Book Review: Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden

One of the nation’s wealthiest communities, Aspen, Colorado has a complex relationship with the environmental movement and social justice. While a community deeply self-conscious about its own liberal politics, Aspen hasn’t shown much tolerance for the poor. In fact, worried that immigrants might overrun the high mountain paradise, in 1999 the Aspen City Council passed an ordinance petitioning Congress and the president to restrict the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, who enter the United States. Citing concerns about overpopulation and the destruction of American environments, Aspen civic leaders became prominent voices of the anti-immigrant wing of the environmental movement. Meanwhile, these same Aspenites, who included some of the nation’s wealthiest and most famous people, showed their concern for the environment by building 10,000 square foot mansions with heated driveways on steep mountain slopes.

Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow use this incident as a jumping off point for their study of white privilege, immigrants, and the environment in Aspen, The Slums of Aspen. Focusing on the idea of “environmental privilege” as the flip side of environmental racism, Park and Pellow contrasts the elite lifestyle of the city’s residents with the people who make the city run: the cooks, shopworkers, and maids who work for cheap, live in substandard housing with long commutes into the uber-expensive city, and never get to enjoy the famous Rockies of Colorado. This environmental privilege means that only certain people can have access to the mountains because of the capital outlay necessary to access it. As the authors say, the Aspen lifestyle “requires the domination of the environment and of certain groups of people.”

Park and Pellow savage the green capitalism of Aspen, noting what they call “The Aspen Logic.” The Aspen Logic is the ultimate greenwashing. It’s living an elite mountain lifestyle, a lifestyle with huge negative impacts on the environment, while promoting a facade of environmentalism (recycling!) that does little to nothing to mitigate rich people’s impact on the planet. The Aspen Logic rejects any environmentalism that does not center capitalism and or that challenges white privilege.

Meanwhile, Park and Pellow spend a great deal of time with the largely Latino workforce in Aspen. They are feared and hated by the wealthy residents, forced into trailer parks far away from their jobs, and then attacked by Aspenites for despoiling nature through that housing. These workers don’t get to enjoy the mountains around them. They aren’t skiing or hiking. Instead, they are working two or three jobs to make ends meet, trying to save money to get through seasonal downturns in employment, and surviving without health insurance. The rich’s playground is their workplace, which might be OK on one level, except that their sheer presence is deeply resented and they are subject to racism by politicians, the police, and owners of the high-end stores in Aspen. Moreover, if exposure to the “environment,” as popularly conceived is supposed to regenerate us, do working-class people and non-whites have a right to access that regeneration? Or should we just tolerate (at best) their presence in order to facilitate our own time with the mountains?

All and all, this is an righteously angry book. And that’s fine, I agree with every point I’ve described so far. But I do have to take issue with their one-sided characterization of environmentalism. They treat environmentalism as a monolithic movement, with the residents of Aspen standing in for all environmentalists:

the mainstream environmental movement in the United States is most definitely not a movement concerned with racial justice. Nor has it shown much willingness to fight for even the broader–and less controversial–goal of social justice. This is not only because it has often traditionally been reserved for middle- and upper-class populations but also because it has always been haunted–indeed–fueled by a strong thread of white supremacy and nativism.

Whoa there. They are right that there is a strand of racism within environmentalism, pointing to such figures as Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey (both of whom clear racists), not to mention the roots of conservation in the early 20th century (which they don’t much talk about). But there’s also an equally long history of environmentalists working with other movements for the benefit of all. Not to mention the growing environmental justice movement that sparks great passion in the students I teach. Even if this statement had a measure of accuracy in 1999, this book came out last year and I just don’t buy it anymore.

With this exception, The Slums of Aspen is a pretty good and revealing book worth reading for those interested in environmental inequality or the state of Colorado. But constructing a monolithic environmentalism is a sizable demerit that puts a disappointing spin on an otherwise solid piece of activist scholarship.