The Smoke and the Spoils Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States

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.

John 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.