Why We Need to Teach the History of the Environmental Justice Movement

When I began teaching an Environmental Justice class, part of my opening unit on the history of environmentalism included clips from one of the only documentaries I could find, A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet. Although the film was broadcast on PBS for Earth Day, I knew that it overrepresented white male voices from the environmental movement — so I asked students to raise questions about the stories cut short or left out. I paused the film for discussion after a short section on the birth of the environmental justice movement bizarrely transitions to a montage of shirtless hippies plowing land and building geodesic domes. Although it’s been several years, I still recall students’ indignation that these two stories — the struggle of Black activists in Warren County, North Carolina, who put their bodies on the line to block toxic waste trucks from entering their community, and the “back-to-the-land” movement of middle-class white people whose privilege allowed them to “drop out” of society and commune with the land — were both celebrated in the film for their seemingly comparable contributions to the environmental movement. My students’ frustration with the film reflects an increasing awareness I’ve noticed in their willingness to connect race, class, and environmental issues. Unfortunately, much of the curriculum available to K–12 educators has not followed suit.

This raises important questions about which versions of environmentalism we want students to encounter in our classrooms. There is a rich history of multiracial, community-based environmental organizing in the United States — exemplified by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 — but this is entirely lost in textbooks that present environmentalism as the work of scientists, politicians, and large conservation organizations primarily focused on the protection of nature. Most high school U.S. history textbooks tell a story of environmentalism that erases both grassroots organizing and communities of color from the movement: Students read that Rachel Carson’s warnings about DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring prompted “national awareness” of pollution, which then blossomed into an outpouring of 20 million people for the first Earth Day in 1970, and ultimately led to bipartisan government action under the Nixon administration, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In this textbook success story, the environmental concerns of specific communities during the same era — Latinx farmworkers organizing against the health effects of pesticides in California in the 1960s, as just one example — are lost in universal language about the problems facing “Americans” and “the nation” at large. 

Textbooks further erase Black and Brown communities when describing generalized “damage to the environment,” ignoring human and ecological sacrifice zones that have long been a calculated risk of capitalist production, based on decisions that certain communities will bear the consequences of pollution more than others. Instead, textbooks like Holt McDougal’s The Americans present flat, universal truths about “the widespread realization that pollution and overconsumption were damaging the environment” and how “many Americans realize[d] that their everyday behavior, as well as the nation’s industrial growth, had a damaging effect on the environment.” 

A similarly uninspired presentation of environmental organizing also shows up in Savvas’ (formerly Pearson’s) description of the first Earth Day in 1970 in its U.S. History. After reading that Sen. Gaylord Nelson “played the leading role in organizing the protest,” the textbook asserts that “the yearly event attracted the support of many of the same people who had advocated civil and women’s rights.” This one phrase — “many of the same people” — is as close as the text comes to suggesting that communities of color engaged with environmental issues. Given the usual list of environmental “activists” in textbooks — including Rachel Carson, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, members of the Sierra Club, and even President Richard Nixon — students are left to assume that environmental issues are primarily the concern of middle- or ruling-class white people. 

This is also a missed opportunity by the authors of U.S. History to make more nuanced connections between the mainstream environmental movement of the 1960s and ’70s and the organizers of the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers storied in previous chapters. But digging into nuanced versions of environmentalism would mean asking hard questions about the “nature first” approach of mainstream conservation organizations, of which Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton offered this critique: “Human beings are the component left out of the survival equation by the environmentalists except . . . as objects of blame for the whole mess in the industrialized countries and, of course, as suicidal breeders in the colonies.”

The thinly veiled racism of campaigns for “zero population growth” directed at poor countries in the Global South in the 1960s and ’70s, the disregard of Greenpeace animal rights activists for Indigenous people’s traditions of seal and whale hunting, and the anti-immigrant policies of the Sierra Club in the 1980s and ’90s are all examples of environmentalism rooted in white supremacy. And while the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and other organizations have worked for decades to repair harm from these actions and policies, the legacy of an environmentalism that pitted the “protection of nature” against the concerns and needs of human communities — especially working-class communities and communities of color most harmed by environmental injustice — is still with us. It’s a legacy captured in the opening line of A Fierce Green Fire, when the narrator Robert Redford announces gravely to viewers that “[t]he environmental movement is about nature versus humanity.”

Redefining the Environment

This kind of thinking was explicitly rejected when activists gathered in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit to articulate a vision of environmental justice and galvanize a national movement in its defense. Reflecting on the significance of the summit 30 years later, participant Susana Almanza, the co-founder of People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources, shared this:

[At the summit] we talked about the interconnectedness between nature and humanity, it was interlocked, interwoven, and couldn’t be separated. The environmental justice movement was powerful because we redefined what the environment was — it was not just nature, it was nature and humanity together. I think that was one of the biggest successes we had as people of color, working together to redefine the environment.

Redefining the environment to include humanity may not sound like radical work to students today, but as an explicit repeal of the white supremacy ingrained in the environmental movement at the time, this was a call to action. On the third day of the summit, Dana Alston — a member of the event’s planning committee — delivered a blunt speech directed at the representatives from mainstream majority-white environmental organizations invited to attend:

For us, the issues of the environment do not stand alone by themselves. They are not narrowly defined. Our vision of the environment is woven into an overall framework of social, racial, and economic justice. It is deeply rooted in our cultures and our spirituality. It is based in a long tradition and understanding and respect for the natural world. The environment, for us, is where we live, where we work, and where we play. 

This is the environmentalism I try to center in my curriculum — one that explicitly makes the nuanced connections glossed over by textbooks between racial, economic, and environmental justice. This is an environmentalism that is comprehensive enough to connect the well-being of all human communities and the well-being of the natural world, because they are not separate entities, something captured in the first of the Principles of Environmental Justice articulated at the summit: “Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.” 

The principles also demonstrate an environmentalism rooted in the grassroots organizing of communities who demand “the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural, and environmental self-determination of all peoples (EJ Principle #5).” This led to a vision of environmental justice at the summit that calls for an end to the destructive consequences of militarism and occupation, the capitalist exploitation of workers, and the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials. As Alston argued in her speech, this is not an environmentalism narrowly defined.

Social Movement Organizing

The Principles of Environmental Justice have been a mainstay reading in my classroom for years, but I’ve only recently begun to learn about and appreciate the full extent of the social movement organizing that went into producing the one-page document that we read aloud each fall. Written more than 30 years ago, the 17 principles are as relevant today as they were in 1991, when they were presented as the culmination of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., attended by hundreds of delegates representing communities, organizations, and tribes from every U.S. state, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Chile, and the Marshall Islands. The continued significance of the principles is a testament to the careful work and vision of summit organizers, who invited a diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islander community activists to share struggles with environmental racism, to learn from and strategize with one another, and to participate in the four-day process of adopting the principles that would redefine the environmental movement. 

The summit was organized at a moment when the environmental movement was in critical need of transformation — even if the biggest U.S. environmental organizations didn’t recognize this at the time. Groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society were waging legal battles and campaigns against the Reagan administration’s attempts to defund the Environmental Protection Agency and roll back many of the environmental protections enacted during the previous two decades. This right-wing anti-environmental movement is all but celebrated in U.S. History, which explains in detail the rationale of “many people” who “complained that environmental regulations stripped individuals . . . of their property rights” and “worried that too much environmental regulation would hamper business and jobs by diverting funds to cleaning up the air and water.” While giving space to the classic “jobs vs. the environment” red herring, the textbook fails to mention anything about the environmental justice movement that was growing in communities across the country at the same time. 

One document that can help students glimpse the extraordinary activism of environmental justice groups that led to the 1991 summit is a letter written one year prior by Richard Moore of the New Mexico-based SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP). The SWOP letter highlights the disconnect between mainstream environmental groups and communities of color and is signed by 100 community activists, artists, academics, and religious leaders — all people of color — from the American Southwest and beyond. The SWOP letter was sent to the executive directors of the “Group of 10” mainstream environmental organizations — the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, and Wilderness Society, among others — and opens by raising “concerns about the role of your organization and other national environmental groups in communities of people in the Southwest.” The SWOP letter outlines a litany of “racist and genocidal practices” endured by Southwest communities of color, including centuries of land theft, resource extraction by mining companies that poisoned the land and water, nuclear testing and radioactive contamination by the U.S. military, and industrial and municipal waste dumps intentionally located in communities of color across the region. Not only had mainstream environmental organizations largely ignored these issues for decades — at times they had made them worse. The SWOP letter continues: 

Although environmental organizations calling themselves the “Group of 10” often claim to represent our interests, in observing your activities it has become clear to us that your organizations play an equal role in the disruption of our communities. . . . [You] continue to support and promote policies that emphasize the cleanup and preservation of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular. 

One of several examples included in the SWOP letter is the 1987 creation of El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico, which dispossessed the Indigenous Acoma Pueblo of 13,000 acres of ancestral land but was nonetheless supported by the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society “in complete disregard of the cultural heritage of the Acoma people.”

Racism and Environmental Activism

When Dana Alston spoke directly to representatives of the major environmental organizations at the 1991 summit, she argued that “the boards of directors of some of the environmental organizations are the very companies that we are struggling against.” Here again is important language from the SWOP letter:

Group of 10 organizations are being supported by corporations such as ARCO, British Petroleum, Chemical Bank, GTE, General Electric, Dupont, Dow Chemical, Exxon, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Waste Management Incorporated. Several of these companies are known polluters whose disregard for the safety and well-being of workers has resulted in the deaths of many people of color. It is impossible for you to represent us in issues of our own survival when you are accountable to these interests. Such accountability leads you to pursue a corporate strategy toward the resolution of the environmental crisis, when what is needed is a people’s strategy that fully involves those who have historically been without power in this society.

The SWOP letter and Alston’s speech again offer examples of the environmentalism I want students to encounter in my classes, while also providing critical context for reading the Principles of Environmental Justice that came out of the summit. On their own, the principles are remarkable — I’ve been using them for years as a stand-alone reading — but without context students sometimes describe them as “great, but too idealistic.” This is perhaps because the principles lack the typical “compromise” between “the economy” and “the environment” students read about in textbooks like U.S. History. Take for example the uncompromising approach to toxins spelled out in Principle #6: “Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production.” This is not the incremental environmentalism of “calculated risk” and “allowable pollution limits” championed by the big green groups and influenced by polluters for most of the 20th century, nor is this the toothless environmentalism on display year after year at United Nations’ climate conferences awash in fossil fuel lobbyists. Instead, EJ Principle #6 demands that as a society we stop producing toxic substances entirely and repair the harm done to people and communities by the production of these substances in the past.   

I’ve seen an increasing frustration from students with forms of environmentalism that rightly seem to them to lack the urgency and seriousness to match the ecological and social crises they see around them. I’ve also heard from students that this frustration is reinforced by the inevitable yet embarrassingly inadequate lists of individual “actions” that so often conclude the environmental lessons they have encountered throughout their years in school. Although offering these individual actions is likely a well-intentioned effort by teachers to offer students hope, it’s time that we recognize their failure as a response to the enormity of today’s social and ecological crises. To return to the imagery from A Fierce Green Fire, these individual “solutions” are more in line with the white, middle-class environmentalism of the back-to-the-landers than the interconnected struggle for racial, economic, and environmental justice defined by activists in Warren County. Buying organic food and green consumer products, driving an electric car, or even riding a bike all depend on a person’s privilege and ability to engage in such actions. Given this menu of options, I’m not surprised to hear an increasing sense of climate fatalism from students — the notion that humans are too selfish and greedy to take serious action in response to the climate crisis — which shares a sense of cynicism with earlier movements that deemed society so broken that the best response was to drop out and move to the country. 

We live, and teach, in a moment that requires a more radical, transformative approach to environmentalism than most K–12 curricula have to offer — but we’re not without historical examples of what an uncompromising environmentalism, rooted in community and principles of racial and economic justice, can look like. And it’s not just this moment that requires we teach these stories of hopeful organizing for environmental justice, it’s also what students increasingly expect and demand in their calls for climate justice education and a Green New Deal for Schools from school boards across the country. As young people make demands for climate justice it’s common for them to decry the failure of adults to act, which is in many ways deserved — but this is true only if we ignore the history of the activism and organizing that laid the foundations upon which today’s climate movement is built. Youth climate activist Jerome Foster, founder of OneMillionOfUs, shared this perspective during a 30th anniversary celebration of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit:

The history and the legacy of this conference is woven into the fabric of the youth climate movement; it is just foundational in how we operate. Even though a lot of young people today may not understand where that legacy comes from, it was the architects [at the summit] who ushered in the understanding of what climate justice actually means. Some people say, “Oh, the past is just full of inaction.” No, it’s not full of inaction. It’s full of unheard people. . . . We just have to use that legacy and that knowledge and put that into practice.

As teachers, we would do well to heed Jerome’s call, to lift up the stories of unheard activists, like the organizers of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to teach this legacy as a way of breathing hope into our curriculum, and allowing students to learn from the radicalism and uncompromising approach of these historical leaders who were, despite the best efforts of textbooks to erase them, a transformative force that forever changed the environmental movement.