Ohio Valley History recently published Allen Dieterich-Ward's
"'We’ve Got Jobs. Let’s Fight for Them': Coal, Clean Air, and the Politics of Antienvironmentalism". From the introduction (notes omitted):
Narrating the history of the environmental opposition has grown in importance over the past four decades as the rapid expansion of environmental laws gave way to a conservative antienvironmental movement determined to roll back policies seen as challenging older legal imperatives and in conflict with economic goals. Since the 1980s, first journalists and then historians have focused on the back and forth of environmental policymaking. The basic narrative is of an environmental backlash, which began in the mid-1970s in western states—the Sage Brush Rebellion that formed one of the conservative pillars in Reagan’s coalition. By the 1990s, protests over tightening federal land regulations coalesced ideologically into the wise use movement, which purported to be a modern update of Progressive Era practices (conservationist Gifford Pinchot coined the term “wise use” in 1910). As environmental politics became increasingly partisan, resurgent Republicans in Congress, such as Idaho’s Helen Chenoweth, Tom Delay of Texas, and Alaskan Don Young seized on the principles of wise use and made rolling back environmental regulations key to their “Contract with America.”
The Sage Brush Rebellion narrative provides a compelling shorthand for journalists and historians alike and is doubtless accurate in describing one element of the rise of the environmental opposition. However, the broader narrative of a grassroots backlash prompted by the relative liberalism of the 1970s has recently faced criticism by scholars who point out the ways this framework can mask the purposeful top-down strategies of powerful elites seeking policy wedges to divide the Democratic political coalition. Further, the regional focus of the Sage Brush Rebellion poses the same problems for the story of antienvironmentalism as the overemphasis on the American West that has often characterized scholarship on the environmental movement. While western concerns about federal land ownership sometimes dovetailed with fears among eastern politicians, industrialists, and blue-collar workers about the effects of environmental regulation on jobs, the latter proved at least as decisive in shaping the political landscape as conservationists within the Republican Party were first sidelined and then largely eliminated on the national level. The saga of the spotted owl and old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, after all, cannot fully serve as a stand-in for battles over algae blooms in Lake Erie or acid rain in the Ohio Valley and New England. In industrial cities like Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, opponents of environmentalism seized on plant closures as proof positive of their concerns about privileging “clean air and pure water” over “jobs and continued economic progress.”
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