Environmentalism In The Twentieth Century

The history of the political movement of environmentalism often takes the narrative of white men looking to protect the natural landscape in America or young, middle-class, educated people hoping to fight against the evils of consumerism and capitalism. While these kinds of activists were important to American environmental history, women and racial minorities played a crucial role in the crusade for a more conscious human race that would promote a safer, healthier world. In fact, many of the social progressive movements in the twentieth century worked under an environmental frame to call for racial equality and, in some ways, gender equality. In order to better understand environmental history in the twentieth century, it is imperative to

In the late 1900s, people of color began to criticize and change the popularized image of environmentalism being a movement for young white people celebrating Earth Day. It was not until 1991 during the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit that the idea of environment racism and justice gained widespread attention, but for years before that, African American communities across the country were disproportionately facing environmental harm. In one example, inter-city African Americans in St. Louis who could only afford to live in decrepit housing experienced higher rates of lead poisoning in their children compared to white people who could afford economically and socially to move into newer housing where lead paint was not used.1 Throughout the 1970s, scientists and activists such as Wilbur Thomas and Ivory Perry worked within African American communities to raise awareness of the urban environmental public health concern. In this case, the hard evidence of the dangers of environmental problems in the form of lead poisoning cases allowed a framework through which activists demanded housing quality and justice. Motivated by the personal costs they

Although American history proves time and time again that Native Americans faced an abundance of oppression, the use of their lands by the government to practice ecologically destructive habits in this period again represents how race impacted how one experienced environmentalism. With Native Americans, their struggles to protect the environment in post-war, industrial America were highly passionate and allowed white Americans to sometimes see them as the face of the environment itself. This is clearly seen when the Keep America Beautiful campaign released an ad with a “crying Indian” to spread an anti-littering message to consumers in 1971. To white Americans, Native Americans were an image of the past they used to romanticize their goals of the environmental movement, but to Natives, their activism was rooted in their “struggles to maintain or regain control over ancestral lands increasingly degraded by pollution that knew no ethnic or national