It’s ironic that today’s Republicans see America’s environmental state as such a liability, given that Republican presidents had such a big hand in constructing it. In the early 20th century Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks, forests, and monuments. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed many foundational laws. Even during the last Republican administration of George W. Bush, longtime EPA employees have told me there was considerable if often tacit support by party leaders. [...]
For starters, it helps to recall where the strongest environmental support came from in the 1960s and 1970s, during the great bipartisan build-out of America’s environmental laws and agencies: those regions where urbanizing and industrializing had gone the furthest, across the cities of the coasts and the Great Lakes and especially in their suburbs. A new political language of “the environment” was born along urban edges; it interwove homeowner concerns about pollution and developer intrusions that state and local governments had failed to address. [...]
The other strand of early anti-environmentalism ran through the South, where traditional Democratic dominance was in flux. Democrats like then-Georgia governor Jimmy Carter embraced environmental causes. Some Republicans did as well. When college professor Newt Gingrich ran for Congress starting in 1972 in a West Georgia district extending into Atlanta’s suburbs, it made sense that he did so both as a Republican and an environmentalist. [...]
Racial and geographic realignments over the 1980s and ‘90s favored the anti-environmental Republicanism Gingrich now sought. Better-off black Americans moved to suburbs of their own, as civil rights groups spearheaded a new movement for “environmental justice.” White environmental groups gained bases in well-off older suburbs as well far-flung newer ones, but energy concerns inclined them to identify with a gentrifying downtown and the “walkability” espoused by a New Urbanism. At the same time, black majority districts were also being created to bring racial equity to Georgia’s Congressional delegations, starting with the 5th district, which was won in 1986 by John Lewis. Black representatives became the state’s foremost supporters of environmental causes in Congress.
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