White men have largely controlled American conservation policies for more than a century
Arianna Barajas never thought of herself as the outdoors type. The daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up in Chicago’s suburbs, her forays into nature usually amounted to a bike ride to a community park.
Environmental groups across the country have worked for the last two decades to introduce members of underrepresented populations like Barajas to the overwhelmingly white conservation world. The effort has gained momentum sinceforced a national reckoning on race relations and challenged a variety of industries to focus on diversity and inclusion efforts.
White men have largely controlled American conservation policy for more than a century. The modern conservation movement in the United States began around the turn of the 20th century, led by figures such as Sierra Club co-founder John Muir, who openly derided American Indians as savages, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who doubled the number of sites in the National Park System. Conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day, followed them..
“Urbanization, racial segregation, all these histories have separated BIPOC from neighbors with more green spaces,” Drutman said. “It’s become a white people’s thing because of that.” The teams handle a wide array of conservation projects, such as river restoration, vegetation monitoring, disaster relief and conservation projects on Native American lands. The teams include a group for sign-language users and an all-female crew dubbed “the Trail Angels.”, based in Eugene, Oregon, has recruited LGBTQ students between 16 and 18 and LGBTQ adults to its so-called Rainbow Crews since 2017.
After spending the summer tagging and tracking whooping cranes across south-central Wisconsin, Barajas has become even more aware of how minority perspectives are rarely considered in the conservation world.
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