Fighting the Green Tyrants: Anti-Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth-Century American West

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

The American West has long been characterized by the close relationship between its inhabitants and its environment. In particular, there is a long history of a primarily extractive relationship between humans and nature in the region. But there has also been a long history–particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries–of attempting to regulate that extractive relationship. These efforts have often inspired intense backlash that sought to preserve local extractive systems and paint federal regulators as tyrannical. This panel works to unpack this history of conservative opposition to environmental regulation through a series of papers exploring related, yet specific stories of conservative efforts to maintain systems of resource extractivism in the late twentieth-century American West. First, Caroline Johnson presents a paper discussing energy resources and the efforts of Western conservatives to overcome federal regulatory frameworks to allow and, indeed, encourage further expansion of drilling in the region. In doing so, she argues, Western conservatives fostered an intense anti-statism that would remain in local political culture for years to come. Next, Christian Filbrun focuses on the history of efforts to protect Lake Tahoe and the conflict between local environmentalists and developers over environmental regulations to preserve lake clarity. The competing campaigns to alternatively preserve the beauty of Lake Tahoe or resist the tyranny of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency offers a compelling glimpse into the complicated picture on the ground in many Western environmental conflicts. Finally, Zephaniah Fleetwood examines anti-environmentalist conspiracy theories in the militia movement of the 1990s United States. While militias often primarily cared about perceived attacks on their 2nd amendment rights by a tyrannical federal government, they framed their anti-government concerns in a specifically anti-environmentalist lens that sought to justify themselves as private property owners seeking to protect their rights and liberties.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Enemies of Society and Prophets of Doom: Growth and the 1970s Origins of Conservative Anti-Environmentalism - Alex Boynton, University of Kansas

• Inventing the Petroleum Cowboy: Right-Wing Mobilization and the Rocky Mountain Oil Boom - Caroline Johnson, Vanderbilt University

• “Keep Tahoe Red”: The Politics of Environmentalism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Lake Tahoe Basin - Christian Filbrun, University of Nevada, Reno

• Throwing Open the Green Curtain: Anti-Environmentalist Conspiracy Theories in the 1990s Militia Movement - Zephaniah Fleetwood, UC Davis

Chair

• Kathleen Brosnan, University of Oklahoma