Anti-Environmentalism. Resistance to environmental protection in the United States from 1969 until the early 1990s

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Herbert
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265378432

The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, in 1969 established a national environmental policy in the United States. In the following decades both the central government in Washington, D.C., and the federal states adopted a series of measures and it seemed like a rather broad consensus about the need for environmental protection had emerged in the American society. At the same time, however, a social countermovement arose which criticized specific environmental measures or even environmental policy in its entirety and opposed them on different levels. This new political force was often called Anti Environmentalism and did, indeed, gather all those who disapproved of environmentalism and whose attitudes towards the environmental movement and its claims ranged from skepticism to outright rejection. This phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by previous scholarship is the focus of the proposed research project. It understands protests against environmental protection measures as a crucial part of an ongoing societal negotiation process about the right amount and the adequate forms of environmental policy. Furthermore, Anti Environmentalism has become a defining feature of New Conservatism, a development that, in the beginning, was not a foregone conclusion by any means. Both these aspects of the history of Anti Environmentalism will be examined in a diachronic perspective. In four case studies, the project analyzes the political, institutional and social actors behind Anti Environmentalism, as well as their motifs and, self , perceptions. Firstly, it examines the early, and unsuccessful, opposition against the passage of NEPA in the U.S. Congress. The second focal point is the controversy about nuclear power in the 1970s. The third case study examines the perspective of anti environmentalists in one of the most hotly contested issues in the history of US environmentalism: the conflict about the protection of the Northern Spotted Owl in Northwest America. Finally, the project explores the establishment of the Wise Use Movement and thereby analyzes the institutionalization of Anti Environmentalism in the United States towards the end of the 1980s. These case studies will allow combining a close up examination of focal aspects with a more comprehensive perspective. In this way the project will shed light on the formation of this complex movement and the different dynamics that effected its development in very specific historical contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants