations in distant, pristine landscapes. Blacks, immigrants and the poor were virtually left out of the early conservationists’ illusory egalitarian visions of equitable land use. The environmentalists that would come next would combine egalitarian social philosophy with a holistic view of ecology. The results would open up space for the social environmentalism and environmental anti-racism that emerged in the 1960s.

By the 1890s, toxicologist, reformer and physician Alice Hamilton was already looking for ways to combine her interest in social justice with her interest in medical science. From 1897 to 1919 Hamilton worked at Hull House, a settlement house started by reformer Jane Addams. Through her work at Hull House, Hamilton developed a profound sympathy for the poor. She used her medical expertise to help with various public health issues in the community. It was at Hull House she began to hear stories of “industrial poisoning,” health effects suffered by workers exposed to noxious chemicals on the job. In 1908 she was appointed to the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases and later became chief medical examiner. Through this office Hamilton began to investigate the effects of the industrial use of lead on workers. Hamilton was met with fierce resistance from the automotive industry, the main culprit of lead pollution, but by speaking to workers and sympathizing with them she was able to advocate for their health concerns. She connected workers’ struggles with environmental issues. Through her advocacy of worker safety and health she made the environment a labor issue. Other reformers would follow her example. Later environmentalists continued to connect social justice with preservation and stewardship of the natural environment.

By the 1920s Bob Marshall, founder of the Wilderness Society, was arguing the wilderness belonged to the people. Marshall defined wilderness as a “region which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means, and is sufficiently spacious that a person crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.” The wildness was an area devoid of human molestation, but it also belonged the people. Marshall wanted corporations to stay far away from the pristine American forests, but he wanted all people to be able to enjoy them. In 1925 Marshall wrote that “people can not live generation after generation in the city without serious retrogression, physical, moral and mental, and the time will come when the most destitute of the city population will be able to get a vacation in the forest.” Marshall believed in the spiritually regenerative power of the wilderness. He argued that all people needed and deserved this rejuvenation of the spirit as a human right. Marshall advocated an egalitarian environmentalism. His social environmentalist vision lead him, working for the US Forest Service in 1937, to advocate public transportation from the cities to the forests, reform of the Forest Service’s discriminatory policies against oppressed racial groups and for the Forest Service to acquire more land closer to cities. Bill Marshall was one of the first social ecologists. Social ecology is social justice with the idea of a delicate, interconnected ecosystem.

    By the 1950s social ecology had shifted the debate over the environment, but blacks, immigrants and the poor still felt excluded from white Americans’ visions of environmental conservation. Alice Hamilton's research had exposed environmental disparities along racial lines. Bob Marshall had advocated an egalitarian approach to the enjoyment of nature. However, the early environmental movement was largely led by middle class whites. Throughout the 1960s and 70s various groups began to challenge corporate power along racial lines. They began to identify environmental racism and agitate against it.

Labor leader and civil rights activist Caesar Chavez and the organization he lead, the United Farm Workers (UFW) were among the first to identify environmental racism and to connect it to civil rights and labor struggles. Caesar Chavez used an appeal to emerging Chicano pride coupled with environmental biologist Rachel Carson’s heavily publicized pleas against the use of the pesticide DDT to organize against unsafe conditions for farm workers. Chicanos, Americans born to Mexican immigrant parents, and Mexican-Americans had played a historic role in California’s agriculture business. The UFW used the sense of solidarity between Chicanos and Mexican-born immigrants to build a powerful grassroots organization that was also organized like and made the demands of a traditional labor union. This strategy was powerful. Even more powerful was when the UFW connected the dangers faced by farm workers from pesticides to the dangers consumers faced with residual pesticides on their food. UFW’s strategy was political. It identified the nexus of environmental negligence, disregard for workers’ rights, racism and blind greed that stood at the heart of California agribusiness. The UFW fought to ban DDT and other pesticides in court. They organized a grape boycott. As a result, in 1970 they won contracts that incorporated pesticide-related health and safety language. Chavez and the UFW pointed out the environmental racism in the California fields, orchards and vineyards. Chicano and Mexican-born workers were made to work in unsafe conditions because California agribusiness believed that nobody would care about brown skinned immigrants toiling in the fields. UFW exposed this cynical racism and made gains for farmworkers not only in California, but elsewhere in the United States as well.

Another group that identified environmental racism and cynical corporate greed was  tile Citizens Committee to End Lead Poisoning (CCELP). Formed in Chicago in 1965, the CCELP formed in response to several incidents of lead poisoning in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. East Garfield Park was a mainly black neighborhood. CCELP enlisted teenagers to canvass on weekends and established a lead screening program with the Chicago Board of Health. Their campaign gained sympathy for city residents in the media.

The CCELP’s form of community organizing inspired other groups in other cities. By the 1970s anti-lead groups had successfully pressured the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose stricter regulations on the use of lead paint. By targeting negligent landlords anti-lead groups connected housing, racism and the environment. Additionally, they were looking to force landlords to keep up their properties. They were targeting economic power in their neighborhoods.

Lead wouldn’t be the only issue of urban environmental racism that plagued blacks and latino city residents in the 1960s and 70s. In Harlem in 1957 a rat chewed through a baby’s leg and arm in a well publicized case. Rats were a part of a larger problem. The root causes of the rat problem in the cities were dense population, substandard conditions, wear and tear on buildings, large amounts of waste and a reduction in tax revenue because of white flight. The late 1960s government pest control programs emphasized education campaigns designed to change urban residents’ individual habits, but none of the root causes were the fault of residents themselves. Some whites blamed the black and brown people who lived in the cities for the rat problem. They argued it was apathy toward their living conditions that caused rat problems. They argued city residents disposed of their garbage in unsanitary ways and allowed their homes to go into disrepair. The individual responsibility theory perpetuated racism and ignored the larger, systemic issues that contributed to rat infestations. It placed the blame wholly on the residents themselves and implied black and brown city residents were morally inferior.

Environmental activists in America’s cities responded to the environmental racism they saw. They Residents in America’s cities found creative ways to use rats and symbols to draw attention to substandard living conditions. Jesse Gray, head of Harlem’s Community Council on Housing, organized a rent strike in the winter of 1963 to 1964. The legal argument for the rent strike was that landlords had committed constructive eviction. Constructive eviction is when the landlord has forced the tenant from the building by allowing unlivable conditions, thus breaking the lease. The Community Council on Housing used rats as symbols of the deplorable conditions of properties neglected by landlords. Gray encouraged residents to bring dead rats to their eviction hearings as evidence of poor maintenance. He suggested they wear necklaces made of rubber rats and send rubber rats to politicians along with their grievances. The rent strike was highly successful, but again, landlords couldn’t be expected to maintain their properties indefinitely.

Other groups like the Black Panther Party (BPP) organized grassroots pest control measures to, in the words of the BPP, encourage “people’s community control over modern technology.” The BPP placed the blame for the rat problem squarely on capitalism. They argued that the exterminators charged exorbitant prices effectively making pest control a leasure item. The BPP sprayed rodenticides in impoverished neighborhoods and had health clinics to help deal with the health effects of rat bites. BPP artist Emory Douglas incorporated rats as symbols of “black misery” in his artwork. The BPP and other community groups saw grassroots pest control as a way to foster community autonomy.

By the 1980s and 90s environmentalist groups like Earth First! were taking the radical politics of the BPP, the direct action of the UFW and the wild egalitarianism of Bob Marshall to the wilderness to protest clear cutting forests. Earth First! extrapolated the idea of human rights to the non-human world. They argued that all life had an equal claim to the land. This “deep ecology” approach insists human needs should not dictate the terms of humankind’s relationship to nature. Earth First! was formed in 1980 on the premise that “in any decision consideration for the health of the earth must come first.” Earth First! used controversial tactics protecting the forests of California throughout the 1980s. They were accused of putting metal spikes in trees. They argued tree spiking would force the government to declare logging there unsafe. In 1987 there was an accident. A worker named George Alexander broke his jaw and got his teeth knocked out after cutting into a spiked tree. A wedge was driven between workers and environmentalists. The logging industry hired groups to push the argument that it was a matter of saving jobs or saving nature. Earth First! missed the opportunity to unite with workers and join the environmental struggle to the workers' struggle.  Many loggers were hunters and enjoyed nature. They could have appealed to a Bob Marshallesque wilderness sentiment. Earth First! demonstrated contempt for workers’ safety and their economic interests. The loggers didn't have the same interests as the logging corporations. The workers were exploited. They were not paid the value of their labor. They were only paid an hourly wage after surplus value was extracted from them. Radical groups could exploit the contradiction between workers and management like Alice Hamilton did. Earth First! chose a different tactic and gave loggers no choice but to side with management. This was a missed opportunity and both groups played right into the logging corporation's divide and conquer scheme.

By 1999 the illusion that it was workers against environmentalists was shattered. Thousands of environmentalists, unions, anarchists, communists and progressives stood united in Seattle, Washington in November of 1999 against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and their neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism is an evolution of classical liberalism. Classical liberals like John Locke and Adam Smith advocated personal autonomy and individual liberty. Neoliberalism advocates autonomy and liberty for the corporation at the expense of the individual, especially the poor. The neoliberal institutions that were founded in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as well as the World Trade Organization created in 1995 have sought to lower barriers to the free flow of capital across borders since their inception. Once at odds over logging in Southern California in the 1980s and 90s, unions and radical environmentalists like Earth First! now found common ground in their opposition to neoliberalism and a ruthless, globalized form of free market fundamentalism. The logic of neoliberalism dictated limitless economic expansion. The neoliberal answer to poverty was to encourage poor countries to reorganize their economies around export commodities that were valuable to industrialized countries. The IMF and World Bank funded massive infrastructure projects in the Third World that caused poorer countries to go into debt and had devastating effects on the ecology of Third World nations. The neoliberal logic of the free market became such a consensus in Washington, DC that by the 1990s any attempt by the government at conservation was virtually laughed at. In 1997 Senate chauvinistically unanimously voted against a global warming measure that would not have demanded developing nations reduce carbon emissions even though the average US consumer consumed between 50-100 times the energy of the average Bangladeshi. Former vice-president Al Gore argued climate change was an inconvenient truth, but emphasized reduction of personal energy consumption over public policy as a solution to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Even president Barack Obama, elected in 2008 on a platform of “Hope and Change,” advocated action on climate early in his administration, but later advocated cap-and-trade free market solution to greenhouse gases, which provided economic incentives to corporations that limited their carbon emissions. He then stopped talking about climate altogether. Climate change is the greatest market failure in human history. Neoliberal faith in the free market has exacerbated some of the greatest environmental disasters in human history. The market will not be able to provide the solutions to these disasters.

Today there is a grassroots movement against unrestrained capitalism and its environmental effects. Global actions against climate change happen frequently. It is clear from the environmental movements of the past that the government has the power to take action to save the environment, but they won’t unless there is a strong, militant grassroots effort against corporate power. The liberal state is reluctant to intervene in the market, but the market clearly can’t be trusted to be a responsible steward to the environment. The natural environment is related to social, economic, racial and labor issues. It cannot be separated from these issues. An unrestrained market looks for the cheapest way to make the most profit. To have environmental and social justice the market must be eliminated. Only a system of economic democracy, where the people have control of the means of production and everyone’s needs are met by a planned economy can offer hope to avert the looming environmental disaster. Some of the richest people in the world have admitted it is time to move on from capitalism. Today the choice is clear: Socialism or disaster.

Sources:

Dawn Biehler, Pests in Cities: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013)

Robert Gottlieb, “Reconstructing Environmentalism: Complex Movements, Diverse Roots,” Miller and Rothman eds., Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 1997)

Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press, 2005)

Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in America’s History, (New York: Oxford, 2002)

Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009)

     

- Mitchell K. Jones 2018