I really, really don’t want to hurt or insult any well-meaning people working with ecology or environmental justice/studies or related community-building. So, if I sound bitter, please don’t think that “I don’t like you” and don’t let me dissuade you from continuing to explore these projects. In fact, thank you for your service in The Good Cause. But I can’t resist digging myself a deeper hole while needlessly volunteering information which might make me seem like A Not Nice Person, but I wanted to clarify something. (It’s very important to me that anyone reading this takes what I say with a grain of salt; this is just my impression from anecdotal experience.)
But, specifically, when I said (“land management types booed and were upset at this”), I wasn’t even referring to the predictable colonialism or colonialist apologism from wealthy private land developers or industrial-scale ranchers or advocates of “sustainable” mining or timber harvest or whatever. Instead, I was vague-posting about the self-assured wealthy-ish “progressive” environmental NGO/nonprofit careerist types. (Specifically, I’m referring to environmentalist circles in North America west of the Mississippi River; I’m not familiar with the social ~vibes~ of environmental studies/activist circles east of the Great Plains.)
If you’re interested in ecology, environmental studies, or activism generally and you have lived in (Willamette Valley, Bend, Washington State, Vancouver/Victoria, Boise/Pocatello, Moscow/Pullman/Coeur d’Alene, Missoula, the Wasatch Front, Denver/Boulder, Flagstaff, Tucson, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, etc.) … I’m betting there’s a good chance you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Long story short: Having socialized and worked with organizations and many activists like this, it’s my perception that, in the American West, some or even many (to be fair, not all!) students/graduates of environmental studies and adjacent fields have turned “environmental studies” into a performative and “cool” and “woke” lifestyle or aesthetic brand, a brand central to their identity and public persona. The “watershed region as an alternative to political borders” concept is often taught in, like, naturalist community groups or freshmen-level environmental studies university courses as a sort of thought experiment to get young people to start to contemplate/consider alternatives to outdated modes of organization, like political borders. And it’s a good lesson! Glad it gets promoted! However, some activists will learn some of these basic concepts, and they won’t really continue to actively seek out and explore new information after graduation or after attending a few community education lectures, yet – and this is key – they still become very proud of and too confident in their education/activism. So, often, you might witness an environmental nonprofit employee dismiss or deride the knowledge or experience or perspective of Indigenous people or someone who works on a small communal farm but doesn’t have a degree. And a retort to or criticism of their “environmental expertise” can often be perceived not as constructive good-faith discourse, but instead genuine criticism can be perceived as a deeply personal attack on their identity or the effort they’ve put into their education, work, or social posturing.
So, if you were at, like, a naturalist club gathering or an environmental studies lecture, and you were to say something like “the watershed region concept is inadequate, do better!” There’s a good chance that there would be hurt feelings and you would not have a fun time.
This attitude or “subculture” seems pervasive among the kinds of ostensibly progressive environmental nonprofit orgs that work with “stakeholder collaboration” in land and resource management. In other words, these are people “progressive” enough to be, like, Bernie supporters or advocates of European-style soc-dem reforms. However, they make many concessions to resource extraction, they participate in continued local gentrification, and they still maintain an essentially unquestionable reverence for the quasi-mythical narrative of “the American conservation movement” and its problematic historical standard-bearing personalities (Teddy Roosevelt, etc.), and they do not adequately criticize ongoing Indigenous dispossession, ongoing subjugation of rural communities near resource extraction sites, or the colonial/imperial implications of much of the history and current approach to conservation in the US.
In the American West, there seems to be a sort of vague, informal network that exists, which replicates itself in various “mountain towns” or college towns, wherein relatively progressive or loosely-socialist environmental activists will maintain social circles that incorporate “less-progressive” “stakeholders” in public land use, like fly-fishing guides, rural private landowners, resort ranches, wildland firefighters, mountain biking groups, and other expressions of a sort of middle or upper class “outdoor enthusiast” culture. And sometimes, there’s like an unwritten rule that you just aren’t allowed to openly criticize the political implications of a “progressive” environmental activist hanging-out and doing deals with the CEO of a local timber extraction corporation while at the ski hill’s pub barroom.
This is partially why, for example, there is such an infamous problem with academics in environmental studies, anthropology, and similar fields whomst disregard the concerns/comments of Indigenous scholars and decolonization advocates. “You’re being too radical! You’re insulting the experts!” Rather than incorporating or genuinely considering new information or perspectives brought to their attention by activists, many environmenalist-ish activists and academics will take Indigenous criticism as “a personal attack” on their career, expertise, identity, or social circle. It’s not coincidental. Indigenous scholars and other advocates of decolonization call into question and heavily criticize the colonial/imperial/profit-oriented history of the US approach to conservation and ahistorical concepts like “pristine wilderness,” and the contemporary motivations of US government management of lands, especially west of the Mississippi River where many local regions are still functionally treated as de facto intensive resource extraction colonies, complete with large-scale ecological devastation and mining barons buying local elections and dictating state policy. And this kind of criticism is uncomfortable for some academics and activists, because, first, it implies that these activists might be complicit in continued ecological degradation - which is a painful and difficult irony for activists who might genuinely care about ecology but hadn’t yet grappled with the historical context and human/ecoogical cost of how NGOs and land management agencies operate. And Indigenous and decolonial criticisms can also make explicit or reveal how a certain trope or lesson that an academic/activist learned at university 5 or 10 years ago might be ahistorical, outdated, or probelmatique™.
(Again, just my impression, please don’t take what I say here as authoritative.)
