Reflections on the Deep Roots of Environmentalism in the United States

As the impacts of climate change become more evident, the Sierra Club and its environmental allies have been joining coalitions with other groups, including labor and social justice organizations, to achieve their common goals more completely and quickly. Witness the diversity of people and groups who participated in the People’s Climate March last April, 2017, in Washington, DC, and around the country.

Such alliances are fitting, as some of these movements have been critical in shaping the environment since long before Sierra Club formed in 1892. Chad Montrie’s excellent book, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States (Continuum, 2011), examines the deep roots of environmental activism. Montrie documents that widespread concern for the planet predated Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1950s, the sight of Earth from space soon thereafter, and the first Earth Day in 1970.

As far back as the early 1800s, mill and factory workers developed a new appreciation of nature, which led them to call for the preservation of natural areas for recreation and to fight pollution in their communities. After growing up on farms, these newly urbanized workers grievously felt the loss of exposure to clean air, water and sunlight from laboring long hours inside buildings with poor lighting, unhealthy air quality and little space to move around. Workers began to think of natural places as refuges to get away to for a time, and to indulge in hunting and fishing for both sustenance and recreation.

Factory owners and managers from this early time commonly ordered the dumping of industrial and human wastes into the nearby rivers, and built mill dams that flooded upstream land and blocked migratory fish. Courts, which initially decided in favor of traditional water flow, increasingly sided with manufacturing interests. Families of workers living in towns around industrial sites were most often affected by unhealthy air and water, and by the 1870s, citizens were fighting back with lawsuits and efforts at pollution-control legislation. The idea of a natural right to clean air and water developed, an idea that was still being discussed as a proposed New York State constitutional amendment in 2017.

Class differences in land preservation priorities became evident around 1900 as the preservation of wild places for subsistence hunters and fishermen was challenged by the movement to establish preserves for sport hunting by the wealthy without regard for local land use traditions. This led industrial workers initially to oppose park formation and some fish and game laws, but they eventually grew to support conservation rules and regulations as the popularity of recreational fishing and hunting grew. Especially during the New Deal Era, when young men in governmental relief programs repaired natural areas and made them accessible to a new generation of car owners, appreciation of nature increased among working people.

During the 1950s and 1960s, organized labor led the fight against pollution and health hazards in the workplace and community, sometimes in coalition with environmental groups. During the Shell Oil strike in 1973, Sierra Club joined the nationwide boycott over health and safety issues. Also during this period, the environmental justice movement became more powerful as it attempted to stop strip mining in Appalachia and prevent farm workers from being doused with pesticides in California. Yet relationships among labor, local environmental justice and national environmental groups were at times rocky, as each pursued different priorities or disagreed on strategy.

Industrial leaders began using the “jobs vs. environment” argument at least as far back as 1909. Especially during the 1970s — characterized by high unemployment and inflation — and the 1980s, notable for cuts to government spending and resurgence in the popularity of free enterprise, employers claimed that they and their workers had a mutual interest in fighting regulation and threatened massive layoffs even in the face of evidence that protections did not substantially affect company profits.

Most layoffs that did occur at this time were due to the larger context of automation, declining industry caused by rapid depletion of resources, and other factors rather than from regulations that were adopted to promote conservation and fight pollution. This same scenario is playing out again when the Trump administration blames environmental regulations and the Clean Power Plan for depressing coal production in the US when the reality is that the market for coal is drying up.

Today, workers and residents of communities that have borne the worst impacts of pollution and climate change are once again joining forces with environmentalists to stop abuses, conserve resources, prevent pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To quote the first Climate March, “To change everything, we need everyone.”