In reality, the latter has had far more impact than the former.  So let's not get ourselves feeling too guilty about "our roots" to do some real activism.  We've had a lot of hand-wringing about the movement lately, and it's time to get working hard and looking forward, rather than looking backward.

Re "who benefits from saving wilderness," how about the wilderness itself?  Anthropocentrists like authors Klingle and Taylor are so empathically deficient that they apparently can't even imagine that other species have any feelings or desires, so they strive to "put a human face on the environment."  This is exactly what should NOT be done, except for a stragegy to convince anthropocentric people to preserve wilderness in its natural condition.  What should be done is to make an effort to educate people, not intellectually but intuitively, in order to awaken empathy for the Earth and other forms of life.

Re the shortcomings of some environmental leaders, even if they were rich or racist doesn't mean that they were not correct.  I don't see any point in denigrating these heroes by concentrating on their negative traits.  What they've done for the Earth is beyond reproach.  Nor is it productive to question their motives.  I agree that why a person does something can be just as important as what he or she does, but is this site about Buddhism or environmentalism?  We embrace hunters and fishermen in our fight to preserve wild areas, but, with a few rare biocentric exceptions, their motives are certainly much different than mine.

The biggest problem with the argument made in this piece is that it fails to recognize the deep ecology movement, which is mostly made up of people who are not wealthy, but who instead shun materialist values in favor of all life.  There is another reason that we believe that preserving natural areas in their natural conditions is paramount, which is that it's immoral to kill except to eat, or to harm ecosystems, or to pollute.  It has nothing to do with preserving the best land for the rich or for white people.

Jeff Hoffman

Once wilderness is gone, it's gone -- quite difficult to get back.  We do people (all people) no favors when we lose access to biodiversity in all its glory.  For one easy example look at our medicines - almost all are based in some way or another on things found in the natural world around us.  For another consider the impact of losing wilderness on soil & water issues.

While enivironmental justice is essential I don't like the tone of this article - seeming to say that protecting wild spaces is silly but looking out for heavy metals in water is important.  I want my daughter and all of her peers (wherever they live and whatever their socioeconomic status) to have access to wild spaces AND clean water.

This seems like divide and conquer tactics from those outside of the environmental movement.  Can't we do better than this?

    This was a good article (I have given a similar lecture to Environmental Students in China).  We need to understand the roots of the envirnomental movement not to attack our old "heroes", but to understand why the environmental movement is having trouble expanding it's base.

    The problem is that we are failing.  The American environmental movement is not able to speak in a language most Americans understand.  We have up to now largely failed in the battle against global warming (some progress is being made elsewhere in the world, but America is not part of the solution at this point, but is a big part of the problem).

    It is fine to defend the work of the elitist environmentalists from the past, but their language and way of thinking have tainted our message and made it difficult for us to communicate with people outside our too small circle.

    If we really want to save the environment, we need to become a broader more diverse movement.  Failing that, we fail.

Patrick

And they criticize "the slavish devotion to an unattainable wilderness ideal."  I'm not sure what they mean by this.  I don't see many environmentalists out there working to recreate a human-free world that never existed.  Instead, I see people working in service of the not-so-unattainable ideal that a few areas should be as free from mechanized development as we can possibly make them.  Here, for example, is the recent handiwork of a coalition of wilderness crusaders:

The Department of Interior's Board of Land Appeals (IBLA) has issued a stay halting a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) decision allowing construction of a new road within the Congressionally-designated Mount Tipton Wilderness area. The road construction was requested by two California residents wishing to develop a 60-acre inholding (private land completely surrounded by federal or other non-private land) within the middle of the Wilderness into an upscale, private horse ranch. The IBLA's decision means that no construction will occur on the proposed road until the appeal is resolved on the merits.

Generally I agree with Jeff Hoffman.  But I find this essay interesting and informative and valuable nevertheless.  What interested me most was their discussion of the social structuring of our cities as they grew.  K&T are totally unfair when they suggest there is a smooth evolution from the class snobbery and racism of the Teddy Roosevelt era to us today -- and it is precisely because this is unfair that the quite recent anti-immigrationist near-coup in the Sierra Club was so shocking, even horrifying, to so many of us.  Still, it is brilliant to observe who lives near the pretty parks and who lives out by the factories and trash dumps.

It is certainly not true that the great majority of environmentalists today have no regard for social justice for the underprivileged, including urban lower classes.  So if there is a lesson here, it is that when we devote all our attention to relatively distant or abstract matters (from an urban perspective) as, say, greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain over forests, or dams in salmon rivers, we definitely might give the impression of being uninterested.

One of our heroes, Rachel Carson, wrote a book which resulted in a universal ban on DDT.  And very well done!  But now, we learn, a restricted application of DDT within houses in Africa will save countless lives from malaria; only DDT is not freely available anymore.  Might we start with something like this, to show that environmentalists can indeed be flexible?

Mark Stephen

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Mark, while I understand your comment regarding DDT in Africa, what good is it going to do the people down there? Instead of having their children get sick and possibly die, their children's children will be born without legs and arms? What's good for the species is not good for the individual and vice versa. As bad as it sounds, who is to say that you or I should get medicine for diseases, when it makes our species less adapted?

Africans right now have a much larger genetic component of sickle cell anemia in their gene pool, since being heterozygous for this trait makes humans immune (by that I mean a bad cold is comparable to the symptoms they get) to malaria without any effects of sickle cell anemia. The highest rates of sickle cell anemia allele also occurs in a 'hot spot' of malaria concentration, with linear decrease the further you get away from it. What usually happens is that an infant that is born homozygous without the allele for sickle-cell, contracts malaria shortly after birth, dies and after a period of grief, the family conceives another child. If heterozygous, the infant contracts malaria, builds a second line of defense against it, and survives, repeatedly contracting malaria and repeatedly rebuilding the secondary immune defense throughout their life. A child born with sickle cell usually dies later as an adult due to complications of the genetic homozygosity.

In other words, what is good for the individual is not good for the population, especially if you consider the tetragenic and mutagenic effects of DDT and other pesticides.

Here in the US, we are fortunate in that we don't have the widespread, grinding poverty that continues to affect so many hundreds of millions of people in India.  The question that I was left wondering after reading Gadgil and Guha was - where are our ecosystem people?  How does equity relate to environmental protection in the US?  Klingle & Taylor point out, correctly, I think, the elitist roots of the environmental movement, but I think they miss alot of the story.  In the environmental world where I work currently, National Forests, environmentalists are frequently accused of destroying jobs and denying access to the common people.  These people whose livelihoods we effect are not ecosystem people - they don't depend on the forest for subsistence - instead they seem more like a rural proletariat - dependent on industrial extraction from the forest for their incomes.  Similarly, recreationists who wish to drive ATVs or snowmobiles in wilderness areas are people who wish to recreate in vehicles that cost more than 10 times the annual income of an Indian subsistence farmer.  Federal land ranchers are by and large far wealthier than the average American.  

It seems to me that all of us in federal land battles, "elitist" environmentalists and "poor" loggers, ranchers, and motorized recreationists, are a part of the powerful industrial class that drove the ecosystem people off the land years ago.  What ecosystem people?  Well - Crazy Horse, who someone else used, is a great example - but it was not only American Indians - it was also white and black subsistence farmers driven off their land by USDA subsidies, rising land prices, and competition from mechanized mega-farms during the first several decades of the 20th century.  

The early environmental movement, it is true, largely ignored (and sometimes even aided the wrong side, as the authors point out in their quotes from Muir) in these struggles - but the environmental movement has a long history, dating back at least as far as Aldo Leopold's early attempts at ecological restoration, of aiding the poor and displaced as well.  Klingle & Taylor mention some interesting examples, but urban, non-white poverty is not the be-all and end-all of poverty.   The Back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s is frequently portrayed as a movement of hippie elites, but at the same time it deeply revitalized many impoverished rural communities - notably those in Northern Vermont and New York that Bill Mckibben, in his new book that I haven't read yet, describes as "the most hopeful place in America."  The back-to-the-land movement also provided the genesis for the organic farming movement, which has helped many rural farmers stay on their land, and here in the Northwest, nearly every rural grassroots environmentalist that I've met was a part of that movement.

I'm not exactly sure how to end this post - but I would be very interested in seeing other responses.  I think Klingle & Taylor (and Grist) are correct to raise these issues - but I think we need to think more seriously about their ideas and not just assume that Environmentalist = John Muir toting Wilderness fanatic.  The story is far more complex (and interesting!)

   Peace to all earthlings, (poor)people included.

   Oh, and as far as those eloquent Natives Jeff mentioned, it's never too late to educate the "average" American, is it? Plus, a good many of them just need to pick up a book or look in the mirror to see, or feel the traces...there's many a "breed" (or non) who will fight the good fight. Share.
   Kinship speaks volumes, and 500 years isn't long at all, especially when it comes to culture.

    Actually, it's not a matter of throwing away Muir or Roosevelt (not that I would!), but of understanding where they were right, and where they were (gasp!) wrong.  It's about correcting the message and thrust of the environmental movement so that it can be broader and more successful.  

    We all agree that we want a successful environmental movement, the issue is how to get there.  If, nothing can reach the people you describe as "slobs", then we are lost.

    I am moderately more optimistic.

Forrest,

    Your post was very interesting.  It raised some useful issues in asking who are the "ecosystem" people, and challenging us (me included) to think harder about where American society currently "is".

    The point is not in creating a sense of "ecosystem" people against the "elites", but in recognizing that we need to reach out from the early visions of the environmental movement, which were essentially elitist, and recognize other kinds of environmental concerns which are held by people in what is called the "environmental justice" movement, and the various social movements.

    The American environmental movement is largely fighting a reactive battle (stop MORE offshore drilling, stop MORE air pollution, etc,) rather than making progress on issues such as global warming.  We need to ask ourselves why we are having trouble delivering our message to other people, and also who might be our natural allies.  That is largely what this whole discussion is about, how are we going to grow and be successful.

    If we assume that the average middle class white American is unreachable, we are in trouble.  We need to look at our message and how we deliver it.

    If we assume that non-white people are unreachable, we are in trouble, the content of the population of America is changing, and an environmental movement that cannot hear or speak with them is doomed.

     In order to avoid the mistakes of the past, we must first acknowledge them, then learn from then, then look honestly at where we are, who we are and where we need to go and who we need to be in order to participate in saving our planet.

Patrick

Exactly.  The only thing divisive about the critical use of history is that it can make those who have acted prior to these insights defensive about their (understandable) mistakes.

Klingle and Taylor are simply pointing to the historical conditions and trends lying in underneath the mythologizing that environmentalists tend to do about their heroes and icons (that everyone does about their heroes and icons).  This is a healthy thing to talk about.  Good for them for doing so.

Peace,
Kip

Several weeks ago Grist editor Chip Giller asked Matthew to write about the historical links between poverty and the environment.  Matthew broadened the essay to an inquiry of the social and cultural biases that have shaped environmental activism over time.  Joseph drew attention to urban and rural tensions within the movement, and that this is a North American phenomenon rather that something unique to the United States.  We have focused on the racist and classist aspects of the movement, but we would have liked to discuss the gendered implications of conservationist, preservationist, and environmentalist ideology as well.  Alas, when an editor says you have 2000 words, they really mean it.

The postings on this blog and conversations with friends and colleagues persuade us even more that the essay was timely.  The reactions are telling in several ways.  First, while the content of our narrative is familiar to environmental historians, it still surprises many lay readers.  Both our emphasis on the impact of environmental activism on socially marginal groups, and our allusion to a critique of wilderness ideology seem weirdly discordant to some readers.  This suggests, once again, that academics need to speak to a broader audience more often.  Thus we greatly appreciate the opportunity that Grist provided.  We yearn for these conversations, and we only wish we had more opportunities like this.

Second, the responses of some readers reinforce the importance of thinking broadly about environmental advocacy.  We want to illustrate the social and cultural consequences of assuming that nature is separate from society, and that efforts to segregate nature from human history result in the systematic oppression of politically marginalized people.  The truly perverse part of this history is that the punished were often the least culpable in harming nature through consuming practices.  Thus reading flames about "idiots" and "slobs" is a metric of how much work remains for the environmental community to understand the implications of its assumptions and actions.

Third, our attention to the flaws of movement leaders is not meant to discount good deeds but to encourage a more nuanced understanding of inconsistencies and shortcomings.  Our hope is to build a smarter, more thoughtful approach to problems in the present and future.  Arguing, as one reader does, that whatever the errors of some leaders, "What they've done for the Earth is beyond reproach" strikes us as a recipe for repeating mistakes.  We ignore the past at our peril, and unless we extend ecology's holism to the human community, we will likely be banging our heads against a wall of putative barbarians for a very long time.

Finally, we suspect that we have not yet broached environmentalism's greatest challenge.  Much of the discussion on this blog is about which cause is most important.  Readers differ on their priorities, but they agree that the problem is "out there."  This underscores a critical cultural shift in the last four decades.  As Tom Dunlap observes in Faith in Nature, environmentalism's original formulation was far more radical, envisioning fundamental changes in how society thinks and acts.  Like now, it viewed humans and nature as a seamless relationship, but while we now work to isolate nature or stop bad deeds, the original effort was to reform the self.  As such, it seems that we still elide the urgent need to alter our own patterns of thought and behavior.  We find our toughest opponent in the mirror.

Demonizing natural resource industries has been a staple of environmental advocacy for 150 years, yet the tactic only makes sense by ignoring our own habits of consumption.  This also holds for discussions of "ecosystem people."  Market consumption has altered how we relate to nature.  In fact the ecosystem people are us and we are them.  Any other definition denies the complex social processes that shape the world, and it absolves middle-class consumers for their role in altering landscapes and societies.  In this respect it seems telling that our students find it easier to grapple with the shortcomings of heroes, even the problem of regarding nature as something wholly apart from human culture, than to deal with the implications of consumption.  Most of us are aware of the Ecological Footprint critique, as well as the inordinate environmental impact of consumers in North America and western Europe.  We know deep down that, as Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip character Pogo, wrote, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

This we know, yet even our most avowedly radical students can stumble when confronting the links between destructive social and environmental practices and the middle-class standard of living.  We do too, and that, it seems to us, should be our first task.  Elizabeth Chin's essay "I Will Simply Survive" and discussion blog eloquently underscore this problem.  The Sacramento Bee's series "State of Denial" (http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/projects/denial/) is another thoughtful exploration of the paradoxical relationship between domestic conservation and the consumption of foreign resources, including oil from Amazonian Ecuador, paper from Canada's boreal forests, and fish from the North Pacific.

These are tough but necessary discussions.  We wish you luck.  It has been an honor to participate in this series.

Matthew Klingle
Joseph Taylor