The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation

Conclusion: Transitions and Legacies

138  conclusion Transitions and Legacies Many people assume that a Supreme Court Justice should be remote and aloof from life and should play no part even in community affairs. But if Justices are to enjoy First Amendment rights, they should not be relegated to the promotion of innocuous ideas. William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man: The Early Years: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas, (1974)1 As Justice William O. Douglas’s public career wound down, he became more outspoken. His Sierra Club dissent showed as much. His publications also evidenced his increased radicalism peppered with his mounting impatience. Douglas reflected important changes in the conservation movement. By 1970, important legislation had been passed and perhaps twenty million AmericansparticipatedinthefirstEarthDay.Theseachievementssuggested the widespread acceptance and popularity of many environmental values. This period was a critical transition point, though, as the movement—now known more as environmentalism than conservation—grew and diversified its ideas and interests. Inevitably, the movement appeared less consensual and divisions appeared with some focusing more on wilderness or urban issues, population or technology problems, local or global scales, social or biological emphases, and radical or mainstream solutions. Douglas stood in the midst of this swirling ferment.2 After publishing some portions of the manuscript in Playboy, Douglas produced a radical statement in his 1970 Points of Rebellion. The slim tract was meant to describe—indeed, to celebrate—dissent and explain why the nation had experienced so much of it over the previous few years. Passages seemed to suggest a revolution, potentially violent, was coming against the Establishment. A harsh indictment of American society, Points of Rebellion emphasized a variety of environmental themes. Indeed, Douglas saw environmental activism as another symptom of broad disaffection against Establishmentvaluesakintocivilrightsprotestsandcampuschallengesover free speech. He listed ecological catastrophes: “Everyone knows—including the youthful dissenters—that Lake Erie is now only a tub filled with stinking sewage and wastes.” And, “Pesticides have killed millions of birds, putting some of them in line for extinction.” Still again, “Hundreds of trout streams conclusion: Transitions and Legacies  139 have been destroyed by highway engineers and their faulty plans.” Such problems naturally led to protest, Douglas explained: “Youthful dissenters are not experts in these matters. But when they see all the wonders of nature being ruined they ask, ‘What natural law gives the Establishment the right to ruin the rivers, the lakes, the ocean, the beaches, and even the air?’” His seeming understanding of youthful protest made him, as one scholar noted, the only person over thirty the protesters trusted. Although similar to earlier Douglas comments, these held a sharper edge.3 Points of Rebellion built on a strong foundation and went in somewhat new directions. Douglas pointed out that the poor often suffered the most. He referred to West Virginia coal-mining communities as colonies of the Establishment, colonies that devastated workers’ health and the landscape. He also pointed to the “technology revolution in agriculture” that displaced ruralresidentsintourbanslums.Thejusticefurnishedexamplesofhighways being relocated through African-American neighborhoods where protests would not be heard. “The values at stake,” Douglas asserted, “are both aestheticandspiritual,socialandeconomic;andtheybearheavilyonhuman dignity and responsibility.” Like the movement as a whole, Douglas pushed toward a greater recognition of social inequities tied up with environmental problems. Such were many of the newer and angrier concerns as the 1970s developed.4 TwoyearsafterhepublishedPointsofRebellion,Douglasproducedhislast environmental book. The Three Hundred Year War: A Chronicle of Ecological Disaster presented a compendium of natural catastrophes. Various chapters on radiation, pesticides, garbage, water, and more included a wide array of statistics all pointing to a devastated natural world and corrupted economic and political system. Again, Douglas underscored the class- and race-based correlation of living in polluted environments. Reflecting on this growing problem, he wrote, “When we speak of the survival of man and his habitat, we must think not only about wilderness areas, pure air and water, freeflowing rivers, abundant wildlife, and the like but also of ghettos, poverty, unemployment and the large bloc of people who suffer from pollution and its related ills and who are not beneficiaries of the affluence that produced it.” This broadening of concerns represented a belated recognition of what came to be known as environmental racism, an issue increasingly prevalent among the host of problems environmentalism addressed in the next two decades. A great deal of Douglas’s early writing and activism focused on wildland protection, but moving into the 1970s, he was gradually more sensitive to factors that anticipated the growth of the environmental justice movement. His...