The 2016 election was cataclysmic for environmentalists. Despite the record global warmth of 2015 and early 2016, environmental issues played almost no role in the election (no question about climate change was asked in the three presidential debates). Major environmental groups lobbied heavily for Hillary Clinton, and her loss left them with an actively hostile President-elect Donald Trump. The appointment of climate skeptic Myron Ebell to head Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team bodes very poorly for the future. Trump has not yet nominated a secretary of the Interior, but the nominee will likely be someone who is devoted to promoting the aggressive energy development of the nation’s public lands, while showing active hostility toward land preservation, endangered species protection, and aggressive pollution controls.

The state of American environmental policy would have been unthinkable to environmentalists four decades ago. Environmentalism, once a bipartisan movement with tremendous political power to pass sweeping legislation with almost no organized opposition, is now a mere interest group in the Democratic Party. It is locked in a running battle with often hostile courts to maintain past gains, and is often seen as a threat to jobs by working Americans. What was once a popular movement now pushes a technocratic elite agenda with few connections in the American working class. Understanding and changing this is critical to building a popular political movement that again appeals to average Americans.

When environmentalism began as a popular movement in the 1960s, it succeeded for two primary reasons. First, Americans were experiencing a poisonous, toxic environment. Although early 20th-century conservation created national parks and placed the national forests under federal control, corporations could largely pollute as they did a century earlier. Cities like Pittsburgh were as notorious for their air pollution in 1960 as in 1890. Second, Americans believed themselves economically secure and thus environmental protection was not seen as a force that could cause any real economic damage.

Rachel Carson’s exposé of pesticide use in her 1962 book Silent Spring began the modern environmental movement, leading to the ban on DDT in 1972. The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland and the Santa Barbara oil spill that same year led to widespread outrage over American environmental depredations. Legislation passed through Congress by what are now unthinkable majorities: The 1970 Clean Air Act passed the Senate without a single vote against it. The United States was becoming a green nation by popular acclaim.

The state of American environmental policy would have been unthinkable to environmentalists four decades ago

This began to change after 1973. The postwar economic boom came to a crashing halt. Globalization began to make itself felt, with the outsourcing of American jobs. As a result, working class support for environmentalism began to wane. Employers began blackmailing unions into opposing environmental legislation, claiming they would close their factories and move to Mexico if a given law passed. The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan brought a new hostility to environmentalism in the White House. Greens responded to Reagan’s radical agenda by turning to wealthy liberal donors who could fund their lawsuits against the administration, and these donors were more ready to open their wallets with appeals to cute charismatic animals and deforestation in the Amazon, rather than reports of how pollution was affecting people of color or working class whites in Appalachia.