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Tracing the roots of environmental justice through five centuries

In The Earth Is Ours, Not Mine, Aaron Sachs shows that the idea of environmental justice goes back not decades but centuries-that it originated not in late twentieth-century campaigns against disproportionate environmental harm, but hundreds of years earlier, when English commoners attempted to reclaim the commons and Native Americans tried to protect their land against encroachment by European settlers. Sachs chronicles five hundred years of dissent and resistance against capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction, constructing a family tree for today's environmental justice movement.

Sachs recovers the history of the Diggers, an anti-Enclosure organization in seventeenth-century Britain-whose leader declared, "the Earth is ours, not mine"-and describes the surprising overlap between their discourse and the practices of American Indigenous communities around communal land. From this unusual convergence, Sachs traces the evolution of ideas and principles underpinning a collectivist ethic in thinkers as varied as John Milton, Mary Shelley, Rachel Carson, and Murray Bookchin-a twentieth-century theorist of environmental justice and a Vermonter who positioned himself to the left of Bernie Sanders.

Environmentalists often focus on the future, dismissing modern history as inherently destructive and providing no models to build on. Sachs counters this by showing that the careful practice of history in fact offers hope and possibility, tempered by realism. If we want a future in which social justice and environmentalism converge, we must first rethink the past.