The climate crisis becomes grimmer by the day, but Mother Earth is up against more than just climate deniers and powerful corporations. The suffering environment is also the victim of racist organizations.
To understand why, we have to go way back to the origins of the environmental movement. The movement originated in the early 1910s as a form of wilderness conservation. It had little or nothing to do with climate change, pollution or human health. The leadership was white upper-middle class men and a very few women. According to environmental and population writer Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone “the conservation movement of 20th century America was the progeny of some of the most active eugenicists living at the time.” Notions of exclusivity, purity and worth still reverberate through today’s environmental movement.
Fast forward to the 1970s and 1980s and the environmental movement included more women, had a less conservative base, and was more focused on pollution and urban environments. Radical factions of the movement emerged and it also became more institutionalized and bureaucratic. The general public became interested in environmentalism on a massive scale (the first Earth Day occurred in 1970). Overwhelming though, the movement continued to be helmed by white men. The 1970s and early ‘80s also saw the rise of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement.
John Tanton seeded that movement, and has been instrumental in its growth since 1979 when he founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). He also founded or financially supported a myriad of other anti-immigrant groups – NumbersUSA, Center for Immigration Studies and Immigration Reform Law Institute, to name a few. But Tanton wasn’t your run-of-the-mill racist. He was a doctor, conservationist, former member of the Sierra Club, self-described progressive, and most insidiously, an advocate of racial eugenics. The complexity of his interests enabled him to obscure what he really was – a white nationalist.
Interestingly, Tanton and, subsequently, the movement he shaped used his conservation bona fides to great effect. Many of the groups he helped create had some sort of environmental platform, even while they took money from racist institutions like the Pioneer Fund and Tanton continued to cavort with controversial eugenicists.
In a September 18, 1996 letter to prominent California eugenicist Robert K. Graham, Tanton wrote:
“Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”
Tanton Network talking points continue to claim that immigrants are damaging the environment by contributing to urban sprawl, congestion, pollution, waste generation, water consumption, land conversion or loss of biodiversity. And the only way to address these problems was to restrict immigration to the U.S.
Tanton and other leaders in his network even tried to take over the Sierra Club’s national board of directors a few times. Fortunately, they failed in those efforts (barely), but continue to inject themselves into environmental discourse. One of their favorite tactics is to show up at Earth Day events and promote the idea that immigration is bad for the environment. NumbersUSA has a booth every year at Earth Day Texas, for example. There are some easy ways to make known their presence isn’t welcome.
- Report them to event coordinators. Often, coordinators of large events don’t do due diligence on the groups tabling or presenting at these events.
- If you see an anti-immigrant group featured at an Earth Day event, speak up. Tell them you know about their connections to white nationalism and that they are distracting from the real causes of the climate crisis.
- Distribute this nifty downloadable flier, Top Ten Reasons Immigrants are Not To Blame for Environmental Degradation, created by Betsy Hartmann, Director of the Population and Development Program and Professor of Development Studies at Hampshire College
To address the climate crisis more successfully, we must acknowledge the complex and sometimes appalling aspects of the environmental movement’s history. And make sure strains of that history aren’t influential today.