While the civil rights movement and the environmental movement have long and rich histories reaching back to the nineteenth century, both movements have had their greatest impact in the United States during the last forty years. The fact that the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act both were passed in 1964 reminds us that advocates of environmental reform and of racial justice have shared the same historical era, even when these two causes seemed to lead their followers down very different paths of concern. As civil rights activists devoted themselves to the tasks of ending racial discrimination and creating equal opportunity for people of color, environmentalists focused their efforts on the need to reform pollution and regulate the use of natural resources. At certain historical moments, these groups have pursued divergent agendas and their constituencies have resembled exclusive factions. Yet, environmental concerns cannot stand apart from social arrangements of power and opportunity, especially when those arrangements hinge upon race and ethnicity.

In ways too rarely addressed in forums, conferences, debates, and discussions of environmental affairs, issues of the environment have played themselves out within the larger context of the distribution of power and access within American society. In spite of recent efforts to focus more attention on this reality, the racial and class exclusiveness of the mainstream environmental movement remains the movementÍs weakest dimension.

During the last three decades, there has been no shortage of conferences dedicated to natural resource issues. At most of these events, white speakers have addressed primarily white audiences. And yet there are many people of color involved in this line of work, people who should be participating in these discussions. Indian tribes usually have their own divisions of natural resources and their own strategies of land management. Hispanic county commissioners and local activists wrestle with resource management questions daily. The Director of the National Park Service, the former president and longtime member of the Denver Water Board, members of the Beckwourth Club (a Denver African American group dedicated to outdoor recreation) -- all of these people of color are fully engaged in natural resource issues, though they too rarely appear in the most publicized discussions.

When people of color are visible in discussions about the environment, their role is often limited to one dimension of the environmental movement, the crusade for "environmental justice." During the last decade, the pattern by which landfills and incinerators have been located in neighborhoods with minority residents has been studied and documented. While this dimension of the concept of "environmental justice" is now well-established in the operations of the US Environmental Protection Agency, it has had the effect of reconfirming the narrow notion that people of color are primarily concerned with the urban manifestations of environmental issues. The contributions of people of color in the area of public lands management--in matters of recreational land use, forestry policy, water allocation, and, in general, the appreciation and appraisal of nature--have received considerably less attention. During conference sessions, we celebrated the success of those individuals involved in the "environmental justice" movement, but directed most of our efforts to an exploration of the much-neglected and long-standing involvement of people of color who are concerned with issues of natural resources that extend beyond the "environmental justice" concerns.