June 12, 2023: Women in War: The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act

[June 12^th marks the 75^th anniversary of the passage of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, an important step toward a more inclusive America on multiple levels. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other histories of women in war, leading up to a Guest Post from one of the best scholars of those histories and issues!]

Three women who reflect the arguments for and effects of this transformative legislation.

1)      Margaret Chase Smith: As that hyperlinked Senate bio succinctly illustrates, there were no shortage of significant moments and achievements in Margaret Chase Smith’s groundbreaking political career. But I would certainly argue that her (initially) sole sponsorship of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act has to be very high on that list. As the ensuing Congressional debate (on which more in a moment) reflects, the idea of legally allowing women to become regular and permanent members of the armed forces was quite controversial; while President Truman could have taken the step with an Executive Order (as he crucially did when racially integrating the armed forces), proposing it as a bill made it possible to have that debate and still succeed in achieving this inclusive outcome. And we have Margaret Chase Smith to thank for that!

2)      Mary Hallaren: As a Senator, Chase Smith could help argue for the Act, but of course could not also serve as an expert witness on its behalf during those debates. Many military men did importantly and inspiringly do so, including Truman’s Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. But perhaps the most extended and certainly the most eloquent expert witness was Mary Hallaren, Director of the WWII Women’s Army Corps (on whom more later this week) and as that first hyperlinked bio quotes “one of the giants among military women” (despite standing less than 5 feet tall). The Congressman questioning Hallaren, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Walter Andrews, was a vocal opponent of the Act, and undoubtedly contributed to the long process between the February start of hearings and the June 12^th passage. But pass it did, and we have experts like Mary Hallaren to thank for that!

3)      Frances Lois Willoughby: That passage didn’t just immediately transform the U.S. military and the national community more broadly; it also transformed the careers and lives of countless American women. One of the first so affected with Frances Lois Willoughby, a pioneering physician who had volunteered for the Navy in 1944 but been assigned only to the Naval Reserve due to her gender. She stayed in the military after the war, and in October 1948 was sworn in as the first female doctor in the Navy; two years later she became the first woman to achieve the rank of commander. She would serve for another 14 years before her retirement in 1964, becoming a captain and continuing to influence the Navy, the medical profession, and the possibilities for women in both worlds as well as the nation overall. Just one inspiring figure who has the Armed Services Integration Act to thank for her amazing career!

Next war women tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other stories or histories you’d highlight?

June 10-11, 2023: Environmental Activisms: The Climate Just Cities Project

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ve highlighted a handful of such activisms. Leading up to this special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On a few links (beyond the interview hyperlinked above) that help frame the many layers of this vital 21^st century initiative.

Professor Joan Fitzgerald: As that interview also reflects, the Project was started by Joan Fitzgerald, a Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University (and the supervisor for my son’s internship). That first hyperlink leads to her profile with the Scholars Strategy Network and its Boston Chapter (of which I’m a co-leader), a page that captures much of her writing and activism and also itself illustrates her commitment to truly public scholarship, research, and service. That’s all at the core of the Project as well.

Greenprint for a Climate Just City: That 2021 working paper embodies a great deal of what the Project is working for and toward, and many of the practical and tangible initiatives through which it and all of us can achieve those goals.

Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change (2022): Like most of us trying to do public scholarly work, Fitzgerald is doing so through a wide variety of forms and media, including this recent Oxford University Press book which includes not only her own research and analysis and arguments, but also “interviews with practitioners and elected officials” among other resources.

The Boston Climate Progress Report: While of course these issues and challenges face every American and every global community, it’s not a coincidence that the Project is located in Boston, a city that both faces climate crisis with particular urgency and that features many individuals and communities (including the new Mayor) at the forefront of the efforts to confront that crisis. I’m very excited for my son to become more and more connected to those local and regional as well as scholarly and global efforts this summer!

Next series stars Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?

June 9, 2023: Environmental Activisms: All of Us

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On three ways we can all be environmental activists in 2023.

1)      Meat: As I wrote in this Thanksgiving post on the wonderful vegan meal delivery company Purple Carrot, I’m not the proselytizing type of vegetarian, and I’m going to hold myself to that same standard here. I won’t even quote at length from my younger son’s amazing and entirely convincing persuasive essay (also mentioned in that post) on how the meat industry contributes to the climate crisis. Instead, I’ll just say this: in the last few years, vegetarian and vegan meat alternatives (as well as cheese substitutes and the like) have become so, so much tastier than they had been, as well as far more numerous and diverse. (Seriously—I couldn’t even stomach most of them a few years back, and now my sons and I have so many favorites, like these Field Roast plant-based sausages to name just one.) I’m not telling anyone what to do, and I’m far from a purist or absolutist in my own diet or choices; but if every one of us made even a small effort to reduce our meat consumption, the effects would be real and significant.

2)      Cars: Look, I know that hybrid and electric vehicles remain more expensive than their gas-guzzling counterparts; I believe the gap has been lessened in recent years, but it still exists, and reflects the complex roles that wealth and class play in movements like environmental activism and justice. But I also know that in my situation, as someone with a substantial commute, the Prius I bought in 2021 had already paid for itself in gas savings within its first year, so I do believe that economics and environmentalism can and do go hand-in-hand when it comes to our transportation decisions. And if a hybrid or electric vehicle isn’t feasible, it seems to me that far more of us (and I’m certainly including myself in this mix) could do a much better job with carpooling, taking public transportation, and otherwise working to reduce what is without question the biggest carbon footprint in most of our daily lives.

3)      Pressure: I can already hear a clear and understandable response to those first two items: “No matter what individual actions I take, they will always be dwarfed by the role that governments have to play in producing real change.” I don’t think it’s either/or, and indeed would argue that any perspective which minimizes what each individual can and should do reflects a level of cynicism that I find not only counter-productive but ultimately hugely damaging for our collective future. But at the same time, yes, far bigger actions have to be taken if we are to really start to confront and respond to the defining crisis of all our lifetimes. Can we use our voices and pressure to influence those bigger actions and the governments and other global entities that need to take them? In response, and to close this post and series, I’ll quote Don Henley’s “Inside Job”: “Insect politics/Indifferent universe/Bang your head against the wall/But apathy is worse.”

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?

June 8, 2023: Environmental Activisms: 21st Century Voices

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On three recent books that carry the legacy of environmental writing into the 21^st century.

1)      Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet (2016): Edited by Julie Dunlap and Susan A. Cohen, this wonderful collection gathers together a wide variety of writers (twenty-two in total, as well as an introduction by the great Bill McKibben) and genres to consider what environmental writing and activism are and can be in this bleak historical moment. I excerpted a few pieces from it for my Spring 2017 adult learning class on contemporary issues and they were very well-received, but I would really argue that the book works best when read as a whole, putting these individual voices in conversation and community to exemplify the subtitle’s generational cohort as fully as possible.

2)      Breaking into the Backcountry (2010): I’ve highlighted my FSU colleague Steve Edwards in a number of posts over the years, and in terms of his evolving writing career have been particularly inspired by pieces on both parenting and reading. But Steve’s first book, the magisterial Breaking into the Backcountry, is likewise great and indeed represents a worthy heir to works like Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. As I said about Abbey’s 1968 book in that hyperlinked post, a 2010 project on the importance and inspiration of spending nearly a year in solitude in nature might seem a bit too divorced from the social and communal issues facing us collectively these days. But like Desert Solitaire and Walden and so many other great works, Steve’s thoughtful and moving book proves that the opposite is true: that we need such books and writing now more than ever.

3)      Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (2016): We also need books that can bridge those only superficial gaps between (for example) nature and society, individual experience and collective history, and I know of few works (recent or otherwise) that do so more potently than Lauret Savoy’s Trace. Savoy, a geologist and Professor of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College, links those scientific and scholarly pursuits to both her own and America’s multi-racial heritage and identity, and the result is a book that truly exemplifies interdisciplinary engagements with some of our most complex and shared collective spaces and themes. Trace seems to me to be a key reflection of the future of environmental writing (and a key part of the future of American Studies to boot), and an illustration, like all three of these books, that that future is in very good hands.

Last environmental activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?

June 7, 2023: Environmental Activisms: Animated Activism

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

Three examples of the longstanding link between animation and the environment.

1)      Captain Planet and the Planeteers/The New Adventures of Captain Planet (1990-96): As a viewer and fan of the show since its first episodes, I might be biased, but it seems to me that Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle’s environmental edutainment program (or programs, since the show changed its name when Hanna-Barbera took over principal production in 1993) Captain Planet was one of the most radical and influential children’s shows of all time. The show’s consistent environmental activist themes and stories should be evidence enough for that claim; but if not, I would point to the 1992 episode “A Formula for Hate,” in which the villain sought to spread lies and paranoia about AIDS and thus to turn a town against an HIV-infected young man (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris). The pre-Boston March for Science talk I recorded through my role as the Scholar Strategy Network’s Boston Chapter Co-Leader focused on science and public activism, and I can’t imagine a clearer embodiment of that link than this Captain Planet episode.

2)      FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992): 1992 was a banner year for environmental animation, as it also saw the release of FernGully, a joint Australian and American animated film (based on Diana Young’s children’s novel of the same name) about the growing threats to the world’s rainforests. Among its many achievements, FernGully succeeded in bringing Cheech and Chong back together for the first time in six years; it also perhaps influenced the casting of John Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996), which likewise featured a pairing of Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater. They, like all of the film’s voice actors (including Robin Williams in his first animated film as Batty) worked for scale, as all were committed to the film’s environmental and conservationist messages. Indeed, I’d argue that Captain Planet and FernGully together reflect the leading role pop culture played in advancing those issues in the early 1990s—a trend worth remembering whenever we’re tempted to dismiss pop culture’s social or communal roles.

3)      Princess Mononoke (1997): Legendary animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 historical fantasy anime film illustrates that those cultural contributions to environmental activism were taking place around the globe. Like FernGully, Mononoke uses the genre of fantasy to tell its story of supernatural and human heroes working together to fight for an embattled natural world against encroaching forces. Often the genre of anime has been associated with futuristic and urban settings; but Miyazaki’s film, among others in the era, redirected the genre’s tropes and themes to the historical and natural worlds. Like Captain Planet and FernGully before it, Mononoke was an international hit (as well as a box office smash in Japan), with its English-language version becoming one of the most popular Hollywood adaptations of an anime or Japanese film of all time. In my experience, Earth Day really took off as a collective phenomenon in the 1990s—and if so, we might well have these pioneering 1990s animations to thank.

Next environmental activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?

June 6, 2023: Environmental Activisms: Mardy Murie

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On three factors that help explain the unique life and legacy of the “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement.”

1)      Alaska: Born Margaret Elizabeth Thomas in Seattle in 1902, Mardy and her family moved to Fairbanks, Alaska when she was 9; although she briefly attended colleges in both Oregon and Massachusetts, she would return to Alaska to finish school at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines[ (becoming its first female graduate in 1924). While her life, inspiring marriage (on which more momentarily), and conservation efforts would take her to many other places for much of the rest of her life, Alaska always remained a focal point, as illustrated by her successful 1956 campaign to create the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and her late 1970s testimony in support of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act (signed by President Carter in 1980). Alaska is of course hugely singular on the American landscape, but it’s also long served as an exemplification of the broader need to protect public lands, and no one has been more instrumental to those efforts than Mardy Murie.

2)      Her Marriage: She was Mardy Murie because of Olaus Murie, a biologist and fellow conservationist she met in Fairbanks and married (at sunrise in the village of Anvik) the same year she graduated college. I’m not sure any single detail could better capture their genuine partnership than the fact that their honeymoon consisted of a 500-mile dogsled journey around Alaska to research its wildlife and ecosystems. The lifelong, deeply inspiring partnership that developed from there would eventually take the Muries to Moose, Wyoming (near Jackson Hole), where the ranch that served as both their home and their research base has since become a National Historic Landmark (linked to Grand Teton National Park) as well as an operating scientific and conservation school. Mardy’s activisms weren’t defined (and certainly weren’t circumscribed) by her marriage, but they were absolutely complemented and amplified by it, as were his.

3)      The Wilderness Act: While it doesn’t really make sense to boil centuries-long movements down to individual moments or laws, it’s nonetheless fair to say that one of the most significant such turning points for the environmental and conservation movements in America was the 1964 passage of the Wilderness Act, the first law to create a national legal definition of “wilderness.” That act was written by the then-Executive Director of the Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser, and in both its creation and its nearly decade-long fight for passage represented a collaboration between many of the leading voices in that longstanding organization—a community that featured Mardy and Olaus Murie throughout their lives. While Olaus had tragically passed away in 1963, Mardy attended the ceremony at which President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act, as is only appropriate for an activist without whom every 20^th century conservation effort would look different and far less successful.

Next environmental activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?

June 5, 2023: Environmental Activisms: Aldo Leopold

[This summer, my older son is extending his prior efforts to help combat climate change by interning with the amazing Climate Just Cities project. That project is part of the long legacy of American environmental activism, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of such activisms. Leading up to a special weekend post on Climate Just Cities!]

On three important environmental concepts to which the pioneering conservationist connects.

1)      Forestry at Yale: In 1900, when Leopold was just 13 years old, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry director Gifford Pinchot donated money to Yale to start the nation’s first dedicated graduate forestry school. That program became young Leopold’s dream destination, and after a series of necessary steps (including attending preparatory school in New Jersey and completing undergraduate requirements at New Haven’s Sheffield Scientific School) he made it to Yale, and went on to be the poster boy for this new type of academic conservationism. This was the era when many scholarly disciplines were becoming more organized around academic study, but of course the very idea that forestry was a scholarly discipline was likewise new, and a vital part of Leopold’s own career and arc.  

2)      Game Management: Another longstanding conservationist idea that transformed into a scholarly discipline in the course of Leopold’s lifetime was wildlife management. And indeed, in this case Leopold was a pioneering figure in that transformation, as his 1933 appointment as Professor of Game Management in the University of Wisconsin’s Agricultural Economics Department (itself the first such specialized department in the world) made him the first such professor in the nation. Long ago I wrote for my Talking Points Memo column about the interconnections between big game hunting and American history, and would note that the creation of such positions and departments reflects an even more important shift when we locate them within that larger collective context.

3)      An Ecological Conscience: Those kinds of communal programs and disciplines provide important contexts for Leopold’s career, and indeed were likewise influenced by him. But ironically, it’s in a text published just after his 1948 death that Leopold’s own most influential ideas were developed. Leopold spent the last decades of his life living in central Wisconsin’s so-called sand county (or sand prairie), an area that had been over-logged and -farmed, devastated by fires, and left largely barren by the mid-20^th century. Throughout his time there Leopold was working on the book that he completed not long before passing and that was published in 1949 as A Sand County Almanac. The whole book explores Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (as he termed it), but the section entitled “The Ecological Conscience” most directly expresses what he means: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from the conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” That’s an environmental perspective we could still much better hear and learn from.

Next environmental activism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? American environmental voices or efforts you’d highlight?