Forcing the Spring

The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement

Robert Gottlieb

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559638326
  9781559638050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597267618
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 1993, Forcing the Spring was quickly recognized as a seminal work in the field of environmental history. The book links the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s to earlier movements that had not previously been defined as environmental. It was the first to consider the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in the history and evolution of environmentalism.

This revised edition extends the groundbreaking history and analysis of Forcing the Spring into the present day. It updates the original with important new material that brings the book's themes and arguments into the 21st century, addressing topics such as: the controversy spawned by the original edition with regard to how environmentalism is, or should be, defined; new groups and movements that have formed in the past decade; change and development in the overall environmental movement from 1993 to 2004; the changing role of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in today's environmentalism; the impact of the 2004 presidential election; the emergence of "the next environmentalism."

Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition considers environmentalism as a contemporary movement focused on "where we live, work, and play," touching on such hot-button topics as globalization, food, immigration, and sprawl. The book also describes the need for a "next environmentalism" that can address current challenges, and considers the barriers and opportunities associated with this new, more expansive approach.

Forcing the Spring, Revised Edition is an important contribution for students and faculty in a wide variety of fields including history, sociology, political science, environmental studies, environmental history, and social movements. It also offers useful context and analysis for anyone concerned with environmental issues.

Part I

Complex Movements, Diverse Roots

Revisionist Histories

In 1995, Martin Melosi, the President of the Environmental History Association, published an article in the association’s journal, Environmental History Review, based on the keynote address he had delivered at the association’s annual meeting. That same year, a collection of essays entitled Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature was published, based on the contributions of several of the participants of a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar on the theme “Reinventing Nature,” that was convened by University of Wisconsin Professor William Cronon and held at the University of California at Irvine. The two gatherings—the Environmental History Association meeting and the Reinventing Nature seminar group—involved participants who were deeply engaged in what could be characterized as “the new environmental history.”

Melosi, in his Presidential address, argued that this new environmental history could be traced to the emergence of the contemporary environmental movement in the late 1960s. Reflecting in part the changing themes and values of the movement, environmental historians had tended to share some of the values of the movement as well, including an “ecocentric” worldview and a belief in “the intrinsic value of nature.” During the 1980s, those approaches had broadened to begin to integrate urban, public health, and industrial themes as part of an environmental history previously dominated by its focus on wilderness. By the 1990s, issues of race and justice had come to preoccupy both movements and historians alike, changing the very nature of environmental discourse. “Just as the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped to shape the burgeoning field of environmental history,” Melosi declared, “the current public dialogue over equity and environmental justice ultimately may have a similar impact.”¹

The “Reinventing Nature” essays also sought to extend if not reconfigure the perspectives of environmental historians, specifically regarding the connections between humans and nature. The concept of “nature,” Cronon wrote in a new edition of the book, was as much “a human idea as a non-human thing.”² This view of nature as a humanly constructed concept became immediately controversial, causing sharp and sometimes bitter exchanges with both other academics and activists like Earth First’s Dave Foreman who felt the argument undermined environmental efforts. Cronon himself worried about such unintended consequences, and the controversy pointed to the importance of historical interpretations in situating and defining what constituted an environmental issue—and an environmental movement. If environmentalism was “as much a cultural prospect as a ‘natural’ one,” as Cronon put it, then an environmental history was necessarily about human actions and human shaped environments, whether related to the High Sierras or John Muir’s urban lowlands.³

Such a revisionist environmental history, focusing on such themes as race and class as well as the human connection to nature, has become increasingly prominent among historians. The editors of the Environmental History Review during this period sought to situate the emerging environmental history field of the 1990s and first years of the twenty-first century as establishing an important and legitimate place within historical scholarship as a whole, while arguing that it had evolved away from an “advocate history” or “immature discipline,” as one of the editors put it, toward a more comprehensive and wide-ranging field.⁴ Gaps, however, clearly still remained. Discussion of gender in historical/ ecological relations, or for that matter “the significance of women’s experience,” historian Virginia Scharff sharply reminded her fellow historians, was nearly nonexistent in the new environmental history, to the extent that one could in fact argue that it reflected “the persistence of occupational segregation by sex in the historical profession.”⁵ Similarly, the focus on social movements has remained limited, particularly as environmental historians have sought to establish some distance from the earlier criticism of their “advocate role” and identify a legitimate place for itself within the historical field.

Nevertheless, the new environmental history, as the Melosi address and Reinventing Nature seminar group suggested, has opened up the discussion of what constitutes an environmental perspective, much as the original edition of Forcing the Spring sought to do. This in turn has provided a lineage and source of power for a much wider assortment of groups identifying with or at the edges of environmentalism itself. And by exploring such diverse histories as slave narratives about the land or oil industry-related pollution concerns in working-class neighborhoods or fire-suppression strategies, whether in Malibu, Oaxaca, or the Sierras, environmental historians in the past dozen years have also broadened our understanding of what constitutes an environmental question.

Jenny Price, one of the participants in the Reinventing Nature seminar group, has since become an environmental historian turned nature writer who now focuses on Los Angeles as an appropriate subject for her new field. “To see L.A.—and to see and understand any city and how we navigate our various places within it,” Price writes, “one has to see how we use and manage and move the nature with which we build and sustain the city.” Price therefore argues for “a foundational literature of nature not as the anti-city but as the stuff of everyday life.”⁶

By constructing an environmental history of everyday life, we can begin to see how the historical chapters of Forcing the Spring could be merged: the traditional view of environmental history and its various movements as seeking to protect and manage Nature, and the revisionist history that places environmental history and its various historical movements within the context of an evolving urban and industrial order. This integration becomes the task not only of historians but also of those who want to make history.

Chapter 1

Resources and Recreation: The Limits of the Traditional Debate

A “GREEN UTOPIA”?

To understand a complex movement with diverse roots, it might be best to begin with a paradoxical figure within environmentalism. Passionate about his hiking and climbing, a champion of the poor and powerless, deeply committed to wilderness, and equally forceful about the need to make nature a direct part of people’s lives, Robert Marshall is an enigmatic figure for those who have sought to define environmentalism in narrow and limiting terms. Yet this intense, engaging, always smiling, always curious radical forester proposed a common thread for a movement split between those focused on the management and/or protection of Nature and those who defined environment as the experience of daily life in its urban and industrial setting. The liberation of society, Marshall proclaimed, was a condition for the liberation of Nature, and the liberation of the natural environment from its would-be exploiters was an essential condition for social liberation. The absence of such a common thread serves as the environmental movement’s actual point of departure.

The son of a well-known lawyer who was a senior partner in the prestigious Washington, D.C., firm of Guggenheimer, Untermeyer, and Marshall, Robert Marshall grew up steeped in liberal values, including defense of civil liberties, respect for minority rights, and the fight against discrimination. Encouraged by his father, whose strong interest in forest conservation led him to make a large endowment to the Forestry School at Syracuse University, Marshall decided to attend the program at Syracuse to launch a forestry-related career. After graduation, he worked in various capacities for the U.S. Forest Service, where he began to develop strong feelings about forests as a necessary retreat “from the encompassing clutch of a mechanistic civilization,” a place where people would be able to “enjoy the most worthwhile and perhaps the only worthwhile part of life.” Marshall quickly became a strong critic of development pressures on forest lands and the activities of private logging companies, which had led to a decline in productivity, increase in soil erosion, and “ruination of the forest beauty.”¹

Marshall most loved to hike and explore. He was constantly on the move, a pack on his back, entering and discovering new lands, new environments, new wilderness. In Arctic Village, a 1930 bestseller describing his activities in the Arctic wilderness area, Marshall spoke of a “vast lonely expanse where men are so rare and exceptional that the most ordinary person feels that all the other people are likewise significant.” His compassion for people and powerful desire to be in touch with wilderness eventually led Marshall to adopt two distinct, yet, for him, compatible positions about wilderness protection. On the one hand, Marshall feared a loss of the wild, undeveloped forest lands in both their spectacular western settings and in the less monumental forest areas of the East, such as the Adirondacks. In a February 1930 article for the Scientific Monthly, Marshall laid out this concept of wilderness as a “region which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means, and is sufficiently spacious that a person crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.” To achieve that goal, Marshall urged a new organization be formed “of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness” and be militant and uncompromising in their stance.²

At the same time, Marshall argued that wilderness belonged to all the people, not simply to an elite who wanted such areas available for their own use. Already by 1925, Marshall was writing that “people can not live generation after generation in the city without serious retrogression, physical, moral and mental, and the time will come when the most destitute of the city population will be able to get a vacation in the forest.”³ Marshall was particularly critical of the policies of the National Park Service with their expensive facilities and concessions. Though he argued against more roads and increased development in either park or forest lands, Marshall nevertheless wanted wilderness accessible to “the ordinary guy.” During the New Deal era of the 1930s, this was a particularly appealing position to the Forest Service, which convinced Marshall to head a new outdoors and recreation office. Through this office, the Forest Service hoped to contrast itself as a kind of blue-collar alternative to the Park Service.⁴

Despite his agency role, Marshall remained a critic of both the Forest Service and the Park Service, blunt in his attack on the prodevelopment posture of the Forest Service as well as the Park Service’s recreation-oriented policies, which ended up destroying wilderness. His criticism of the Forest Service, laid out in his best-known work, The People’s Forests, was tied to Marshall’s overall critique of private forestry and its role both in destroying wilderness and in injuring the work force, the community, and the land itself.

In The People’s Forests, Marshall distinguished between private ownership of forest land (where the vast bulk of private lands had already been overcut), private ownership with public regulation, and full public ownership, which Marshall strongly endorsed. With public ownership, Marshall argued, “social welfare is substituted for private gain as the major objective for management.” To Marshall, that meant a new labor and rural economic development strategy and careful land use planning, more research and science, and safeguarding recreational values from “commercial exploitation.” His concept of linking protectionist objectives within a social policy framework was, according to one reviewer from The Nation, the best assurance for future generations that the forests could provide “a green retreat from whatever happens to be the insoluble problems of their age.”⁵

This search for a green retreat, or a “green utopia,” became a continuing passion for Marshall, both in his governmental activities and advocacy work. After his return to the Forest Service in 1937 following a stint with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Marshall laid out this combined social and environmentalist vision. It included subsidizing transportation to public forests for low-income people, operating camps where groups of underprivileged people could enjoy the outdoors for a nominal cost, changing Forest Service practices that discriminated against blacks, Jews, and other minorities, and acquiring more recreational forest land near urban centers. At the same time, he sought to designate wilderness as places “in which there shall be no roads or other provision for motorized transportation, no commercial timber cutting, and no occupancy under special use permit for hotels, stores, resorts, summer homes, organization camps, hunting and fishing lodges or similar uses ...”⁶

Marshall also sought to integrate some of these ideas into the approach of The Wilderness Society, an organization he helped found and finance in its first years of operation. In 1937, Marshall enlisted his close friend Catherine Bauer, a leader in the regional planning movement, to explore the issues of wilderness, public access, and social policy. In a long letter to Marshall, Bauer noted that wilderness appreciation was seen as “snobbish,” but that a great many people, even the majority, could enjoy the wilderness, given a chance to experience it. Bauer suggested that “factory workers, who experience our machine civilization in its rawest and most extreme form” were the ones who could most benefit from wilderness and that by doing so they could broaden wilderness’ political base.⁷

Though Bauer’s suggestions reflected Marshall’s own approach, they caused some concern and consternation among other key figures in The Wilderness Society, especially its executive director, Robert Sterling Yard. Yard, whose salary was largely paid out of Marshall’s funds, worried that the New Deal forester might interest too many “radicals” like Bauer to attempt to influence wilderness policy. Yard and others were also sensitive to the redbaiting that Marshall himself became subject to during the late 1930s, with its possible taint for The Wilderness Society as well. Most of these attacks, led by members of Congress associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, sought to tar Marshall through his non-wilderness activities and financial contributions. Wilderness Society leaders such as Yard feared that Marshall’s activities might reflect on the organization and worried that his advocacy of a “democratic wilderness” policy could undermine their preservationist concept of “protection.” In response to the democratic wilderness concept, key Wilderness Society figure Olaus Murie would later write in an essay that “wilderness is for those who appreciate” and that if “the multitudes” were brought into the backcountry without really understanding its “subtle values,” “there would be an insistent and effective demand for more and more facilities, and we would find ourselves losing our wilderness and having these areas reduced to the commonplace.”⁸

Murie’s pivotal essay was written a few months after Robert Marshall unexpectedly and tragically died in his sleep during an overnight train ride from Washington to New York. His death (Marshall was only thirty-nine when he died on November 11, 1939; some attributed his mysterious death from unknown causes to his hard-driving, passionate wilderness hiking) brought an end to the idea of combining a social and protectionist vision. In his will, Marshall divided his $1.5 million estate into three trusts: one for social advocacy, including support for trade unions and for promoting “an economic system in the United States based upon the theory of production for use and not for profit”; a second to promote civil liberties; and a third for “preservation of wilderness conditions in outdoor America, including, but not limited to, the preservation of areas embracing primitive conditions of transportation, vegetation, and fauna.” It was this last trust that came to be controlled by key officials of The Wilderness Society, including Yard, whose approach was more narrowly conceived (in terms of membership and constituency) and politically limiting (in terms of resource policy) than Marshall’s own inclinations. Ignoring his social vision, Wilderness Society leaders focused instead on Marshall’s protectionist ideas, successfully lobbying to have a wilderness area in Montana named after him. Over time, Robert Marshall’s life and ideas began to undergo reinterpretation, with the suggestion that his love for wilderness had really been an exclusive and separate concern. With his death, Robert Marshall, the “people’s forester” whose life’s mission had sought to link social justice and wilderness protection, would become an ambiguous historical figure representing environmentalism’s divide between movements, constituencies, and ideas.⁹

FROM RESOURCE EXPLOITATION TO RESOURCE MANAGEME...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Introduction to the Revised Edition - The Next Environmentalism
• Introduction
• Part I - Complex Movements, Diverse Roots
• Part II - The Contemporary Movements
• Part III - Issues of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class
• Conclusion - Environmentalism Redefined
• Epilogue - From the Ground Up: Environmentalism in the George W. Bush Era—A Postscript
• Afterword - A Note on Method
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index
• Island Press Board of Directors