Negative Feelings about the Environmental Movement
Many people in the United States have negative feelings about the environmental movement, and they don’t want to be associated with it because of these feelings. They don’t want to be identified as an environmental activist, as one of “those.” Yet climate change is an environmental issue, and it’s important that we engage with climate change.
The history of racism and classism in the environmental movement is a main source of people’s negative feelings. The U.S. environmental movement has its roots in the conservation movement, which was founded by owning-class white men who wanted to preserve beautiful places and species for their own benefit. They wanted to vacation and hunt in what are now some of our national parks. And they created national parks without considering the sovereign land rights of Native peoples, without thinking about making these beautiful places accessible to working-class people and People of the Global Majority, and without giving thought to the rights of the people who had long lived there.
Owning-class white men dominated conservation groups for many years, and what are known as environmental organizations developed out of that. Patterns of racism and classism persisted, and the organizations continued to focus on issues that were mostly of interest to white owning-class people.
In the meantime, sources of pollution were located in communities that lacked political power—communities of People of the Global Majority and of poor and working-class white people. Extraction industries were often put on Native lands and in other places where corporations could get away with not taking precautions against pollution. Grassroots organizing against what came to be termed “environmental racism” was not supported by the mainstream (predominantly white middle-class) environmental movement, which did not see it as their issue.
It was a long and difficult history of racism and classism. The mainstream environmental movement worked to preserve beautiful spaces and species without considering the impact on working people’s jobs, on Native lands, and on communities of the Global Majority. It came to be seen as caring more about wild spaces and species than about poor people. Sexism was prevalent, especially in leadership, although women are now well represented in the movement.
Over time the movement has been “called out” on [criticized for] its racism and classism, and huge efforts have been made to address the oppressor patterns within it. But racism and classism persist, and trust has been slow to build.
Another reason for people’s discomfort with the movement has been that many of the activists in it have distresses that make them more comfortable with nature and wildlife than with people.
We don’t all have to join the environmental movement to take action on climate change, but some of us should. We can work within it to strengthen it, including by introducing our theory and tools to work on racism and classism. And none of us should stay away from it because of undischarged distress. We can discharge on our restimulations.
Seattle, Washington, USA