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ix Preface t h e฀c i t i z e n฀e n v i r o n m e n ta l i s t s A funny thing happened on the way to study the public forum: I didn’t find what I expected. As a historian interested in public debate, I’ve long been working under the loose thesis that when people speak in the public sphere on matters of policy, they give away more than they mean to say. The language they use, the arguments they make, the examples they choose—all of these things betray, intentionally or not, the mindset of the speaker. We can see their assumptions, their intentions, and above all the ways that they conceive of the society around them. When arguing about the most mundane policy matters—roads, infrastructure, sewers, schools— participants in public debate give away their vision of the proper functioning of society; their understandings of the meaning of race, class, and gender; the goals of government or the meanings of capitalism. When more disruptive topics deeply divide the public, historians can see even more. Like a bulldozer that has carved a deep trench in the earth, disruptive public debates expose the layered sediment of assumptions hidden from view in more quiet times. I had previously studied the topic of divorce law and reform attempts using this operating thesis. The language and assumptions of speakers on the meaning of marriage was most illuminating. I was thinking about public debate in this way in the late 1990s when I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to begin this project. In Pittsburgh the biggest public debate concerned the city’s air pollution and attempts to forge a viable future amidst the crumbling remains of an industrial past. This debate had flared up once again at just the moment that I began searching for a research topic. When I went to a public meeting called to discuss a proposed revival of an industrial site that promised both more pollution and more jobs, I was treated to the sight of these debates in the flesh. On one side were diminutive, middle-aged professional women, housewives, and mothers who represented various civic and neighborhood groups, defending their vision of a city as a place to live and to raise a family. On the other side were the men of the local labor unions, in their union jackets and work boots, defending the simple observation that living and raising a family required a job and a paycheck. The two sides presented their cases in front of x฀•฀p r e fa c e the microphone and then argued with each other, squaring off, toe-to-toe. The working-class men loomed over the clubwomen, who nevertheless did not give an inch. This, I thought, was the jackpot: a real live local debate that would expose all sorts of interesting assumptions about jobs, the environment, and the proper role of government. But when I began writing a history of environmental debate in postwar Pittsburgh , I was expecting to find the local version of what historians said was happening on the national level. I expected to find an upswing in popular interest in environmental philosophy, care for the earth, and ecological concerns surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970, possibly concentrated among college students and mixed-gender groups inspired by campus protest and the New Left. Instead, I found that activists were using language and organizational tools that had more to do with Progressive Era organizing, maternal care for the environment, expert knowledge, and a recurring emphasis on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship . Thinking that this was simply an aberration caused by Pittsburgh’s oft-noted socialandculturalconservatism,Iwasagainsurprisedtofindthatthesethemesappeared across the nation. The thing is, these new environmentalists spent as much time talking about citizenship and maternal care for children and society as they did discussing the logic of environmental philosophy; they identified themselves as citizens and mothers long before they took the title of environmentalists; they spent a great deal of time dealing with the problems of neighborhood organizing, participatory democracy, and the rights of citizens to intervene in policy matters. At least on the local level, members of the new, modern environmental movement weren’t as environmental as one might expect. From this perspective, it would be more correct to say that there was a nationwide phenomenon best named citizen environmentalism, that these activists benefited from similar rhetoric and social capital, and that they are best...

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