In response to President Obama’s announcement of Rebecca Wodder as his pick to be the new Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks for the Department of the Interior, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) had this to say: “I have serious concerns about her nomination: she is the CEO of a far-left environmental organization.”[1] The organization Inhofe describes as “far-left” is American Rivers, a non-profit that works to restore and protect this country’s rivers and streams. In blocking the nomination of John Bryson to the post of Commerce Secretary, Inhofe said that Bryson had founded a “left wing environmentalist organization,”[2] the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Now it is no secret that Inhofe may be the most anti-environmental member of the Senate. Back in 2005 in a speech on the Senate floor he called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.”[3] He is, however, not alone in calling environmental organizations, even these large and mainstream ones, left or left wing. That he could speak of them as such indicates that this bit of rhetoric carries the ring of truth for a good number of people.
My concern is the characterization of environmental organizations, or environmentalism in general, as falling within a certain realm of the political spectrum, that it resides left of center with the issues of social change, social justice, and economic egalitarianism, all movements that, despite their deliverance of a more full political enfranchisement of individuals and betterment of economic and working conditions, have taken on a pejorative patina over the last few decades.
Granting that the issue of environmental justice is an offshoot of social justice, calling environmentalism left wing is a way of ghettoizing it politically, and I just don’t believe that environmentalism should carry this burden of politics. This successful pigeonholing of the environmental movement has been occurring for the last few decades. It was not always the case.
The first major cleanup of an American river was the dredging and antipollution projects of the Schuylkill River in the late forties and early fifties. Decades upon decades of of sludge and waste dumping by coal companies, as well as the release of partially treated and sometimes untreated sewage, had turned the river into a 130-mile-long ribbon of toxic goo. Spearheading this cleanup effort was Pennsylvania governor James H. Duff. Nowhere in the press was there a mention of the cleanup being liberal, conservative, left wing or right wing. The press didn’t even mention that Duff was a Republican governor.[4]
Looking back, one of the striking things about the first Earth Day, in 1970, is seeing how environmentalism was perceived as being the responsibility of citizens and government regardless of political party. As the New York Times described the political mood of Earth Day, “Conservatives were for it. Liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans, and independents were for it.”[5] Barry Goldwater, the patron saint of modern conservatism, gave an Earth Day speech at Adelphi University on the need for legislation to stop factories from pumping smoke into the air and urged listeners to join Planned Parenthood as a way of limiting human population.[6]
It is impossible to imagine a conservative leader making such a speech today. The change in thinking toward the environment began around thirty years ago when Ronald Reagan became president. I’ll look at Reagan more in-depth in my next post.
