Abstract
There is an undeniable logic to the elite resort world that is Aspen, Colorado. Come visit this jewel of the Rocky Mountains and escape from the misery that is hard work, environmental pollution, gridlock, and the class and ethnic strife that is contemporary life today—as long as visitors pay little attention to the minority workers who keep that illusionary escapism functioning while facing racial and class discrimination from the political elite. Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow’s research into the intersection of place, politics, and racism in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley advances our understanding of environmental privilege and nativist environmentalism.
The Slums of Aspen builds on the substantial contributions of Park and Pellow to the field of environmental justice, expanding critiques of environmental racism and discrimination to a more broadly conceived argument against environmental privilege. Whereas most studies of environmental inequality emphasize highly visible forms of discrimination in the urban ghetto or segregated south, environmental privilege allows us to see how economic, political, and cultural forms of power enable access and control over spaces and resources. Aspen, with its association within the imagined pristine forms of nature and beauty, is the ideal place to examine how environmental privilege marginalizes minority and working class groups while maintaining the veneer of environmentally friendly politics. Environmental privilege in Aspen is articulated through nativist environmentalism, “a form of racism rooted in a sense of entitlement to places imbued with particular socio-ecological importance.”
The themes of environmental privilege and nativist environmentalism are interwoven through Park and Pellow’s history of the development of Aspen, which like other stories of the conquest of the American West are grounded in the implications of colonization and racial subjugation, examination of the environmental movement, and ethnographic accounts of workers living in the areas surrounding Aspen. Part of the expression of nativist environmentalism is the proposition that environmental and capitalist goals can function in harmony. Through the strategic recruitment of companies and elites falling into the “green economy,” Aspen can both serve as a mecca for corporate investment and maintain ecological sustainability. However, Park and Pellow are careful to demonstrate how this fictionalized account of the region’s economics masks a divide between the haves and the have-nots—or what the authors so eloquently refer to as “living in someone else’s paradise.” For beneath the lustrous green veneer lies a struggle for the region’s workers to survive, often unable to find affordable housing due to exclusionary zoning policies that segregate the working class further and further away from the where the work is and often into hazardous conditions like flood zones.
At the same time, environmentalists both in Aspen and throughout the United States continue to struggle with the implications of population growth—particularly among minorities—and ecological limits. One of the key examples of this nativist environmentalism presented in Slums is not among extremist groups that often argue for the preservation of elite ways of life by means of limiting immigration, but rather from within the Sierra Club—one of the largest and most influential environmental nonprofits in the United States. In the 1990s, the Sierra Club experienced a period of internal strife when nativist members attempted to win control of the organization to advance an agenda grounded in immigration control. Park and Pellow use this internal debate to highlight how well-intended environmentalists can quickly embrace environmental privilege and nativist environmentalism without considering the implications of this type of logic.
Slums of Aspen is not just a critique of environmental privilege. The authors conclude their rich and detailed expose of this problem by looking at potential solutions being advocated by a variety of worker and immigrant organizations in the Roaring Fork Valley. These accounts provide the reader with explicit examples of means for combatting environmental privilege. Whether it is from groups advocating for social justice, education, or immigration reform, clear evidence of too often unrecognized voices for the working class is presented as a way to end nativist environmentalism. I believe that there will be many in the environmental movement who will after reading this book rethink their political positions on key issues like immigration, population growth, and environmental access in a more socially and racially just manner.
The Slums of Aspen takes the study of environmental inequality to a place where we might least expect it and reveals the racial inequality and class divides grounded in place and politics. Through their ethnographic accounts of the lives of the workers whose labor enables the resorts of Aspen to function, Park and Pellow provide a rich and detailed account of the challenges environmentalism faces if we fail to take into account questions of social inequality first.