Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century

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Dowie, Mark. Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. In this provocative critique of the mainstream American environmental movement, Mark Dowie shows how compromise and capitulation has pushed a once promising and effective political movement to the brink of irrelevance. He unveils the inside stories behind American environmentalism’s undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures. Dowie’s account ranges from the movement’s conservationist origins as a handful of rich white men’s hunting and fishing clubs, through its evolution in the 1960s and 1970s into a powerful political force that forged landmark environmental legislation, enforced with aggressive litigation, to the strategy of “third wave” political accommodation during the Reagan and Bush years that led to the evisceration of many earlier triumphs, up to today, where the first stirrings of a rejuvenated, angry, multicultural, and decidedly impolite movement for environmental justice provides new hope for the future. (Text adapted from MIT Press website.)