talked about moving the cows around to prevent
erosion, and deplored the gold mines that are
doing far worse things to the region. We were
clearly on the wrong track—the environmental
movement as a whole, if not the Nevada activists
I worked with, who did a decent job of bridging
the divide, but why was there a divide? The bar
in Eureka, as of last July, still sold t-shirts
emblazoned with the acronym WRANGLERS
(Western Ranchers Against No-Good Leftist
Environmentalist Radical Shitheads), a slogan
about as diplomatic as my letter from Dick.
The socialism and progressivism that
thrived through the 1930s saw farmers, loggers,
>sheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers. Where
did it go? You can see missed opportunities again and again.
Some of the potential for a broad, blue-collar left was trampled by
the virulent anti-communism and anti-labor-union mood of the
postwar era. More of it was undermined by the culture clash that
came out of the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, when I was
old enough to start paying attention, the divide was pretty wide.
And environmentalists were typically found on one side.
The environmental justice movement set out in part to rectify
that. The founding notion was to address the way that environmental hazards—re>neries, incinerators, toxic dumps—
are often sited in poor communities and communities of color.
But class and thereby poor white people very quickly vanished
from the formula. Toxic dumping in a rural North Carolina
African-American community is said to have launched the
environmental justice movement in 1982, but the prototypical
environmental injustice had been exposed a few years earlier,
in the mostly white community at Love Canal in western New
York. It wasn’t an anomaly either. The 1972 Bu=alo Creek ?ood
occurred when a coal-slurry impoundment dam on a mountaintop in West Virginia burst and killed 125, left 4,000 homeless, destroyed many small communities, and devastated the
survivors—almost all of whom were white. And modern-day
coal mining continues to ravage poor, mostly white regions of
the South in what environmental journalist Antrim Caskey
calls “the government-sanctioned bombing of Appalachia.”
Caskey describes how “coal companies turn communities
against each other by telling their employees that the environmentalists want to take away their jobs.”
The right wooed rural white people (and then screwed them),
the left neglected them at best, and the electoral maps everyone
made so much noise about in the 2004 election weren’t about
red states and blue states, they were about urban islands of blue
surrounded by oceans of red. The anti-environmental and often
corporate-backed Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and the
Wise Use Movement of the 1980s did their part to deepen
the divide by convincing rural whites that their livelihoods were
threatened by environmentalists and persuading them to
embrace pro-corporate, pro-extractive-industry positions. And
small-scale farmers losing their land were receptive to right-wing rhetoric that claimed to feel their pain and pinned the
blame on liberals or immigrants or environmentalists, rather
than corporate consolidation, globalization, or other macroeconomic forces. During the Clinton era when rural right-wingers feared the United Nations and “world government”
(remember the black helicopters?) and the militia movement
was strong, I wished that the anti-corporate-globalization movement could have done a better job of reaching out to these
descendants of the old Progressives, Wobblies, and agrarian
insurgents to tell them that there were indeed schemes for
scary world domination, but they involved the World Trade
Organization, not the UN. An environmental movement, or
a broader progressive movement, that could speak to these
communities would be truly powerful. And truly just.
Pieces of it are here. The Quivira Coalition and many other
groups across the West have found common ground with
ranchers; land trust organizations and others have forged
alliances with farmers; the whole premise that the people who
actually produce the resources that the rest of us use are necessarily the enemy is fading away. I think of the fantastic work
being done by good-old-boy-like activists I’ve met in the South—
a land preservationist getting lots of conservation easements
from the local Charleston-area gentry and a big red-faced drawling guy doing extraordinarily great environmental justice work
