Abrahm Lustgarten on “The Ghosts of John Tanton”

Sea Change Radio

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, immigration became the largest form of population growth for the United States. And he turned all of his interest in energy and eventually his organizations towards battling immigration initially as a form of population control.

Alex Wise (AW) | 03:51 – And this intersection of anti-immigrant philosophy and environmentalism was born into some of these modern activists like Patrick Crusius, the El Paso Mass Murderer. Explain how he plays a role in, in your piece.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 04:11 – Yeah, so I was really interested in trying to trace the evolution of ideas. You know, you hear people say things, you hear Patrick Crusius say that immigrants are await on the environmental burden that Texas can handle, or that overpopulation from immigrants is displacing people from homes in the United States or using up too much water. And I’m interested in where those ideas came from and how, and how they evolved. And if you read deeply as I did into the history and the writings of John Tanton, he was among the first to try to frame immigration issues and environmental issues in this way. And over the decades that have followed the organizations that he founded or supported founding. So the Federation for American Immigration Reform Numbers, USA Center for Immigration Studies being the three primary very influential groups, they have trafficked in these precise messages for a very, very long period of time. They have formalized and made the argument that immigration is leading to the sprawl that we see outside major American cities, that immigration is responsible for the traffic jams, that immigration is responsible for rising CO2 emissions in the United States, and thus for the climate impacts that we’re experiencing and that immigration can account for water shortages and, and things like that. So when I read the manifesto of someone like Patrick Crusius this terrible crime, right? He, he went into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 and killed 23 people. And he did that to target Hispanics and migrants specifically. And he wrote a manifesto that touched on these exact themes. I recognized that those themes were not his invention and were not something that he had pulled from very recent or modern influences. But in fact, you know, went back quite a bit of time and had been carefully cultivated, starting with John Tanton.

Alex Wise (AW) | 06:01 – And John Tanton, as you write, didn’t come up with these ideas in a vacuum. He was very effective in evangelizing them. But you go back even further to the roots of the American Conservation Movement with John Muir and other people who were bordering on eugenics in many ways.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 06:21 – Yeah. Or were eugenicists. But, I mean, the intersection between environmentalism and, uh, you know, racist hate actually goes very, very far back, has a, has a deep history. It goes back to, you know, the Nazi party in Germany and the 1920s, even as far back as the late 18 hundreds, 1890s in Germany, with this idea of ecology and deep ecology and preserving this sort of purity of, of land and environment, and the argument that the earth is becoming overpopulated and that, that the earth can’t sustain. That goes back to, you know, Malthusian principles from, you know, Great Britain in the early 18 hundreds. And so these are very old themes, and they have always evoked deep feeling and, and resonance among, you know, a certain part of the population in that po the population is, on one hand, concerned with environmental preservation. You know, which many people would argue is a very good thing but partially out of a motivation to preserve the sense of, of purity, uh, whether that’s purity of water, uh, you know, a clean river running out of the mountains or purity of place, or purity of people, which for many people means, you know, white people, European descent. So you see, you see this sort of racist inflection point in a lot of what we consider the classic environmental movement in the United States. And John Muir, um, you know, was susceptible to this way of thinking. He, uh, uh, advocated, for example, you know, for the clearing of Yosemite Valley in California from, uh, of Native Americans, and described them as, you know, as dirty people. And you know, John Muir’s writings don’t portray him as an outright racist individual, but he’s, you know, he’s, uh, operating at a time, you know, just after the genocide of, of, uh, native Americans across the country. And he’s susceptible to this same sort of thinking, um, you know, about, um, you know, a certain type of people as a certain type of, of pollutant. And you see that also in, you know, the formative, um, environmentalists like Madison Grant, uh, uh, you know, conservationist who, uh, you know, was involved in the, in the establishment and founding of the Bronx Zoo in New York and in Glacier National Park. And, you know, and other, very influential, you know, environmental movements, in the Roosevelt era, um, where, Madison Grant was explicitly, um, motivated by eugenics ideas and kind of a racial preservationist calling, to preserve what he described as, you know, as the great race, meaning the white race of, of European descent.

(Music Break) | 09:01

AW | 10:02 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m thinking to Abrahm Lustgarten from ProPublica. So Abram, we were talking about this piece that you’ve written on John Tanton. I think what’s so troubling to me reading this is the progressive movement has put its flag in the ground and said that they are the movement of, of science, and that the climate change denying class are setting us back. And, and that’s fairly clear, but one of the things that’s so troubling about this movement that you write about is that it incorporates science and they don’t deny climate change, and they embrace environmentalism in so many ways, but it’s, it takes such a dark, troubling turn.

AL | 10:48 – Yeah. You know, that was a surprising outcome of my reporting, this notion that, you know, so many prominent conservatives, uh, and I’m talking about far right, not kind of middle right conservatives, but so many far right. Conservatives that I spoke with over the course of my reporting did not deny climate change. And, you know, I think many of us think of, you know, climate change as a, as a Democrat issue and absolutely denied by, by conservatives. And what I found is denied by the corporate class conservatives, but less so by the cultural and fundamentalist, you know, far right. Conservatives. And that’s because, well, it’s, it’s for a lot of reasons. I mean, these people that are often more rural and more related to the land that they live on, I found in the extremist communities, you know, they’re people that were more sympathetic to the kind of racial arguments that I was just describing, this notion of environmental threat being climate change, threatening environmental purity, which has been, you know, an age old notion. And, you know, the, the evolution that I think that we’re beginning to see is that, you know, the denial of climate change on the right is, you know, is giving way to an acceptance of climate change. And what that means is that like every other issue, uh, we will have differing opinions on, on what to do about it. And so what I began to hear on the right was, uh, something along the lines of, yeah, this is happening and it’s affecting us, and it has meaning for us. And, uh, we, as you know, as a, as a body politic, uh, you know, on the far right, might have different solutions or different outcomes we’d like to see than you on the left. And we think that, you know, Democrats are doing a lousy job of, you know, addressing the implications of climate change because some of them, for example, might be enhanced immigration. And what are we gonna do about that? And so there is this sort of early sign of a retaking, a reclaiming of environmentalism and a reclaiming, you know, of climate change as an issue among far right extremists that I spoke with.

AW | 12:43 – And how do these extremists take the current Republican talking point? Well, the Donald Trump talking point that sure, climate change might exist, but that just means that these rising sea levels are gonna mean more beachfront property.

AL | 12:57 – Yeah. You know, I found real division there that, that, that this is not a monolithic kind of group when we talk about conservatives, you know, I heard real kind of anger and resentment towards what I described as sort of corporate class Republicans. The idea being when they think about, um, immigration, that, you know, that there’s a corporate class that’s pro-immigration, uh, because they want cheap labor for, you know, for their big businesses, and they want to undermine the American worker. And, and on the far right, I, you know, I heard a little bit more about the need to preserve old historic notions of, American demography, American family, the sanctity of, you know, of our nature and wild places and, and the sanctity of a majority of European descent racially. So that, that’s a real, real difference. I don’t think that we, you know, can any, I will never again think of, you know, of, of conservatives or as Republicans as, as representing, a single view on climate change.

AW | 13:53 – Maybe you can expand on how the rural population has embraced environmentalism in a different way, and how that ends up getting distilled into this anti-immigrant sentiment.

AL | 14:05 – Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s so many, so many things here, and some of, you know, the conversation about the environmental movement in the United States, you know, is outside the, the scope of, of this reporting. Um, except to say that, you know, there’s, there’s long been, um, you know, some interesting overlaps between the goals of, you know, what we’d call standard environmentalists, mainstream environmentalism in the United States, and, um, you know, and if not explicitly, uh, you know, terribly bigoted notions, um, at least sort of leaning, um, you know, in that direction or expressing sympathies in that direction. And, you know, that goes back to the Sierra Club and the example I mentioned about, you know, about John Muir, uh, as a sentiment. And, um, you know, and in my article, I, I look closely at a chapter in which, um, the, the Sierra Club itself was, um, an active participant in this conversation, uh, and ultimately defended, um, uh, you know, a, uh, a non-racist position, uh, for environmentalists, but was really, you know, kind of on the fence about that for a long time. Where, um, you know, legendary American environmentalists like David Brower, uh, were strongly on, you know, on the side of the Sierra Club standing for controlling immigration, uh, as a form of protecting the American environment. And I think you see that, you know, uh, in lots of different ways. If you look closely at what environmental organizations do in the United States today, for example, um, you know, deeply devoted to the protection of, of land, the conservation of land, the purity of that land, a lot less involved in, um, you know, in issues of, uh, you know, uh, inequality or, um, you know, or climate justice or environmental justice issues when we talk about, you know, um, the largest environmental groups in the United States. So, you know, there, there is a systemic vulnerability there in that community that comes out in things like, um, you know, this story about John Tanton because the whole community of John Tanton and his colleagues and the people who run the organizations that he founded, almost all of them, you know, have strong environmentalist leanings and arose out of, you know, these, um, these environmental organizations and, and their history.

AW | 16:14 – And Tanton was able to connect with like-minded people to a certain extent through environmentalism. And then this anti-immigrant rhetoric became a larger and larger part of his philosophy without giving away too much of the story. And I want our listeners to go and read your piece. Why don’t you tell the tale of his evolution or de-evolution in the environmental movement as his life came to an end?

AL | 16:43 – Yeah. You know, so my reading of John Ton’s, um, brilliance, if you wanna call it that, you know, he certainly was a, you know, a very intelligent individual, uh, was that he, you know, with some, um, sort of political, you know, acuity, he recognized that there was an overlap between these environmental issues, this interest in conservation, and, um, his interest in, uh, eugenics and in preserving, you know, uh, uh, communities of European descent, for lack of a better way to, you know, call it, he was trending towards a white nationalism. And, um, you know, he recognized explicitly that he could build a stronger movement, not by just appealing to, uh, you know, the most conservative elements that would already naturally agree with him, um, but by appealing to that, you know, that environmental community that had these sort of vulnerabilities, that had an interest in preserving, you know, an older notion of America, a wilder, a clean version of America. And he basically systemically, systematically preyed on, um, you know, on those sympathies, uh, throughout many, many decades, um, he, he wrote explicitly about the need to build a movement and to draw from the liberal side of the spectrum and to draw from the environmental movement. Um, he indirectly, his, you know, his organization’s waged this campaign, uh, with the Sierra Club to try to, you know, bring the Sierra Club in it’s 750,000 members, right? We’re talking about just an enormous environmental, uh, uh, organization in the United States, um, to, you know, to, to, to bear on the issue of, you know, of halting or, uh, slowing immigration into the United States to turn the Sierra Club into an environmental, into an anti-immigrant organization. Um, when that failed, uh, you know, he, again, you know, sort of preyed on those, um, environmental sympathies and turned the direction of his immigration organizations, uh, towards the issue of climate change and explicitly, uh, published studies that, um, you know, purported to link immigrants to rising carbon emissions, uh, and things like that, um, to basically make the argument that, uh, you know, the immigration was causing climate change, the immigrants were causing climate change. And he did that as his organizations grew in, in influence and power, and they’ve, they eventually became far more powerful than he was. Um, uh, right in the piece how, you know, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies become, um, you know, the quintessential lobbying groups in Washington that affect, uh, the laws that we think about, or the lack of, you know, of laws and policy progress that we know about when it comes to immigration, that they, when you hear about, you know, uh, Arizona’s, you know, law to stop people on the streets and, and ask them for documentation, right? That arose from lobbying, uh, from the Federation for Immigration Reform. Uh, you know, the Dream Act has been, you know, uh, uh, curtailed and, and delayed from passage because of efforts of, of these groups, they become incredibly powerful and they guide the conversation we’ve had today. And ultimately, they, their, their sentiments, their rhetoric, uh, you know, has gotten picked up, uh, repeatedly, um, hundreds and hundreds of times by, um, by right wing influencers, by right-Wing radio, um, by people like Tucker Carlson. And they repeat those messages, or they morph those messages, and they kind of evolve over time. And it’s like, you know, the old playground game of telephone, really, I mean, you start with an idea and you say something one way and somebody else says it in a slightly, you know, different way, maybe a slightly more inflammatory way or slightly more dangerous way. Um, and it evolves through steps over time. And then it’s heard by, uh, you know, and absorbed by people like Patrick Crusius and other mass shooters, uh, around the world and, and in the United States who, um, you know, have referenced the same sentiments in, uh, you know, in their manifestos and the things that they write. They call themselves eco fascists that refer to themselves as protectors of, you know, of the environment. Um, and the danger is, and what the academics, uh, that I talk to warn me of, and the, you know, counter-terrorism experts that I talk to warn me of is that, you know, as the pressures of climate change get worse, and these, uh, these sentiments and sympathies are already kind of floating around there in, you know, in the kind of ecosystem of, you know, of far right ideas, um, that, uh, you know, it suggests a more volatile reaction in the future, um, maybe an organized reaction, uh, you know, that bu begin to see explicit campaigns to use the pressures of climate change to, you know, to divide us further, um, you know, to justify more hate to justify policies that close the border and so on.

(Music Break) | 21:27

AW | 22:30 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Abram Lust Garden from ProPublica. So Abram, you’re talking about this anti-immigrant hate becoming normalized. I can’t help but think of the Republican National Convention this summer where I saw thousands of people chanting mass deportation or something to that effect. The messaging has become so normalized that quote unquote, normal people feel comfortable being on national television chanting this kind of hate, it’s become acceptable.

AL | 23:04 – Yeah, I think, I think that’s right. And to the degree that that is true, uh, a very, very significant part of the responsibility for that goes straight back to John Tanton. I mean, that is why he’s such an important sort of node of activity on this issue. But I want to be clear, you know, I mean, this is a nuanced issue. I, I don’t wanna overstate, you know, that climate change is primary driver of immigration to the United States. It’s not, it’s a factor among many, many others. And it’s probably a growing factor. And I also, you know, don’t wanna deny what, to me seems pretty clear from having looked at immigration and border issues for a long time, which is that, you know, we have a system that’s broken and needs to, to be repaired. So, you know, not a conversation about whether or whether or not we should allow immigration. I kind of, you know, leave that to the side. It’s a problem in need of some policy. But to the extent that the rhetoric is extraordinarily vitriolic to the extent that it leads to, to violence and hate, and begins to intertwine with other things like rising white supremacy and white nationalism in the United States, that isn’t just immigration focused. You know, there is a very strong thread there that ties to environmentalism and ties to John Tanton and ties to his early recognition that climate change was going to exacerbate all of this.

AW | 24:16 – You end your piece quoting Crucius, many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning. So in your research of his manifesto and, and where he became familiar with these ideas, was he reading directly from a John Tanton, or was he a couple generations removed from it? Where did Patrick Crusius swerve so far off the road of basic sociology?

AL | 24:46 – So we actually know less than, uh, you might think about Patrick Crusius thinking, uh, most of, of that is still tied up in, uh, you know, in court cases that are, that are sealed at the moment. I did not base my reporting off of direct links between him and John Tanton. I don’t have evidence that he read John Tanton or, or anything like that. Um, but what is really clear is that the sentiments that he wrote in his manifesto, uh, very, very strongly echo things that John Tanton said, and things that, uh, John Ton’s colleagues said, and things that John Canton’s organizations published over many, many years. The ideas are clearly overlapping. And where Patrick Crusius got those ideas from, whether he got them from, uh, a friend down the street or got them from Tucker Carlson, or got them from reading John Tanton himself, I don’t know. And I don’t know if we’ll ever know. And that was kind of my interest in, in trying to trace the genesis of I, of these ideas. But the ideas are very clearly the same. And at the same time, Patrick, Crusius was at the time, you know, a a 21-year-old kid who didn’t appear to have, not kid, you know, he’s, he’s an adult and he’s responsible for his actions, but did not appear to have, you know, a broad range of, of life experience and, you know, and was not necessarily a deep thinker on these issues, uh, so much as, you know, a a reactive thinker to some of the influences around him, um, that, you know, seemed to have destabilized and already, you know, unstable, uh, situation. And so, I see Patrick Crusius, the sign of the future or a great actor, but really as, you know, just one of the symptoms that’s popping up of a, of a much larger, you know, theme. And if I can just step back for a second, you know, and take the 40,000 foot view, you know, of, of this and, and why I looked at this story. It’s because I think that 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 and the United Nations has, uh, a assist, uh, you know, a spectrum of scenarios that they use to define, you know, the futures that they’re predicting for climate change. And one of them calls for, you know, rising nationalism, uh, a turn inwards in our domestic focus and, um, and, uh, growing conflict. And there’s very little exploration of what that means and what that looks like. And that’s basically the premise, you know, for my reporting is, you know, how are we where when we look at the United States politically, culturally, do we start to see the friction that’s growing or being enhanced by the pressures of drought, by the wildfires, by forest retreat, by immigration, to the extent that it’s, you know, driven by climate change, um, and by each of these issues. And, uh, and that’s what led me to look at, at immigration for this particular story and led me to look at John Tanton. I think it’s just one example of many ways that we’re starting to see that the impacts of climate change are dividing us with enormous potential risk.

AW | 27:58 – Abrahm Lustgarten, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

AL | 28:01 – Thank you for having me.

AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Stevie Wonder, Alex Wise and Joe Henry. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.