Many of us on the Left see the fight for environmental justice as going hand-in-hand with other progressive battles, including racial justice and human rights. But, evidently, not all environmentalist efforts are rooted in the same values. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, about his recent piece chronicling an ugly, hidden side to the history of the American environmentalist movement. We learn about John Tanton, a virulent racist and eugenicist who befriended many environmental leaders, find out how he’s connected to the perpetrator of the El Paso Wal-Mart mass shooting, Patrick Crusius, and talk about how white supremacy and xenophobia have come to dominate right-wing rhetoric in this country.

Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 00:18 - We are all paying too little attention to, you know, the human impacts of climate change to the pressures of climate change and what that does to society and to politics, and to communities, not physically, not the disaster threats and things like that, but what it does to the way that we relate to each other.

Narrator | 00:35 - Many of us on the Left see the fight for environmental justice as going hand-in-hand with other progressive battles, including racial justice and human rights. But, evidently, not all environmentalist efforts are rooted in the same values. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, about his recent piece chronicling an ugly, hidden side to the history of the American environmentalist movement. We learn about John Tanton, a virulent racist and eugenicist who befriended many environmental leaders, find out how he’s connected to the perpetrator of the El Paso Wal-Mart mass shooting, Patrick Crusius, and talk about how white supremacy and xenophobia have come to dominate right-wing rhetoric in this country.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 - I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Abrahm Lustgarten. He's a reporter at ProPublica. Abrahm, welcome back to Sea Change. Radio.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 01:48 - Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:50 - Been almost a decade, I think, since we've spoken, but I wanted to have you on because you wrote an excellent piece recently for ProPublica entitled “The Ghost of John Tanton - Climate Change and Anti-Immigrant Hate are colliding for Telling a Volatile Future.” A lot of our discussions about the environmental movement have focused on race, and one of the criticisms that we hear is that it's too white of a movement In many ways, John Tanton is really the poster child for that discussion. Who is he and why don't you explain how you came to discuss him as part of a, a, a larger point you're trying to make in this piece. 

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 02:28 - Yeah, so John Tanton is a man who started most of the organizations that we now know to be hugely influential in steering and characterizing and setting the tone of our debate over immigration in the United States. But he didn't start out that way. He started out as, uh, an avid environmentalist and going back to the 1950s, 1960s, you know, he was, uh, both an early conservationist. He lived in Michigan and he started early conservation groups in Michigan. He was an early member of the Sierra Club and headed the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club. And he, like many environmentalists of the era, was most concerned about this idea that we were overpopulating the planet, that the number of people on the planet was drawing too much on resources and making life unsustainable. And so he set out, uh, you know, a very intelligent individual and a very organized, uh, and networked individual to campaign against, uh, overpopulation, uh, and to do that in every way that he could. But that evolved over the years. And as the US reproductive rate stabilized in, in the mid 1970s,