Racism and Environmental Pioneer Thinkers
The environmentalist movement is usually associated with left-wing and liberal political ideologies. For example, conservative commentator Brian Sussman argued that the date of Earth Day, an important holiday for many American environmentalists, was chosen because it coincided with Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. Likewise, racial justice movements have traditionally been associated with the Left. Recently, President Donald Trump went so far as to accuse supporters of the Black Livers Matter racial justice movement of being Marxists. The two movements also have a strong history of overlap with one another. For instance, Civil Rights leader Benjamin Chavis Muhammed had success fighting for Civil Rights for African-Americans before directing his activism towards addressing how systemic racism lead to more environmental contamination near Black communities. Despite the supposed proximity of racial justice and environmentalist movements on the political spectrum, the early pioneers of environmentalist thought had widely diverging views and reputations with regard to racism and racial policy. Some early environmentalist thinkers supported racial justice causes, but others expressed racist views about non-white groups that have clouded their legacy in recent years.
Certain important early environmentalist intellectuals played prominent roles within the anti-slavery movement. Writer Samuel Bowles was one such individual. His paper, The Republican, supported the Whig Party’s anti-slavery stance in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. After the war, he wrote Our New West, Records of Travel between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean in which he recounted his travels across the North American continent and argued for the preservation of certain natural beauties, such as Niagara Falls. Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent anti-slavery Christian minister, lent his support to an early form of the National Audobon Society, which at the time devoted itself to the protection of birds. Perhaps the most radical of the environmentalist thinkers connected to anti-slavery is Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau advocated for the idea that each town should have a protected park or forest of at least 500 acres, something that would seem radical even in current conservationist policy discussions. At the same time, Thoreau consistently argued for the end of slavery, going as far as to advocate breaking the law in order to bring the system to an end. Much of his famous philosophy of civil disobedience was based around the concept of acts of resistance against the slavery system. For example, in 1846 he refused to pay his taxes out of opposition to the United States’ entrance into the Mexican-American War, which he saw as a means to expand the practice of slavery.
Other environmentalist figures were closely connected with white supremacist viewpoints. Many environmentalist intellectuals of the 19th Century contributed to scientific racism. William Temple Hornaday, a conservationist and first director of what is now known as the Bronx Zoo, infamously constructed a zoo display of Ota Benga, a black man from the Congo, as if he were just another animal. The 19th Century environmentalist movement was also connected in many ways to colonialism. For example, James Broun-Ramsay is famous for implementing the world’s first conservation program, but he started this program in India as Governor-General under British rule. John Wesley Powell, who is traditionally held in high esteem in the environmentalist movement for supporting early land conservation efforts in the American West, also routinely used his writing to insult Native American groups that he encountered by characterizing them as less than civilized and advocated for their removal off of America’s frontiers. Perhaps most significantly, John Muir, a founder of one of the most prominent environmentalist organizations in the United States, the Sierra Club, maintained close ties to many white supremacist intellectuals and was known to make bigoted statements about Black people and the indigenous community.
Environmentalist thinkers embraced racism and white supremacy in ways that seem contradictory within today’s political understandings. The movement always had voices on the side of anti-racism, but at the same time there were extremely well-known individuals promoting racism. In some cases, environmentalist leaders actually established themselves as abolitionist voices while later freely associating themselves with racist causes. For example, John Wesley Powell enlisted in the Union Army as a young man because of his strong anti-slavery views before eventually presenting himself as a white supremacist supporter of colonialism. While it can be difficult to reconcile these different undercurrents within the environmentalist movement, recent years have elicited clear reactions from environmentalist organizations. In 2020, the Sierra Club announced that it was reevaluating its relationship with the legacy of John Muir in light of his racist views and that it would be committing more resources towards supporting racial justice movements. While it took generations, these kinds of gestures show that there is hope for a confrontation with the more unsavory parts of environmentalism’s past.
