Rewriting the History of the Environmentalist Movement

By Courtney Foster

Black History Month ordinarily evokes a specific set of images, stories, events, and figures—but there’s no reason why every aspect of American history can’t be turned into its own reflection of Black history.

As far as American histories go, the traditional history of the environmental movement in the United States is devoid of any mention of Black history. The usual retelling begins with Rachel Carson’s shocking revelation of toxins moving stealthily through the ecosystem and our bodies in Silent Spring; the resultant mobilizations across the country to curb discharges of pollutants into the environment, including during the first Earth Day; the passage of landmark policies such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, which still shape the legal avenues for environmental protection in the United States today; the move to put a price on carbon through taxation or cap and trade initiatives, marred by the failed Waxman-Markey deal of 2009; and, more recently, the handshakes seen around the world with the passage of the Paris Agreement at COP21.

Photo: An Earth Day rally in New York City. Source: Zinn Education Project.

Photo: The signing of the Paris Agreement. Source: ALEC.

At best, this version of the story is exclusionary. At worst, it includes elements now understood by many to be prejudiced. Paul Ehrlich’s famous and influential book, The Population Bomb, raised paranoia over the ecological impacts of population growth, often in practice aimed at the Global South. Fortress conservation, in which people are displaced from their homes to better “protect” wildlife, continues to take place as a consequence of environmentalist thinking.

But most importantly, as I realized during an Environmental Justice seminar course in college, the traditional retelling of the environmental movement’s story is not completely accurate if you peel back the layers. Identifying and giving voice to turning points in the environmental movement pioneered by the Black community allows us to trace an entire parallel path of the story, often treated separately as part of the environmental justice movement, but which should be seen as a constitutive part of the environmental movement itself.

Silent Spring was a catalyst for the environmental movement, but the United States is far from short of communities who know about the dangers of toxins in the environment because those toxins are readily apparent. Too often, these are communities of color. Just six years after Silent Spring was written, and in the same year as The Population Bomb, the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, famously attended by Martin Luther King shortly before his death, marked one of the early national mobilizations of the African American community in the environmental justice movement as workers advocated for improved pay and working conditions. The workers, suffering from unsafe and unsanitary conditions, faced an embodied form of environmental degradation, as did the humans and animals with pesticides in the blood stream, which Carson wrote about. Both stories could mark the beginning of the environmental movement equally well.

Photo: Protesters blocking dumptrucks of contaminated soil. Source: UNC-CH Marine Sciences Graduate Student Blog, 2016.

Similar moments in time, popularly characterized as reference points in either the environmental movement or the environmental justice movement, point to two parallel tracks in a broader timeline that do not necessarily need to be considered separately. Shortly after the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 and in the same year that the International Whaling Commission approved its moratorium on whaling, residents of Warren County, North Carolina organized a mass sit-in, raising awareness of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill and resulting in over 500 arrests. With no other recourse, people put their bodies in the way of trucks coming to dump soil dangerously contaminated with the chemical. 

Fast forward to today, and in the United States at least, the trajectories of the environmental justice movement and of the general “environmental movement” are still too often bifurcated in conversation. If one thinks of the environmental record of the Biden Administration, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are typically grouped together but are spoken of in separate terms than the Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which has a clear line to the original Principles of Environmental Justice of 1991. Nonetheless, Justice40 is just as historic and may be equally transformative.

In an era dominated by revisionist history, Black History Month prompts us to use that revision for good. Reconceptualizing the trajectory of events in what is traditionally called the “environmental movement” is one place to start.

Courtney Foster is a MALD student at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.