Overview

This book offers a fresh and innovative account of the history of environmentalism in the United States, challenging the dominant narrative in the field. In the widely-held version of events, the US environmental movement was born with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and was driven by the increased leisure and wealth of an educated middle class. Chad Montrie's telling moves the origins of environmentalism much further back in time and attributes the growth of environmental awareness to working people and their families. From the antebellum era to the end of the twentieth century, ordinary Americans have been at the forefront of organizing to save themselves and their communities from environmental harm. This interpretation is nothing short of a substantial recasting of the past, giving a more accurate picture of what happened, when, and why at the beginnings of the environmental movement.

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9781441198686

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Chad Montrie's masterful book rightfully returns working peoples to the center of the story of American environmentalism. Deftly moving between time and place, Montrie's social and environmental history balances fascinating narratives with a broad overview of how the stories of millworkers, hunters, New Deal laborers, union activists, and farmworkers are intimately connected. A must-read for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary environmentalism--Julie Sze, University of California at Davis

An engaging, critical synthesis of 20 years of new scholarship in environmental and labor history, A People's History of Environmentalism tells a new story of the emergence and power of environmentalism as a movement forged by common people in defense of their lives and livelihoods. Countering previous arguments that environmentalism began in post-World War II middle-class suburbs, Montrie redefines environmentalism as a grass-roots, working class response to industrialization and urbanization dating from the early 19th century. From the start, this movement included workers' resistance to elite attempts to control nature both for profit and for upper-class leisure. Montrie narrates the growth of working-class environmentalism and its successes and failures from the textile mills of New England, to the Chicago streets around Hull House, to automobile plants of Michigan, to the coal mines of Appalachia, and to the agricultural fields of California, with other stops along the way. This detailed but accessible book offers a forceful new interpretation of American environmentalism and rewrites the narrative of the modern environmental movement to include the crucial role of working class men and women in the fight for a healthy environment--,

Author Information

Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His most recent book is Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (2008)

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