As we celebrate Earth Day, it’s necessary to reflect on the history of environmentalism in the US. People of color and especially Chicanxs are largely invisible in its past and present form.  

The studied canon of nature writers, whose romantic verses and sentences, connected humanity and ecology has been white. People like John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, and even Emily Dickinson racialized nature and its benefits. In their late 19^th and early 20^th century writing, they saw nature as an escape, a form of leisure, or a way to resist the dehumanization of capital and capitalism by reasserting the importance of the individual.  Industrial capitalism in the late 19^th century was turning people and parts into interchangeable pieces in production that were standardized.  Individuals were unnecessary and people were completely replaceable to the point of redundancy.  In order to counter these ideas and economic changes, Whitman chose to loaf, to walk, to sing songs of himself, to contribute a verse in a powerful play that would go on.   In nature, you did not have to be a cog in an industrial machine; you could just be you. Of course, not all people had the privilege of leisure, not all could loaf.

The other late 19^th and early 20^th century forces of environmentalism came from the hope of managing nature for capitalist production. Many saw natural resources—land, water, trees—on the verge of depletion.  Without management, this would be a catastrophe. Technically trained mangers and bureaucrats would oversee those resources, allocating them rationally and responsibly.  Their scientific management would ensure that the landscape would remain for future generations.  But for these early preservationists, the land was valuable, but the people were not. For people like Teddy Roosevelt and Madison Grant (who infamously wrote the eugenicist book The Passing of the Great Race), the indigenous and Mexican peoples who occupied the land were obstacles to overcome and displace.  Inferior and uncivilized, they misused the land.  The government and its agencies would impose order and peace to disorder and chaos. Theirs was an environmental benevolence tied to the previous century’s manifest destiny.   

Modern environmentalism in the late twentieth century was informed by a neo-Malthusian notion of “carrying capacity” that focused on overpopulation. Edward Abbey wrote:

According to the morning newspaper, the population of America will reach 267 million by 2000 AD. An increase of forty million, or about one-sixth, in only seventeen years! And the racial composition of the population will also change considerably: the white birth rate is about sixty per thousand females, the Negro rate eighty-three per thousand, and the Hispanic rate ninety-six per thousand.

Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.

Environmentalists read books like The Population Bomb and Famine 1975! that argued that the population of the world had reached its limits and environmental disaster and global famine were imminent. Largely responsible for the reckless growth were humans in the global south.  People who subscribed to this concept almost always focused on countries and people in the global south, ignoring the disproportionate over consumption of resource and goods of the global north.  So ubiquitous was the racialized idea of carrying capacity that the eugenicist John Tanton, a wealthy white supremacist who created a network of anti-migrant organizations, used the concept of overpopulation to support racist immigration laws in the US. Tanton was a member of the Sierra Club and also played a large role in Zero Population Growth.  The proliferation of “overpopulation” as a trope was so widespread that Tanton did not feel out of place within some environmental circles and the idea also gave him a springboard to create more openly anti-migrant organizations like FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA. 

As the historian Karl Jacoby has written, environmentalism is more than just preserving trees or maintaining the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon.  It is is a “redefining” of the “rules governing the use of the environment” that addresses “how the interlocking human and natural communities of a given society [should] be organized.” The fact that Chicanxs/Latinxs have not only been overlooked as “nature writers” but actively targeted as a cause of environmental degradation in the history of environmentalism points to why environmentalism draws a whiter audience and membership.  Change is slow in coming, but a new generation of Latinx environmental activists are starting to organize their communities and force a reckoning with environmentalism’s racist past