The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

During the latter half of the twentieth century, the resource conservation movement based on efficient use of natural resources changed to an environmental movement concerned with quality of life, species preservation, population growth, and the effects of humanity on the natural world. A multitude of government projects, policies, and laws, together with citizens’ movements, increasingly regulated economic development and sought to preserve remaining wilderness areas. The rise of environmentalism is a core theme in environmental history, because it often influences the way contemporary historians look at the past and the topics they choose to investigate. This chapter examines the conservation movement of the mid-twentieth century and explores the emergence of the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, its regulatory framework, and its philosophy of nature.

According to environmental historian Samuel P. Hays, the period between the conservation movement of the mid-twentieth century and the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s displayed a shift in emphasis from resource efficiency to that of quality of life based on “beauty, health, and permanence.” Hays notes: “We can observe a marked transition from the pre-World War II conservation themes of efficient management of physical resources, to the post-World War II environmental themes of environmental amenities, environmental protection, and human scale technology. Something new was happening in American society, arising out of the social changes and transformation in human values in the post-War years.”¹

Conservation policies in the first two decades of the century had focused on forests, rangelands, and water. During the 1930s and 1940s, resources such as grasses, soils, and wildlife came under the umbrella of conservation, leading to laws such as the Taylor Grazing Act (1934), the Soil Conservation Act (1935), and the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act (1937). But by the 1960s, quality of life issues, aesthetics, pollution, and environmental toxins began to take on greater importance. People became engaged with saving wild and scenic rivers for fishing and trout habitat, rather than damming rivers for massive irrigation projects. They enjoyed seeing wildlife and viewing birds, as opposed to treating them as game to be managed. They became concerned with the health effects of pesticides and polluted air and water as opposed to maximizing crop and timber yields. In general, the shift was away from production goals and toward consumption, health, and quality of life concerns.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government promoted conservation in ways that would benefit wage-workers and jobless and homeless people, as well as Native Americans. Such issues dovetailed with the creation of the welfare state. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal helped to repair the effects of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. The government provided relief for the unemployed during the Depression and took on the responsibility of promoting the general welfare. The conservation and preservation of natural resources became components of a federal policy that was tightly integrated with innovations in social welfare, such as the creation of the social security system. Wise management of natural resources became a hallmark of the New Deal era, along with the development of electric power from the construction of large dams and irrigation projects.

Large government-sponsored projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on the Tennessee River, Boulder (now Hoover) Dam on the Colorado, and the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams on the Columbia River, were developed during the 1930s as part of the program of promoting the national welfare by making hydroelectric power readily available to farmers, rural communities, and cities. TVA was created in 1933 to regulate water distribution and electrical power throughout the Southeast, in the states of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi. The goal was to provide cheap electric power for the country, along with flood control, recreation, and soil conservation.

Hoover Dam (originally called Boulder Dam), located just east of Las Vegas, was completed in 1935 and spans the Colorado River between the states of Nevada and Colorado. The structure reached 726 feet above the river, and created the 115-square-mile Lake Mead. The water captured and held behind the dam would cover the entire state of Connecticut up to a depth of 10 feet. The dam was created not only to provide flood control, but also to generate cheap electric power. Water and power were brought by electrical transmission lines, irrigation pumps, and aqueducts for distribution to the southwest, including Arizona, Nevada, and the Imperial Valley in southern California. The broader purpose of the dam was to enhance the health and comfort of the people of the southwest and to provide for their welfare.

Roosevelt’s speech at the dam’s 1935 inaugural exemplified the goals of the great era of dam building. He constructed a narrative of progress, a story of transformation of deserts into gardens. Before the dam was completed, the President noted, there had been only a desert and a steep, gloomy canyon. He described Boulder City, which was built to house the construction workers, as having been a cactus-covered waste, and the river as a raging torrent that, in times of drought, diminished to a mere trickle of water. Those below lived in constant fear of impending disaster. Each spring, they awaited with dread the coming flood that would destroy their crops. But in June of 1935, after completion of the dam, a great flood poured down the canyons of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, the Iceberg, and Boulder canyons, to be caught safely behind Boulder Dam. The water that was now trapped could be released in controlled flows and transported via aqueducts. Roosevelt celebrated the completion of the dam, proclaiming it the greatest in the world.

Another welfare state program was the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, a federal program established in 1933 and operated through 1942, when it was abolished. Designed to relieve unemployment, it promoted the conservation of natural resources and administered educational and vocational training for 3 million young men ages 17 to 23. CCC workers developed parks, planted forests, and constructed fire towers. Their contributions enhanced many state parks and recreation areas throughout the country.

Other 1930s conservation measures were also aimed at improving the general welfare. In 1934, the Taylor Grazing Act limited grazing on the Great Plains and elsewhere to preserve soil and prevent erosion. Grazing was controlled, and the number of animals, measured in animal units, limited. The 1935 Soil Conservation Act established soil conservation districts and the federal Soil Conservation Service (SCS). Farmers in a given area joined together to develop their own programs of soil and water conservation, organizing legally as groups of landowners. They determined how to improve their land and water, in some cases leaving the land itself totally out of production, so that the soil would recover. By August of 1947, there were 1,670 districts initiated by farmers in the United States, with a total of 900 million acres and 4 million farms, with districts being created at the rate of 25 per month.

Attitudes toward wildlife also changed during the mid-twentieth century. The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 provided federal aid for the restoration of wildlife and the acquisition of wildlife habitat by taxing sales of sportsman’s guns and ammunition. The goal was to restore wildlife resources for economic, scientific, and recreational purposes. The dichotomy between predators (such as wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes) and game (such as deer, antelope, and elk) also began to give way to an appreciation of the wider roles of wildlife within natural systems. Poisoning programs and sports hunters were challenged by wildlife ecologists and conservationists, who argued that animal populations were valuable parts of functioning ecosystems, rather than varmints to be exterminated. By the 1960s, the newer attitudes would set the stage for citizens’ campaigns against pesticides and for the preservation of endangered species.

In the 1960s, concerns over quality-of-life issues were the major drivers of a growing effort to expand environmental policy. During World War II, the country had focused on expanding production, but in its aftermath, people became engaged in rebuilding their lives. Women who worked in the war industries moved back into the home, and returning veterans took up the jobs women had filled. The problems of readjustment helped to fuel the rise of the women’s movement of the 1960s. Additionally, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movements caused many people to question the social status quo. In this social milieu, issues of environmental quality came to the forefront of public concern.

Nuclear fallout was a major issue, resulting from atomic bomb tests conducted in the atmosphere in the 1950s, and the idea that radiation could appear in the food chain at vast distances from test sites became a public concern. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) polarized pesticide producers against society as a whole and brought to public attention concerns over DDT, chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates, and other chemicals. Carson’s language introduced new metaphors into environmental awareness. The landscape created by pesticides was filled with hazards for nature and nature’s inhabitants. Toxic threats came from DDT, which, by accumulating in the food chain, caused birds to die and egg shells to break. Environmental and human health problems also stemmed from chlorinated hydrocarbons (such as aldrin, dieldrin, and chlorodane) and organophosphates (such as parathion and malathion). These pesticides had been used effectively to control mosquitoes, lice, and insect pests on crops in the post-World War II decades, but the side effects on human and ecosystem health were known mainly to scientists. Carson’s compelling book brought them to the attention of the public.

Silent Spring not only mobilized Americans, but also mobilized entomologists, creating what environmental historian John Perkins, in Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis (1982), identified as a paradigm shift from the use of chemical controls to biological controls. Biological rather than chemical techniques were developed to enhance populations of natural enemies, such as birds and beneficial insects that reproduce along the borders of fields. Integrated pest management synthesized biological controls with limited uses of chemicals targeted for specific insects at limited times in the growing cycle.

During the late 1960s, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) raised alarm over the rapidity of population growth, creating deep concerns that continue to the present. The book became a best-seller, alerting the world to the problem of increasing populations and the concomitant social and environmental consequences. The basis for the idea was Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on Population, which asserted that population was expanding at geometrical rates while food supplies were increasing at only arithmetical rates. Unless the human species initiated an era of birth control, the only curtailment of population growth would be through ecological and social collapse. Ehrlich looked at the exponential growth of global population from A.D. 1 to 2000. Eight thousand years ago, world population was about 5 million; in 1650 it had increased to 500 million; by 1850 it was about a billion. During the twentieth century, world population increased at rates of about 2.1 percent per year through the 1960s. The data showed that by the year 2000 the earth would contain more than six billion people, a prediction that came to pass on October 12, 1999.

Critics of The Population Bomb argued that if world population growth is looked at from a different perspective, rather than an alarming exponential growth curve, one can see a logistic curve, in which population growth rates begin to decline and level off during the twenty-first century. The world growth rate slowed from 2.1 percent in the 1960s to about 1.8 percent in 1990, and the doubling time for population increased from 33 years to almost 40 years. The length of time for the population to double is continuing to increase and is consistent with the decline of the growth rate.

Ehrlich later moderated his approach in The Population Explosion (1990), coauthored with his wife, Ann Ehrlich. The two scientists emphasized that one of the major means of dealing with population increase is through reduced fertility, obtained not only through birth control, but through better sanitation, education, healthcare, and especially equal rights for women. If women throughout the world were educated, especially in the developing countries, the number of children born to a woman would be reduced. Women would take better care of their families and, with higher standards of living, would tend to have fewer children. Men should also be educated, allowing them to obtain higher-income jobs than the low-paying jobs that have historically contributed to the necessity for larger numbers of children to assist in raising family income. The Ehrlichs put their emphasis both on birth control and the social structures that would help to achieve it.

Also during the 1960s, new environmental policies emerged from interactions among the three branches of government. Congress played a major role in passing legislation, while the executive branch implemented the policy that Congress created, exhibiting a considerable range of discretion in how the policy was applied. Disputes were challenged in the courts and resolved, at least temporarily, by the judiciary. Then Congress responded by passing additional laws or, in some cases, modifying and responding to what the judiciary had decided.

Within the executive branch, charged with implementing policy and setting regulations, a number of agencies administer the public lands, set regulatory policy, and enforce environmental laws. The Department of the Interior contains the National Park Service (NPS), established in 1916 to administer the separately created national parks previously administered by the military. Also in the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), created in 1946 out of a merger between the General Land Office and the Grazing Service, administers non-forested and desert lands, primarily in the arid West. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), established in 1940 by merging the Bureau of Fisheries in the Department of Commerce with the Bureau of Biological Survey in the Department of Agriculture, is devoted to the study of wildlife and the conservation of species. The Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), created in 1902, is responsible for the building and oversight of dams, especially those in the western states.

Within the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), created in 1886 as the Division of Forestry and established as the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, administers the cutting of timber on public lands, often providing low-cost timber sales to timber companies. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS), established in the Department of Agriculture in 1935, is dedicated to maintaining soil quality. It initiates efforts to prevent water and wind erosion and administers soil banks. The Department of Energy is concerned with nuclear energy and other appropriate energy technologies. Directly under the executive branch are also agencies established in the mid-twentieth century, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and those created in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Water Resources Council (WRC), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1970 through executive reorganization and given authority to regulate air and water quality, radiation and pesticide hazards, and solid-waste disposal. Whenever Congress passes an environmental law, the EPA is charged with issuing regulations to enforce it.

Congress, the second player in the environmental policy process, is responsible for passing environmental legislation. Attempts to legislate solutions to problems of pollution and depletion during the 1960s resulted in such laws as the Clean Air Act (1963) and the Water Quality Control Act (1965), both of which have been amended and updated several times. A major effort was mounted to preserve remaining wild areas by passing of the 1964 Wilderness Act, designating certain federal lands as wilderness areas in which commercial development was prohibited. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968) preserved free-flowing rivers for recreational and conservation purposes.

In 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA) was passed and signed into law on January 1, 1970 by Richard Nixon, creating a vast regulatory industry through the preparation of Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) at the federal level. NEPA began with the statement that Americans needed to recognize the profound impact on the environment of human activities, including urbanization, population growth, industrial pollution, resource exploitation, and technology. It asserted that humanity must promote the general welfare and bring “man and nature” into productive harmony with each other, in order to provide for the needs of future generations. Like the conservation movement of the early twentieth century, NEPA was concerned with long-term resource use and the quality of life. The law mandated that the U.S. government take “a systematic interdisciplinary approach to the integrated use of natural resources through the natural and social sciences.” This was an integrated management approach that used both the social sciences and the natural sciences, drawing especially on the biological sciences. Scientists were to work with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to bring into the equation nonquantifiable aspects of natural resources. They would use not only cost-benefit analysis, placing monetary values on natural entities, but would take into consideration the aesthetic and scenic aspects of nature. NEPA mandated that “for every action that is going to affect the quality of the human environment, it is necessary to make a federal impact statement.”²

The 1970s became known as the environmental decade, as well as the era of environmental regulation, a period in which increasing numbers of laws were passed to improve the environment. The Clean Air Amendments of 1970 were followed that same year by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), which established standards for exposure to harmful substances in the workplace. The Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 regulated pesticide use and controlled the sale of pesticides in interstate commerce. In 1973 the passage of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) established procedures for listing threatened and endangered species in critical habitats. The Safe Drinking Water Act (1974) authorized the EPA to set federal drinking water standards, while the Clean Water Act of 1977 required waters to be “fishable and swimmable” by 1983. Toxic and hazardous chemical wastes also came under scrutiny with the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, which established standards for the disposal of hazardous industrial wastes, and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TOSCA) of the same year, which regulated public exposure to toxic materials.

The judiciary is the third player in the environmental policy process. Environmental litigation developed as an important tool for curtailing pollution and promoting conservation during the 1960s and 1970s. Under the guidance of Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall and Senator Edmund Muskie, and with the support and encouragement of President John F. Kennedy, a series of conferences was held with heads of major corporations who were polluting and extracting resources from the environment in ways that threatened the quality of life. The conferences made it apparent that discussion alone was inadequate. The litigation process developed by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF, founded in 1967) and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC, founded in 1970) advocated taking the polluters to court. In 1974, environmental lawyer Christopher Stone proposed legal rights for natural objects in his book Do Trees Have Standing? A number of prime legal cases occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Storm King Power Development proposed on the Hudson River and the Walt Disney Corporation’s plan for a recreational complex in Mineral King Valley in Sequoia National Park, California. By the end of the 1980s there were twenty thousand environmental lawyers in the United States and the courts had reviewed more than three thousand environmental law cases.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw the rise of powerful citizens’ movements, manifested in the successful fight against damming the Grand Canyon in 1966, led by the Sierra Club’s David Brower, and the national outpouring of citizens on Earth Day, April 22, 1970, conceptualized by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Twenty million people, from grammar school children to college students, from ordinary citizens to politicians, participated in rallies, marches, teach-ins, and debates to save the environment. The League of Conservation Voters was created in 1970 to monitor the positions and voting patterns of legislators. Books such as Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971) and The Limits to Growth by Dennis Meadows, et al (1972) contributed to sustained public interest in solving environmental problems. The 1973 oil crisis increased citizen awareness of energy conservation and drove home the need for alternatives to fossil fuels. All these developments, from laws and court cases to marches and publications, made the decade of the 1970s the environmental decade.

In the 1980s, a backlash against the 1970s regulatory era developed, in which environmental quality standards were relaxed. Under the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981–89), policies evolved that allowed industries to play a much greater role in regulating themselves than was the case in the 1970s. The EPA and OSHA suffered severe budget cuts, and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) became a minor player in comparison to its strength during the 1970s. In a controversial move, made shortly after Reagan took office in 1981, the new president appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Department of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch as director of the EPA, both of whom were associated with corporate interests that had lobbied for reduced regulations. Anti-environmentalist rhetoric developed by the Republicans and the party’s Christian right wing pervaded the administration. Watt, first president of the conservative, anti-environmental Mountain State Legal Foundation (1977), funded by Joseph Coors, Sr. of the Coors Brewing Company, argued for the wise use of the environment. In 1981, he stated, “my responsibility is to follow the scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns. I don’t know how many generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”³ In the early 1990s, Republicans accused California democrat Barbara Boxer of holding the view that “spotted owls are higher on the food chain than we are.”⁴ Anti-environmental forces, therefore, had far greater influence on environmental policy under the Republican administrations of the 1980s and early 1990s than in the 1970s.

Industry also reacted to increased environmental regulation, because the additional costs reduced profits. Economists Daniel Faber and James O’Connor, in a 1989 article entitled “The Struggle for Nature,” argued that “Environmental regulations added to the costs of capital but not to revenues.… [P]ollution abatement devices and clean-up technologies usually increase costs, hence, everything else being the same, reduce profits, or increase prices.”⁵ Large amounts of capital investment were required on the part of corporations to comply with the new regulations. The highest capital investments occurred in industries involved in oil, mining, electricity, and metallurgy, as well as in electrical plants operated by coal and nuclear power. In 1980, it was reported that the United States had spent $271 billion between 1972 and 1979 on pollution abatement. Much of that went into Clean Air Act enforcement. Corporations began to displace those costs onto the public, raising the prices of consumer commodities. Additionally, they displaced wastes onto landfills, inner city neighborhoods, and toxic waste dumps, and began exporting wastes to the Third World. The legislative victories of the environmental movement in the 1970s came back as a financial and ideological reaction, leading to failures in environmental regulation in the 1980s. As a result, they argue, pollution is now much worse and toxic waste sites more abundant in many areas, such as Indian reservations, inner cities, and throughout the Third World. There are also higher levels of dangerous chemicals such as nitrates, arsenic, and carcinogens in the environment than before.

At the same time that regulations were being relaxed under the Reagan administration of the 1980s, citizens were responding to the policies of Watt and Gorsuch by increasing donations to mainstream environmental organizations. The “Group of Ten,” or the ten major environmental organizations, experienced growth as cutbacks in environmental enforcement spearheaded private contributions to their organizations, increasing their budgets and memberships. Invigorated by financial gains and energized by the need to press for continued environmental regulation, they began to focus their main efforts in Washington as lobbyists and lawyers.

The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) constructed a $40 million building and added some 8,000 new members a month in the early 1980s, while the Sierra Club increased from 80,000 to 500,000 members. The National Resources Defense Council doubled its numbers in the 1980s. As the mainstream organizations received more donations from their new members, they also began to forge alliances with corporations.

By 1988, the National Wildlife Federation had a budget of $63 million, much of its funding coming from corporations such as Amoco, Arco, Coca-Cola, Dow, Dupont, Exxon, and Waste Management, and an executive from Waste Management was placed on the board of directors, moving the NWF closer to corporate interests. Other environmental organizations showed similar patterns. The National Audubon Society’s 1988 budget was $38 million, with many donors coming from the same corporations. The Sierra Club, with a budget of $19 million, was receiving funding from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, petroleum companies, and major banks. Studies show that many members of environmental groups come from the corporate world and were wealthy persons who wanted the benefits of the Sierras for hiking; at the same time, ironically, they were involved in the management of companies whose activities destroyed those opportunities.⁶

One result of the “Group of Ten” environmental organizations’ Washington focus was a tendency to neglect local issues. In the 1980s, therefore, in conjunction with the efforts of the “Group of Ten” in Washington, grassroots organizations sprang up throughout the country in response to local environmental problems.

The antitoxics movement grew out of public attention to the pollution of Love Canal, a community near Niagara Falls, New York, in 1978. The main spokesperson was Lois Gibbs, whose son and daughter had both experienced major health problems as a result of living in an area formerly used as a waste site by Hooker Chemical Company. The company had sold the site to the city of Niagara Falls for one dollar, and a school was built on it in 1954. As the mothers of the school children in the late 1970s talked to each other, they found that many were having miscarriages, giving birth to babies with birth defects, and discovering that their children were dying or contracting cancer at higher rates than would normally be expected. Gibbs and others put pressure on the state of New York, and it eventually agreed to buy out the Love Canal homes. Gibbs went on to found a magazine called Everyone’s Backyard, and to organize a major coalition, the Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. Operating out of Washington, D.C., the organization assisted local groups in moving beyond the Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) phenomenon, to Not in Anyone’s Backyard, in a major effort to reduce the health effects of pollution and toxic waste dumping.

The numerous local antitoxics groups merged together in a loose organization in the mid-1980s under the directorship of John O’Connor, to form the National Toxics Campaign. They worked closely with spokespersons, such as actress Meryl Streep of Mothers and Others, to reduce pesticides and toxics in the environment. Much of the focus of the antitoxics movement was on the differential health effects of hazardous wastes experienced by minority communities. A 1987 report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, entitled, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” spearheaded a nationwide environmental justice movement. The report, released under the sponsorship of director Ben Chavis, argued that communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of residences occupied by racial and ethnic minorities. Fifty-eight percent of the country’s blacks and 53 percent of its Hispanics lived in communities where hazardous waste dumping was uncontrolled, communities such as Emelle, Alabama, Houston, Texas, and Chicago’s South Side.

The report also pinpointed the fifty metropolitan areas in the country with the greatest number of blacks living in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. New York showed three cities—Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City. In Indiana, both Gary and Indianapolis were listed. In Ohio, the cities included Cincinnati, Toledo, Columbus, and Cleveland. In California, locations included Oakland, Richmond, and Los Angeles. In Louisiana, the report listed Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Virtually every major city in the country had hazardous waste sites located in areas defined by zip codes as being the addresses of people who were members of minority communities.

In 1993, for example, Audubon magazine published an article on the role that Dow Chemical Company played in polluting the African-American community of Morrisonville, Louisiana, near New Orleans, where Dow had a 1,400-acre plant on the edge of the Mississippi River. The plant opened in 1958 and employed some 2,000 people. By 1970, there were 100 chemical companies and refineries in the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The region, called Chemical Corridor, experienced very high employment growth. By 1993, it was producing 16 billion pounds of chemicals and generating 3.3 million pounds of toxic wastes a year. Employees routinely complained of nausea, headaches, and vomiting, as they worked in plants where high incidences of cancer were reported, including lung, stomach, gall bladder, pancreas, liver, and colon cancer. The region was soon dubbed Cancer Alley, and in 1992, Louisiana ranked forty-ninth on the list of states with respect to its poor environmental health.

The federal “Community Right to Know” law of 1986 asserted that any community could obtain access to the types of chemicals used in local industries and the quantities of pollutants the industries released. The law gave community groups a basis for local action. According to studies done by Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, the movement for environmental justice has been dominated by women, working in coalitions at the grassroots level. Women comprised 80 to 85 percent of all local activists. Women of color, especially Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics, Pacific islanders, Asian Americans, and whites have worked together on problems of toxic wastes and their effects on human health.

An example of a women-organized protest occurred when, in the 1980s, the City of Los Angeles attempted to build a waste recovery plant, called the Los Angeles City Energy Recovery Project, known as LANCER. A network of three facilities, LANCER would incinerate 1,600 tons a day of garbage. The plant spawned an enormous protest. In 1988, the Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), a coalition of Latino women who had originally come together to oppose the construction of a prison, began to protest the plan. One thousand women and men demonstrated together to put pressure on the local air quality management district of the California Department of Health Services and on the Environmental Protection Agency to halt the project. In 1991, after lawsuits threatened to drive up the costs, the City of Los Angeles withdrew the project.

In 1990, West Harlem Environmental Action organized a protest over emissions from the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, which was causing Harlem residents numerous health problems. NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, helped to organize the action and worked with protesters in a campaign called “The Thousand Points of Blight,” a phrase derived from President George Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” campaign slogan. In another example, in 1993, a group of New York City Hispanics staged a major protest over a proposed incinerator in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Originally known as Toxics Avengers, they changed their name to El Puente Ojo Cafe, or Brown Eyed Bridge. The group was heavily dominated by high school students.

Native Americans were another minority adversely affected by hazardous waste problems. Much of the uranium mining for the nuclear power industry needed for atomic bombs and nuclear power plants was done on Indian reservations. The workers, especially Native American mine workers, experienced high rates of lung and other kinds of cancers. Children, some of whom played in the mine tailings, succumbed to leukemia. In 1977, Women of All Red Nations was formed, with the acronym WARN, to protest the declining quality of life on Indian reservations and problems of reproductive health. They said, “We call for the recognition of our responsibility to be stewards of the land and to treat with respect and love our Mother Earth who is the source of our physical nourishment and our spiritual strength.” The White Earth Recovery Project in Minnesota exemplified another long-standing disagreement between native peoples and the United States government over access to land and its natural resources. Women on the reservation sought public support in a brochure that began: “Since our lands were stolen, we’ve been to the state, we’ve been to Congress, we’ve been to the Senate, we’ve been to the Supreme Court, and now we’re coming to you.”

The antitoxics movement and the 1986 federal Community Right to Know law began to have a positive effect by the late 1990s. In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency released its Toxic Release Inventory of 644 chemicals put into the air and water by 21,000 companies for the year 1997. In just a decade the released chemicals had declined by 43 percent, but nevertheless totaled a staggering 2.58 billion pounds.

In conjunction with the emergence of grassroots movements, three social movements arose, dedicated to changing people’s ecological consciousness and societal arrangements. The deep ecology movement began with a 1973 article by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, entitled “The Shallow and the Deep Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Deep ecology was promoted in the United States by philosopher George Sessions and sociologist Bill Devall, who published Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (1985), the goal of which was to change people’s consciousness about the human relationship to nature. Deep ecology called for a new ecological worldview—a relational total-field image, as Naess put it—that pursues a philosophy of person-in-nature rather than a separation of people from nature. It proposed a new ontology, or science of being, to rethink the human manipulation of nature. It argued for a new psychology, in which individuals identified with nature as a Self-Writ-Large. When a redwood tree is cut down, for example, it is as if an individual has lost an arm or leg, because each self can identify with a larger cosmic Self. A new consciousness is critical, deep ecologists argue, to saving the planet.

Social ecology also developed as a movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Social philosopher Murray Bookchin founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont in 1974, aimed at changing human ecological relations with nature, particularly at the local level. Social ecology is based on the idea that the evolution of dominance hierarchies in human societies led to the human domination of nature. To overcome domination and move toward an ecological society, Bookchin promoted communitarian democracy, modeled on New England town hall meetings and face-to-face decision-making. Bookchin and his followers saw an opportunity to enact these ideas through the emerging Green Party in the United States, identifying especially with the left Greens.

A third movement to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s was ecofeminism. The movement originated in Europe, where French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne founded the Ecology-Feminism center in 1972 and published a chapter entitled “The Time for Ecofeminism” in her book Feminism or Death (1974). Ecofeminism examines women’s historical and cultural connections to nature and draws on women’s activism to resolve environmental problems. Numerous women throughout the world embraced and promoted ecofeminism through actions, articles, and books as a movement to liberate both women and nature. Among others, Ynestra King explicated the concept through a course at Vermont’s Institute for Social Ecology, and helped to publicize it through a 1980 conference entitled “Women and Life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the ’80s.” Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein developed the movement further by organizing a major conference in southern California in 1987, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and in 1990 published Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism.

The concerns of the environmental movement in the 1990s moved to the global level. Environmentalists warned of a global ecological crisis manifested by ozone depletion, global warming, population expansion, vanishing species, and declining biodiversity. Out of such global concerns, the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Montreal Protocol over ozone depletion, signed by 24 countries in 1987, had successfully reduced chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions worldwide by 1995, but emissions in developing countries continued to grow. Alarm over increasing signs of global warming led to the Kyoto Climate-Change Conference in 1997. The resulting Kyoto Protocol sought to establish limits on greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries that would reduce gases to 1990 levels by 2012, while exempting developing countries. Although the United States signed the agreement in 1998, the U.S. Senate had yet to ratify it at the century’s end. The extinction of wildlife was another major concern. By 1999, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 1,180 species as threatened or endangered under the provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Nine wild salmon species in the Pacific Northwest were threatened, resulting in mandatory economic and environmental restrictions. As the world’s population passed the six billion mark in October 1999, the urgency of dealing with the environmental impacts of a potential doubling in population by 2040 heightened. Problems to be resolved included the encroachment of humanity on wilderness areas and wildlife from industry and housing expansion, energy development, air and water pollution, and increases in endangered species.

Over the last three decades of the twentieth century, environmental policies and laws that dealt effectively with global and national impacts achieved some success, but received opposition within the executive and legislative branches of government, illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of the environmental policy process and the influence of citizens’ movements. Reversal of the environmental crisis, environmentalists maintain, will depend on reducing fossil fuel emissions and hazardous chemical wastes, on finding humane ways of reducing population growth rates, preserving biodiversity, and implementing sustainable forms of livelihood on the planet.

The conservation movement of the early to mid-twentieth century focused on the efficient use of natural resources and wildlife management, on government-sponsored irrigation, dam, and power projects, and on conservation projects of the New Deal era. With the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, the emphasis shifted to quality of life, aesthetic, and health concerns. Fueled by popular issues that arose in the 1960s, such as environmental pollution and population growth, an era of regulation emerged in the 1970s in which Congress passed numerous environmental laws to regulate resource use and environmental quality. The 1980s witnessed a relaxation in regulation, the growth of mainstream environmental organizations, and the rise of citizens’ movements focused on local environmental issues, hazardous wastes, environmental justice, and green politics. During the 1990s, environmental concerns became increasingly global, stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit, global warming, ozone depletion, species extinctions, and population growth. All of these efforts at solving environmental problems have had numerous successes, but the problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century remain monumental in scope.