Mind over Matter: Social JuStice, the Body, and environMental hiStory Skylar Harris n 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on Ia grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, “We won’t play nature to your culture.” In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America’s popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years ear- lier, in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity’s physical engagement with nature, Kruger’s statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship. Rather than being born out of a concern for the physical effects of the interaction between humans and the environment, Kruger’s image emerged from a postmodern intellectual tradition pennsylvania history: a journal of mid-atlantic studies, vol. 79, no. 4, 2012. Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania Historical Association This content downloaded from 128.118.152.206 on Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:18:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PAH 79.4_10_Harris.indd 440 26/09/12 12:52 PM mind over matter that sought to critically engage with the concept of cultural construction, as well as with contemporary feminist scholarship. With this image, Kruger critiqued prevailing cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity that associated women with nature and men with civilization. These dual identi- ties, Kruger charged, served to culturally reinforce women’s exclusion from spheres of power and influence, and transformed them into passive objects, able to be viewed but unable to return the gaze.1 In addition to being notable landmarks in the history of the environment in America’s popular consciousness, Silent Spring, the first Earth Day, and Kruger’s untitled 1983 photograph also provide a noteworthy parallel to the evolution of the study of the environment’s impact on social equality, human health, and the body. The field has its roots in the study of the concrete, tan- gible effects of humanity’s interaction with the environment, but over time it has broadened to address a variety of abstract concepts. This includes not only the now-traditional cultural constructions of race, class, gender, but also the ontological reality of the concept of nature itself.2 One of environmental history’s first and most enduring contributions to the larger field of history is its ability to use the issue of the environment to investigate socioeconomic inequality and issues of social justice. This approach has become a popular subject for urban environmental historians, but its origins can be found in a less metropolitan context. Samuel Hays’s classic 1959 text, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890–1920, made a seminal contribution to the field of environmental history. This work, which would come to shape not only envi- ronmental history but also the history of the Progressive Era, examined the ways in which reformers developed conservation policies for national parks and wilderness areas. In an effort to recreate an uncorrupted image of natural wilderness areas and enforce a conservation policy that emphasized efficiency and corporate progress over individual access and use, these reform-minded leaders ultimately privileged the land rights of large-scale land users and the middle class over more marginal populations.3 Following in Hays’s footsteps, Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation extends this approach through a series of case studies that examine the ways in which the conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries replaced local traditions of land use and management with for- malized legal codes. While Hays’s national study focuses most heavily on the American West, Jacoby includes a detailed case study of the Adirondack State 441 This content downloaded from 128.118.152.206 on Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:18:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PAH 79.4_10_Harris.indd 441 26/09/12 12:52 PM pennsylvania history Park in New York (which Hays’s study also includes, but does not as closely examine). Jacoby finds that, in the park’s creation in 1892, the goal of pro- viding middle- and upper-class Americans with a retreat from the city in the form of natural recreation and wilderness conflicted directly with longstand- ing local land use policies. In order to create a wilderness park that appeared to be uncorrupted by humanity, thousands of people already living on the land had to be displaced. As a result, battles erupted over property, logging, and hunting rights, all of which had previously fallen under local codes of use. Local response to this dilemma varied, as some residents burned the for- est or poached game out of protest, while others accommodated by becoming guides, and some cooperated with rangers to legally extend local-use rules.4 As the field has matured, this attention to socioeconomic divides and inequality has broadened in scope to reconsider the boundaries of what is and is not a “natural” environment.5 In confronting the cultural construction of nature, environmental historians have addressed the need to examine natural and built environments in urban as well as wilderness settings. With this development has come increasing attention to the issue of the environment and social justice in urban and suburban settings. Such works examine how racial, ethnic, and economic divides can manifest themselves in the form of environmental health and quality-of-life concerns. This approach has also focused on the ways in which historical social justice movements and grass- roots political organizations have agitated to address environmental inequal- ity in their own communities.6 A good example of this approach in the Mid-Atlantic can be found in Matthew Gandy’s Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, which explores all of these themes in a broadly defined study that addresses urbanization, popular conceptions of what is and what is not natural, the harnessing of natural resources in the construction of manmade capitalist enterprise, industrialization, and environmental decline, as well as issues of the environment and social justice. Gandy frames the urban ecosystem not as an unnatural, manmade divergence from the environment, but as a distinct metropolitan form of nature, shaped by the dynamic and ongoing interactions between human and nonhuman forces, and by the ongoing contestations among the city’s inhabitants over the meaning and allocation of resources. Gandy also highlights the ways in which unequal distributions of power in the city—especially control over public funds—determined the physical distribution of natural resources for desirable aesthetic and practical features such as parks or water infrastructure. He also focuses directly on the 442 This content downloaded from 128.118.152.206 on Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:18:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms PAH 79.4_10_Harris.indd 442 26/09/12 12:52 PM mind over matter ways in which environmentalism and political activism merged in the 1960s and 1970s for a number of community leaders and movements representing New York City’s underserved populations. These groups organized to advo- cate for public health and environmental planning reforms, and to protest the ways in which the city privileged influential communities over poor and minority populations with regard to waste removal and proposed large-scale waste incinerators.7 Other historians of the urban environment have also focused on the disproportionate accumulation of environmental toxins and hazards in poor and minority neighborhoods. In “Reconstructing Race and Protest: Environmental Justice in New York City,” Dolores Greenberg situates envi- ronmental health concerns within the larger framework of historical black social and political mobilization. After examining the ways in which racial and economic forces have divided New York City’s neighborhoods since the seventeenth century, Greenberg details the process by which environmental reform movements that followed in the wake of Silent Spring met the needs of white neighborhoods but failed to address ongoing toxic dumping or aban- doned toxic sites in minority neighborhoods.8 Such concerns are not limited to the city, however, as evidenced by Elizabeth D. Blum’s Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism, which reveals how the politics of race, class, and gender took shape over the course of a battle for environmental justice that ultimately led to landmark legislative action and a cultural shift in Americans’ awareness of the problem of toxic waste. According to Blum, in addition to being remark- able for these impacts, the example of Love Canal serves as a powerful case study in the empowerment of usually marginalized populations, as the grass- roots activism around the crisis relied heavily on the engagement of women, African Americans, and the working class. While their marginal social status was what made the residents of Love Canal vulnerable to exposure to toxic waste in the first place, it was also what provided them with the tools to combat their condition.9 Blum’s research reveals that many of the working-class women address- ing the crisis closely allied their mission with that of second-wave feminism, while African American residents, particularly renters, found their race to be both a resource in terms of allying their cause with that of the broader civil rights movement and their engagement with the NAACP, but it could also be a barrier to interracial cooperation.