The Smoke and the Spoils

The future of our environment lies in the hands of the working class, but what if the future of the working class also lies in environmental political struggles?

The unsettling realities of climate change, air and water pollution, and toxic contamination loom larger with every passing day, but the policies that will enable us to respond to these crises continue to be blocked by reactionary actors and ideologies. How do we explain the power and persistence of anti-environmentalism in the United States? In The Smoke and the Spoils, John Hultgren argues that the benefits of continued fossil fuel production flow upward to a tiny fraction of the American populace. But the powerful interests who benefit from such a reality continue to beat back strong environmental laws and regulations by successfully constructing a cross-class coalition that includes a segment of the working class. 

This political reality is far from new, but the coalition enabling it has shifted over the course of American history. To confront anti-environmentalism, it is thus necessary to grapple with both the deeply entrenched patterns that have reappeared in environmental struggles at different moments in American history and the cracks and fissures that working-class activists and environmental justice movements have periodically pried open to challenge the status quo. Tracing the trajectory of anti-environmentalism from the nineteenth-century frontier to the 1950s suburb, from the shuttered shops of Main Street to the extractive economies of Trump country, Hultgren offers a historically grounded theory of anti-environmentalism that will help us to better understand—and ultimately combat—the institutional, organizational, and ideological forces standing in the way of environmental progress. 

Placing environmental politics within a broader context of class struggle, this book makes the case that the environmental crises of our time will only be mitigated by a resurgent working class.Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Putting Anti-Environmentalism to Work
1 Rollin’ Coal with Du Bois: The “Wages of Whiteness” on the Wild Frontier
2 Defending the Suburban Environment: The Treadmill of Social Reproduction and the Making of the Middle Class
3 “Those Who Bring from the Earth”: Anti-Environmentalism and the Conservative Lexicon of Class
4 Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance: The Political Environment of “Trump Country”
Conclusion: From Ashes to Fascists?
Notes
References
Index“John Hultgren traces the historical construction of the white US worker as the antithesis to environmentalism, reveals cracks emerging in this narrative, and provides an indispensable guide for working-class organization against these projects of ecological destruction—not least as the new Trump era unfolds.”
—Andreas Malm, Associate Professor, Department of Human Geography, Lund University; author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline and coauthor of White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

“Hultgren provides much needed clarity for understanding how American anti-environmentalism emerged and how it is sustained through appeals to the working classes and offers vital tools for confronting this phenomenon. A monumental achievement.”
—David N. Pellow, Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project, UC Santa Barbara

“Historically rich, theoretically sophisticated, and all too timely, The Smoke and the Spoils is a revelatory account of both environmental and labor politics that recasts the relationship between class, nature, and capitalism.”
—Alyssa Battistoni, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University; coauthor of A Planet to WinJohn Hultgren is a Faculty Member in Environmental Politics at Bennington College in Vermont. He is the author of Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America.