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The Growing Rift between Workers and Environmentalists

In 2013, I attended a symposium that brought leading environmentalists from around the country to Harvard University for a discussion about the failure of the cap and trade bill to pass during President Obama’s first administration and to consider next steps. At the dinner that evening, speaker after speaker expressed despair and confusion. For decades, environmentalists relied on a combination of political popularity and scientific accuracy to lobby lawmakers to implement environmental legislation. But now that strategy had suddenly proven ineffective. The hostility of nearly all congressional Republicans to any legislative action on climate change left these environmentalists despondent and at a loss for solutions. As a labor activist as well as an environmental historian, this conversation reminded me of any number of union conferences I have attended, where a once powerful movement has no answers for navigating the political wilderness where it has suddenly found itself. Support for environmentalism has declined precipitously since the 1970s and 1980s. In a 2000 Gallup poll, Americans answered a question about supporting environmental protection over economic development by a 70–23 margin. Answering the same question in 2013, respondents chose economic development 48–43. Part of this shift derives from a growing rift between workers and environmentalists, who had in the past formed tenuous but often very real alliances to combat pollution, improve workplace environments, and protect wilderness. Today, unions and environmentalists remain connected in the fight against increasingly unchecked corporate power, but more and more they seem inherently opposed to each other’s goals. Building trade unions such as the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) unite with oil companies against environmentalists and meet with President Trump to support oil pipelines. Many Northwestern timber workers blame the protection of the northern spotted owl for their job losses. Environmental activists themselves have helped to worsen this growing divide. The popular movement they built during the 1960s and 1970s has been largely abandoned in favor of the pursuit of a new strategy, centered on fundraising and lawsuits, one that does not nurture or depend upon a broad political base. The history of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) illustrates this shift. Between 1937 and 1987, the IWA, a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)-affiliated timber workers’ union, largely operating in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, opposed the timber industry’s logging practices, lambasting it for deforestation and community destabilization. In the late 1940s, the union lobbied for a congressional bill to regulate private forestry, end clearcutting, and demand sustainable forestry. Its representatives testified for wilderness bills in the 1950s, justifying the loss of productive timberland as necessary to provide recreation for its