Racism in Environmentalism and Why it Matters
The namesake of the 1902 Newlands Act, or Reclamation Act, was a racist. He was so outspoken in his hatred for Black Americans that in 2022 Congress voted to remove his name from a memorial fountain in the DC area.
Francis Newlands was far from the only white supremacist involved in the irrigation movement. At the 1911 National Irrigation Congress, a Reclamation Service employee made the following remarks: "In this new empire [in the West], to which the young, the strong, and the adventurous are turning, there is to be a coalescing of all the Aryan races into a final race-type. In time that type will dominate the world." At the same conference an Australian commissioner for trade and irrigation said, to applause, "One of the things that Australia is remarkable for is that we are making it a white man's country from end to end... We are absolutely excluding from our territory all colored races. We have a few native blacks, but they are dying out." At another National Irrigation Congress in 1907, a professor and official in the Department of Agriculture said that the West was "destined by the almighty for a white man's country." These speakers would have certainly approved of Oregon's Black exclusion laws, which made explicit and binding the racism prevalent in rhetoric about westward expansion. Historian Donald Pisani calls federal reclamation the "grandest scheme for social planning ever conceived in the United States," so it is well worth considering what these planners envisioned as the goal.
The Progressive Era overlapped with the eugenics movement in the US, which peaked some time around the passage of the racist 1924 Immigration Act. There is no shortage of racist statements like those above. Because much of the racism of that period went unchecked, it should not be surprising that there were proponents among conservationists and irrigation advocates. This matteres because, then and now, themes within conservationism and environmentalism reinforce white supremacy and provide cover for bigots.
Among the most consequential impacts of the racism of early conservationists stem from the denial of the humanity of Indigenous peoples. George Perkins Marsh wrote in 1864, "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords." Indigenous peoples' successful environmental stewardship practices could not dissuade white conservationists of this notion, even when viewed firsthand. The Yosemite Valley that John Muir fell in love with in the late nineteenth century, about which he wrote that "no mark of man is visible upon it," had been profoundly influenced by humans. Yet his reaction to a seeing a group of Miwok people was to comment that they were "hideous" and that "they seemed to have no right place in the landscape." Anglo settlers in North America, from the very beginning, viewed Native Americans as a less-than-human part of the landscape, whose maintenance could not possibly count as having improved it. By contrast, a Southern Sierra Miwok elder remarked in 1989, "The white man sure ruined this country. It's turned back to wilderness."
One effect of this anti-Indigenous racism was that conversationists and environmentalists have often had an arms-length relationship with Native Americans. But it has also solidified the ideal of untouched wilderness as the standard of environmental purity, meaning that any human intervention, as Marsh wrote, would inevitably "turn to discords." It is then conceptually impossible for humans to exist harmoniously with non-humans and the landscape. (It could also be noted that the cruelty directed at Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century may have helped harden Social Darwinian attitudes that inevitably impacted the broader shape of our society. Theodore Roosevelt, the great conservationist, remarked that Native Americans should be given the same claim of 160 acres as were given to white settlers, and if a farmer failed to create a profitable farm, he should "perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers." Henry Dawes, the namesake of the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, visited the Five Tribes in the Southeast and observed a village without any poor people or debt. His response was to complain, in 1885, "The defect of the system was apparent... There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization." His prescription became law, and the allotment of Native American reservations further dispossessed those nations of much land -- not as an unintended consequence but as a means of instilling "civilization" by way of selfishness and deprivation.)
The Progressive Era conservation movement awkwardly combined survival-of-the-fittest sentiment with a mandate to develop the country's national resources for the common good. Eugenics and racism helped to square these ideals -- the good of the country was best served by weeding out the weak. Save the Redwoods League, started in 1919, had a number of prominent eugenicists as members. One of them, Charles Goethe, supported the cause of redwood groves because he considered the trees to be "the fittest of their species, the survivors of a master race," according to sociologist Dorceta Taylor. Promoting an interest in the natural world, for Goethe, would help become to become more "biologic-minded." The Sierra Club also had eugenicists in its leadership. Notably, David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, was on the organization's board during John Muir's presidency. Jordan cofounded the Human Betterment Foundation, a eugenics organization that the Nazis drew inspiration from.
To be clear, the utilitarian strain of conservation evidenced in the irrigation movement, in which wild rivers should be put to use for the common good, became anathema to twentieth century environmentalists. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Floyd Dominy (dubbed "the last conservationist" by historian Ian Robert Stacy) was the nemesis of environmentalists, especially the Sierra Club's David Brower. The preservationist strain of nineteenth-century environmental thought, which is more recognizable to us in its aims to preserve untouched wilderness, was influential but ultimately less powerful than the utilitarians at the time. But eugenicist thought was pervasive throughout and ultimately survived among the environmentalist heirs of the conservation movement.
One subset of environmentalists became exercised with the threat of overpopulation around the end of the 1960s. Paul Ehrlich, an entomologist, and Anne Ehrlich, a biologist, published The Population Bomb in 1968. The cover of the paperback first edition, above the title, reads, "Population control or race to oblivion?" The book popularized a new wave of thought that drew upon the fears of Thomas Malthus, who predicted in 1798 that unchecked growth in population would outpace the food supply. Also in 1968, Garrett Hardin published his influential "Tragedy of the Commons" in the magazine Science. The essay, in the form of an evaluation of how the profit motive leads to the overexploitation and degradation of the commons, ultimately argued for "abandoning the freedom to breed."
The general distrust of humanity's influence on the environment and the specific notion that overpopulation will lead to societal collapse has allowed those concerns to teeter into racism and xenophobia, often in plain sight without much rebuke. For an example of what I mean, take a look at environmentalist hero Edward Abbey's 1988 essay, "Immigration and Liberal Taboos." It opens with a smirking observation that "the old word wetback is now considered a racist insult" and does not get any better from there. Immigrants "come to stay and they stay to multiply" and "these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which--let's be honest about this--is not appealing to the majority of Americans... The squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America is plain for all to see." He concludes, "To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity--and birth control. Population control." Or, he suggests, we arm would-be immigrants at the southern border and send them back--something which may achieve the same end. Yet it's not just immigrants that have a problem with a booming population. He repeatedly took issue with the "breeding" of Dine people, in Desert Solitaire and elsewhere. In a letter to American West magazine, he wrote, "The Navajos have greatly outbred the carrying capacity of their range" and claims that industrialization would only "[confirm] the majority in their passive acceptance of Federal handouts for survival."
Is there some reason why he doesn't lob the same complaints at white people? Well, conveniently enough, he himself admits to being a racist. In his journal, published posthumously as Confessions of a Barbarian, he declares, "I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia." Ed Abbey was generally a piece of shit, but he still retains his pedestal among environmentalists, especially here in Utah.
Concerns about population control and immigration within environmental circles hardly begin and end with Abbey. Notably, the Sierra Club faced a coordinated effort within and without its ranks to steer the organization's priorities toward stricter border control. The club, which published The Population Bomb, put an initiative on the topic to its membership in 1998. 60% of members voted against a formal position opposing immigration, though a faction within the organization continued to plot for several more years. David Brower, the influential Sierra Club president who became famous for his opposition to Bureau of Reclamation dams, resigned from the board in protest of the outcome of the vote.
The (failed) scheme to control the organization through its board by electing immigration hardliners happened through what journalist and disinformation expert Brooke Binkowski calls the Tanton Network, a loose group of white supremacists and their wealthy backers. Its namesake and seminal figure, John Tanton, was an eye surgeon and environmentalist who became obsessed with overpopulation. The network has proven influential recently in driving fears about immigration at the southern border, now one of the country's top political issues. Looking into all of the various players in the network is head-spinning, and nearly everyone involved has a profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website. The network is linked to the Heritage Foundation, which has become infamous for publishing Project 2025, its radical set of ultraconservative policy proposals. Perhaps ironically, that document calls for the gutting of federal environmental protections.
John Tanton founded, among other organizations, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Social Contract Press. His first funder and longtime associate was the billionaire heiress Cordelia Scaife May, who shared his xenophobia and concern for the environment. May, whose brother Richard Mellon Scaife is a board trustee of the Heritage Foundation, was involved with Planned Parenthood for a number of years before becoming frustrated with their lack of concern over immigration. She "credited Tanton with helping her realize she could take a stand for her beliefs," according to the New York Times, and the pair collaborated in the creation of dozens of nonprofit organizations, leading to an impression (for the public as well as the IRS) that the movement was more grassroots than it actually was. With the Trump presidency, affiliates like Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller represented the network's influence at the highest levels of power. May is now deceased, but her influence lives on through the Colcom Foundation, which has given around $180 million to anti-immigration organizations.
May also befriended Garrett Hardin, the author of "Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin wrote to her that "the hope of the future lies in intelligent discrimination." Hardin, who believed that Black people were less intelligent than white people, served on the board of FAIR and the Social Contract Press and founded the Environmental Fund, with funding from Cordelia May. In a 1974 essay, "Living on a Lifeboat" (later reprinted in The Social Contract) Hardin declares, "Every life saved this year in a poor country diminishes the quality of life for subsequent generations." The context of his writing at the time was famine in Ethiopia, and he argued against foreign aid, since it supposedly encouraged people to have too many children for the country's natural carrying capacity. In a later essay, he stated directly, "Sending food to Ethiopia does more harm than good." In "Living in a Lifeboat," he approvingly quoted Tertullian, "The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race." Hardin's influence can be heard plainly in comments from David Attenborough in 2013: "What are all these famines in Ethiopia?... They're about too many people for too little land. That's what it's about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy."
After Hardin's death, John Tanton founded the Garrett Hardin Society. Its website features a tribute from a frequently published writer on VDARE along with a preface from VDARE's founder Peter Brimelow. The site, named for the purported first British child born in North America, Virginia Dare, is a clearinghouse for writers who are too racist for the National Review and serves to bridge the narrowing gap between extremist white nationalism and mainstream conservatism. Richard Lynn, a psychology professor and race scientist, also pays tribute to Hardin, whose work was compatible with Lynn's views that "the single most important issue [facing western society] is the increasing immigration of low-IQ third-world peoples into the United States, Canada, and Europe." (I recommend browsing the SPLC pages for all these freaks, because all of their outlandish racist views are too many to adequately represent here.) In 2003, VDARE and the Social Contract encouraged readers to join the Sierra Club in order to aid their takeover of the organization.
Another network affiliate, John Rohe, wrote a biography of John Tanton and his wife, subtitled "A Journey into American Conservation." Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm wrote the foreword. (This is what I mean when I say tracing the network is head-spinning.) Lamm was one of the candidates for the Sierra Club's board in its attempted takeover, and he served as the board chairman for FAIR. A Democrat who served three terms, Lamm was also an attorney and a prolific author who wrote books like The Angry West, a rather popular portrayal of a misunderstood region stewing in discontent, partly due to environmental exploitation. After his term in office, Lamm taught at the University of Denver for three decades, where he directed the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues. His 2021 obituary in the Denver Post calls him, "A man to match our mountains," and fails entirely to mention his racism.
In 2006, Lamm drew condemnation from a number of public figures, including officials within his own party, for his book Two Wands, One Nation. The book imagines that you have the choice between two magic wands, one which would solve racism, and the other which "you could wave across the ghettoes and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, attitudes, and respect for learning." Lamm contended that "the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand." He wrote, "Even if discrimination were removed, other groups would still have substantial problems until they developed the traits that lead to success. Asian and Jewish children do twice as much homework as black and Hispanic students." (You can read the introduction to the book on Huffington Post's contributor network here.
Two years prior, he delivered a speech that went viral as an email forward (which tracks). The speech was titled "I Have a Plan to Destroy America," and it presents a darkly satirical view of how one might destroy the country. The plan includes the invention of multiculturalism: "[I would] encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal... We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' [???] without much effort... I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture... I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology." The plan would also make discussion of the plan taboo, using words like "'racist,' 'xenophobe' that halts [sic] argument and conversation."
Again, this is just a glimpse into the well-funded, well-connected world of racist environmentalism. I felt like it was important to write about this partly because I simply hate this shit. Masking racist views about the reproduction of non-white peoples in liberal "concern for the environment" or even for the climate does not immediately scan as hate, especially when those who propagate these views hold positions of power and advanced degrees. But the truth is that environmentalism is infected with this kind of poison, and an inability to see it for what it is leads to further discrimination and violence, as well as a fundamental misapprehension of the problems that we need to solve.
Here in Utah, you can start to hear rumblings of support for the idea that people should not move here due to the state's scarcity of water. The idea is not at all well represented among state or local leadership, but it is worth keeping an eye on. This is not because I am in favor of continuing to supercharge the state's economy with in-migration of businesses and residents. I am critical of the idea, however impractical it appears in the present, of somehow closing the state's borders or pressuring current residents to leave. It is easy to see where that road leads: those with more social and economic power get the privilege of living where they want while others get pushed around.
With the benefit of hindsight, we have a clear view of how much of early environmentalism and the conservation movement reflected the values of elite white men and how they tended to pin environmental problems on women or poor people. (I highly recommend Dorceta Taylor's The Rise of the American Conservation Movement. Karl Jacoby's Crimes Against Nature is also a good look at how "poaching" and "squatting" functioned as environmental crimes for the purposes of wealthy sportsmen.) Power distorted people's views of environmental issues and affected which policies were implemented. Conservation discourse contributed to the ongoing dispossession of the continent's Indigenous peoples. Power has not stopped influencing our view of who is to blame, and this should concern people of good faith who want to work toward a better society. Ultimately, an environmental movement that cannot confront power is not worth much.
References:
Arthur Hooker, ed. Official Proceedings of the Nineteenth National Irrigation Congress (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1912)
W. A. Beard, ed. Official Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Irrigation Congress (Sacramento: News Publishing, 1907).
Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Donald Pisani, “Reclamation and Social Engineering in the Progressive Era,” Agricultural History 57 no 1 (1983): 46–63.
Dorceta Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
**Read more:**
A Short History of Water in the US West
The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)
The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923) How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)
Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River
The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb
Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project
The Case of Uphill Flowing Water
Water for City and Country in the Late 20th Century