At the Sierra Club, a Focus on Race, Gender and the Environment, Too
What’s this? A new book by a white male historian, of Harvard? Who the fuck is that? Who wrote this thing? There is no author credit, and it’s not even a scholarly work, it’s just a collection of random essays, one in the style of an editorial. Yet it’s already been called the “canon.” It’s about race (as a white male historian) and gender (as a historian, of white men) and the environment (as a male historian, of white men). “For decades, the environmental movement has been held back from the world by a gender bias that limits the number of women we can talk to on matters of environmentalism,” said David Foreman, the book’s editor, in an interview with Salon. “The Gender Revolution is the first book to address this.” And how the movement has been so “delayed” is because they didn’t publish enough of them. In 1972 the environmental movement got started, and it was all about saving the environment from pollution, nuclear power, and deforestation. Now it has nothing to do with the environment. It’s all about saving the environment from “mankind,” as foreman puts it.
Foreman calls this “a book that would have made the front cover of Nature,” and he makes no apology for that. In fact, as well as having the advantage of being written by a white man, he is clearly unashamed of it. But there is a difference between having a book published in Nature, and being published with the author’s name on the cover in the New York Times. And Foreman has nothing to apologize for in his own work. It’s true that, as many of his
