Brian McCammack

“Black, Brown, and Green” is the first comprehensive history of modern environmentalism in the United States that centers racial politics through the experiences and perspectives of virtually unknown environmental activists of color. The early 1970s, in particular, were years of far more contingency and possibility in the environmental movement than most people—scholars and the general public alike—recognize, as definitions of “environment” and who counted as “environmentalist” were up for grabs. “Black, Brown, and Green” shows how and why the composition of environmentalism’s core constituency for the past half-century—white, middle-class, and suburban—was far from inevitable and offers instructive lessons for twenty-first-century environmentalists who continue to confront longstanding racial diversity problems.